LAKE FOREST, Ill. — Chicago Bears wide receiver DJ Moore calls it the evil eye. That’s what a player receives if he doesn’t have the play exactly right.
“You’ve really got to be in your playbook and know every last detail of that playbook like (Ben Johnson does),” Moore said. “If not, you’re going to get either the evil eye or get yelled at to get in the right spot. I try to stay away from that.”
The Bears’ new head coach is obsessed with details.
That in itself doesn’t make him unique among professional sports coaches. It’s not a rare quality when someone reaches the pinnacle of the profession to be so focused on the margins.
In his seven months on the job, though, Ben Johnson is testing that theory. He does seem different. He says it, and he lives it.
“His actions actually go behind those words, and that’s with everything,” quarterbacks coach J.T. Barrett said. “It’s from walkthrough, making sure the splits are right, or making sure our footwork is right to a route detail, making sure that’s a consistent look to make sure everybody’s on the same page. That’s just how he operates.”
During training camp, the challenge was posed to players, coaches and general manager Ryan Poles — OK, Johnson is a details guy. What coach isn’t? But what makes him different?
There’s something in the way Johnson coaches the finer points that resonates.
We saw it at the first practice of training camp. He yanked the starting offense off the field. The players weren’t surprised.
“No detail goes unnoticed,” tight end Cole Kmet said that day.
To Moore, that reflected the way Johnson wants things done.
“Y’all saw him kick the ones off,” he said. “We’re not wasting no time, so that’s how detailed you’ve got to be. You’ve got to know what you’re doing on that play, and you better get it right the first time or you’re off.”
Guard Jonah Jackson, who played for Johnson in Detroit, answered the question with a question.
“Can you hear him when he’s out at practice?” he said. “It’s every day. He’s going to make sure we’re good to go.”
Defensive tackle Andrew Billings, on his fourth team and sixth head coach, takes note when Johnson stops a play if anything seems off. Billings, on the other side of the line, will wonder, “Why are we stopping this play? What happened?”
“If the detail’s not ready, he’s not going to let the play go,” he said. “He’s going to call it back. … He’s not going to let it slip. He’s going to stay on the offense.”
“Everything he does is very detailed and meticulous,” Jackson said. “It’s everything, and that’s what makes him special as a play caller and a coach.”
It’s not limited to the offensive side of the ball, either. Defensive end Dayo Odeyingbo said Johnson will show clips to the defense where they expect their coach to focus on one thing, but he has something else in mind.
“He’ll talk about a whole completely different thing on the back side, just a small detail that might not have shown up on the play but is a detail that needs to be fixed for the future,” he said.
Defensive tackle Gervon Dexter has learned that the smallest fundamentals can make the biggest difference.
“You’ll have plays where you can be dominant. But it’s those little things that count that you don’t notice that you’ve got to fix now to be a good team,” he said. “Good teams are always keyed in on the small details.”
Quarterback Case Keenum is on his eighth team and 14th head coach (counting interims). The coaches who harp on the details the way Johnson does are those who succeed. They’re the ones who help the players understand why a detail is critical to the play.
“It’s the coaches I’ve been around that are detailed about split and how you line up and where you got to get to and when you got to be there and everybody on the field trusting that guy to be here on that time, whether it’s blocking for me, blocking for him, lining up here to adjust to get defender’s eyes over here so we can block him this way or different ways of doing a lot of plays I’ve run before,” he said, “but I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s why we do that. That makes a ton of sense.’”
Bears coach Ben Johnson has been hammering the details this summer with his players, including rookie tight end Colston Loveland. (David Banks / Imagn Images)
Standing out in a league of 32 head coaches, all of whom say they’re detail-oriented, is partly about accountability.
Even if a play works, if something is wrong, Johnson calls it out.
“Some people say (the details matter) and they’ll tell you it does, then (a mistake will) happen once and you move on from it and don’t really talk about it much because maybe the result of the play was good,” Kmet said. “(Johnson) has no problem pulling up a good result, a great play that was a 15-yard gain and saying, ‘This is not what we’re looking for.’ That’s what I’ve noticed.”
Johnson is already Kmet’s sixth play caller as the tight end enters his sixth NFL season.
“You talk about some of the best offenses in the league and league history, you hear the stories of how detail-oriented they are and no mistake was too big or too little,” Kmet said. “All those things matter. You might get away with a certain thing one time, but over and over again, that probably won’t happen. You need those things in crunch time as well.”
While Moore works to avoid the “evil eye,” he knows Johnson’s obsessive coaching will be impactful.
“What do I like about it? It’s going to get us where we want to go,” he said.
Take the difference between a 6-yard catch and an incomplete pass. Second-and-10 versus second-and-4. It doesn’t take an analytics crash course to understand how that can change a game as far as an offense moving down the field. It does.
But that’s where the attention to detail comes in.
The example Kmet used is if he’s in protection but can get out to be a safety valve for the quarterback if his responsibility drops in coverage, Johnson will watch how quickly that materializes.
“Cole, we can be a tenth of a second quicker,” he would say. “A little second so we can flash for the quarterback.”
Because if Kmet gets there a tenth of a second quicker, it’s a 6-yard completion, and Johnson knows why second-and-4 is so much more beneficial than second-and-10 for what he wants to do next.
“Sometimes you would think they’re so minute, but he sees as it a big picture,” Kmet said. “All those things matter. I’m sure as a play caller, he’s always thinking ahead in that regard.”
The coaches are accountable for being on their p’s and q’s, too. They take after the head coach.
“He is just as focused and dialed in on every little thing,” passing game coordinator Press Taylor said. “He sees so much, which is impressive. From the running back’s depth to the left tackle’s footwork on the back side of a combination, to the receiver’s split, to the quarterback’s rhythm in the huddle and the cadence, whatever that may be. He’s just as intense and consistent as anybody I’ve been around.”
Running backs coach Eric Bieniemy has been coaching for 25 years. He explained why he loves Johnson’s focus on the specifics.
“He’s stern. He has a system. He knows what it’s supposed to look like,” Bieniemy said. “He wants it done a certain way and he’s demanding of us to make sure that we’re getting it done the right way. … And that’s some good s—.”
Offensive line coach Dan Roushar said the first time he talked to Johnson, he could tell that the head coach was “wired correctly.”
“There’s no gray,” Roushar said. “It’s, ‘Here’s the job. Here’s the details in the job. Let’s go execute the job.’”
Maybe no position coach talks details more than an offensive line coach, considering the nuances and importance of a lineman’s technique. The feedback from Johnson can be immediate.
“He knows exactly what we’re doing when we do it well and when we don’t do it well,” Roushar said. “That’s gratifying as an offensive line coach because you get feedback immediately, either at the snap or after practice, when you look at it to get better as a group.”
Special teams coordinator Richard Hightower, entering his 19th season coaching in the NFL, could tell from the opposing sideline that Johnson was “pretty sharp.” Now he’s gotten to see it first-hand.
“When you work with him and you can see the attention to detail and how he meticulously looks at everything, no matter what it is,” he said, “dives deep into things and has an eye — real head coaches have an eye for things when they happen and they’re able to anticipate stuff.”
One of the hardest parts of the transition to head coach is all the stuff that isn’t “coaching.” It’s all the responsibilities that aren’t calling plays or leading meetings.
For Poles, the truest example of that is when the coach has to make the schedule, especially for training camp. It’s not only when the practices are but how to coordinate with the sports science team and figure out the intensity levels of practice, how to work in the joint practices.
Then there’s next week, when the coaches and personnel department have to cut the roster to 53 players and scour the waiver wire. While all that is happening, there are still practices leading into Week 1.
“That’s when the first kind of bumpy stuff happens,” Poles said.
But Johnson had a plan for that. When he presented Poles with the summer schedule, he had built in the fact that they had to juggle practice and transactions.
“That was the first thing that clicked to me,” Poles said about Johnson’s attention to detail. “He understands not just what he needs to do as a coach but how that blends with everybody else.”
A first-time head coach might have to make a lot of schedule changes as he adjusts. That can be OK, but Poles said if changes are happening constantly, that could be a concern.
When Johnson showed him the training camp schedule, Poles said, “It was on point. It made complete sense.”
A great head coach has a handle on everything. He has to. We don’t know yet how good a head coach Johnson will be, or how all these details will translate to the on-field performance, but we have learned about his intensity. He isn’t going to let the slightest error slide. He’ll give the “evil eye.” He will run it until they get it right.
“You can just feel when he’s teaching something, it bothers him to the core if it’s off by a yard,” Kmet said. “I don’t know if it’s OCD or something, but there’s something about it that really bothers him, and he’ll let you know that. He’ll teach it, and I think guys have been really responsive to it.”
(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
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