LAKE FOREST, Ill. (670 The Score) – The Bears are confident their breakthrough 2025 season is just the beginning of what’s to come.
Led by first-year head coach Ben Johnson and 24-year-old quarterback in Caleb Williams, the Bears went 11-6 to win the NFC North this season before earning their first playoff win in 15 years. In the wake of that success, Johnson isn’t about to get complacent. He has reminded his Bears that what they accomplished in the 2025 season doesn’t carry over into 2026.
“There is no building off of this,” Johnson said. “We go back to square one. We’re back at the bottom again. That’s really all 32 teams. If you feel otherwise, you’re probably missing the big picture. We’re back at it. We got to start from scratch, we got to start from the fundamentals.
“They know what the expectation is. They know what the process is that we believe in as a coaching staff. I think more than anything else, they’re going to know what they’re getting themselves into. And yet we got to dig a little bit deeper, we got to work a little bit harder, we got to give a little bit more if we want to take this thing over the top.
“We did a nice job this year, but it’s not enough. We got to do more.”
The Bears’ success came in general manager Ryan Poles’ fourth season in Chicago and was welcomed after the organization had struggled to get its rebuild off the ground. Former Bears head coach Matt Eberflus was fired late in the 2024 season, and Johnson was officially hired one year ago Wednesday.
The Bears have a core group of players in place. Now, Poles faces the challenge of fortifying the roster with limited salary cap space.
“You just have more constraints,” Poles said. “At the same time, I don't think the process changes. You’re going to identify the guys that fit what we want in our football team, which coach hit, and you just keep trying to acquire those players. We know what they look like, we know how they act, we know how they talk and we'll continue to do that. That's part of the thing. One, can you self-evaluate and be critical of yourself and your team to make sure you know what you have in the building? And then can you just keep pounding away and sticking to your process. You make tweaks, of course, but stick to the process of bringing in the right types of people and it usually works out for you.
“You see it across the league all the time – you panic and you want to do crazy things that everybody else wants you to do, it leads you to some situations you can't get out of. So we want to stay flexible, we want to stay open-minded, we want to stay committed to building this team the right way because I think that's the best way to sustain success. We're always going to be opportunistic. We're going to go through opportunities that pop up and talk through them. Is this best for us short-term? Is it best for us long-term? And then we move from there.”
Chris Emma covers the Bears, Chicago’s sports scene and more for 670TheScore.com. Follow him on Twitter @CEmma670.