The last time Bears coach Ben Johnson faced the Packers, he gathered his players in the locker room following a come-from-behind playoff win and laid his feelings bare.
“F— the Packers,” he said. “F— them. F—ing hate those guys.”
He didn’t apologize for it, either.
“This is a rivalry,” he said later. “And [for] the city of Chicago, Green Bay, it needs to be a rivalry.”
There were no F-bombs thrown around in Sunday’s postgame speech — “You guys know what next week is? Enough said,” Johnson said — and no bulletin board material to come from the coach Monday, either. In fact, Johnson seemed relieved to have finished his Zoom call with reporters without igniting a firestorm in advance of Sunday’s game at Lambeau Field.
Receiver Luther Burden knows Johnson’s true feelings.
“I feel like he wants to beat them really bad,” Burden said. “Like everybody else in the room, every Chicago fan. We just want to beat them real bad and make them quit.”
Johnson circled the Packers game on his first day on the job. In his introductory press conference, he quipped that he enjoyed beating Matt LaFleur twice a year as a Lions assistant coach. LaFleur was bewildered that Johnson, whom he doesn’t know well, would make the comment. The two have exchanged quips through the media since, and their icy relationship is never more apparent than during a postgame handshake in which neither man breaks stride.
LaFleur was asked Monday why he rarely inserted himself into the rivalry discourse. His answer could be interpreted as a passing shot at the opposing coach, who has.
“This game is about players,” he told Green Bay reporters. “We’ll keep it about the players. I’m not the one out there playing. That’s always been my mentality.”
Johnson and LaFleur are the faces of the rivalry, though, particularly with stars Caleb Williams and Micah Parsons out with injuries. And their franchises appear to be heading in opposite directions.
On Dec. 7, the Packers beat the Bears at Lambeau Field when Williams threw an interception in the end zone with 22 seconds to play. The Packers then lost their last five games — including two at Soldier Field, one in the regular season and then in the playoffs. Their two wins this season have come in overtime against a Jets team the Bears beat by 11 and, on Sunday, a Buccaneers team starting an undrafted rookie quarterback for the first time. LaFleur, who received a contract extension shortly after losing in last year’s playoffs, has drawn the ire of a typically supportive fan base.
The Bears, by contrast, lost in the second round of the playoffs last year and have opened the season 3-1 despite playing three different quarterbacks.
With Johnson calling plays, the Bears have outscored their opponents by 47 points, the third-best margin in the league through Sunday’s games. The Packers have been outscored by 32, the fourth-most.
The Bears have scored the ninth-most points. The Packers have scored the sixth-fewest. The Bears lead the league in yards gained. The Packers are 19th.
Before the Bears beat their rivals 31-27 in the wild card round of last year’s playoffs, the Packers had lost just three of the previous 20 rivalry matchups and seven of 37. The Bears have thought they’ve turned the tide before, though, only for the Packers to, the next year, prove them wrong.
Matt Nagy beat the Packers at Soldier Field to clinch the NFC North in 2018. He opened the season against them the following year and lost 10-3, starting a stretch of 11-straight Bears losses to the Packers. John Fox stunned the Packers at Lambeau Field in 2015 then lost his next four rivalry games by a combined 47 points before being fired. Marc Trestman won at Soldier Field in his first rivalry game and lost the next three by 67 points before being canned.
Johnson split the two regular season games against the Packers last year before beating them in the playoffs. Amazingly, he owns more wins against the rival than any Bears coach since Lovie Smith. Nagy, Fox and Trestman each won once, as did interim Thomas Brown. Matt Eberflus went 0-5.
A win at Lambeau Field would provide another clue that things are changing. Lose, and it feels like more of the same.
Bears chairman George McCaskey knows the stakes. At the NFL’s annual meeting in April, he said he was fine with Johnson’s feelings about the Packers, cursing and all, but knew that “you gotta back it up” on the field.
“If we don’t beat them in the playoffs, then the narrative is still, ‘Well, you still can’t get past them. …’” McCaskey told the Sun-Times then. “The rivalry is 100 plus years old. And, sad to say, the last 30 years they’ve had the better of us.”
Sunday is Johnson’s first chance to back up the words he screamed in January.
“This is a big week for us,” Johnson said. “It’s important to our organization, it’s important to theirs as well. It’ll be really good competition here on Sunday.”