How Johnson’s play calling shaped path to Bears’ head coach

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Nearly 25 years before he ran the league’s best offense, Ben Johnson’s play designs were ignored.

He’s the Bears’ new head coach for many reasons, but his play calling and success with the Lions helped make him the most coveted head-coaching candidate, the coach the Bears players wanted after seeing what he had done in Detroit.

Lions coach Dan Campbell wanted Johnson to try everything. Fifteen-year-old Johnson wasn’t as lucky.

“I do distinctly remember when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, giving some play diagrams to the head coach of the varsity team,” he told The Athletic at the league meetings. “I don’t know what we did with them at the time. … I doodle a lot, still to this day.”

Johnson quarterbacked A.C. Reynolds High School (in North Carolina) to a state championship his junior year. You won’t see any 2024 Lions plays in those highlights.

“Listen, we won the state championship my junior year. I would trade nothing for it. But we only threw the ball three times in the state championship game,” he said with a laugh. “If that tells you anything about how far my plays went. I was 2-for-3 with a touchdown and we ended up winning the game (14-7). So the plays didn’t go very far.”

While Johnson doodled a lot and often thought about plays, he wasn’t necessarily this mad scientist building an encyclopedia, waiting his turn. He had a long way to go before wearing the headset and calling the play into the quarterback. The first nudges toward that career came in Chapel Hill.

“Soon after I got into college, I started getting the comments from the coordinators, ‘Man, you’re going to be a great coach one day,’” he said. “That’s a compliment, but it’s also a backhanded compliment because it means you’re not a very good player. I knew exactly where my future was going.”

John Shoop was Johnson’s offensive coordinator at North Carolina and a major influence on his career. He watched the way Shoop not only designed the plays but how he installed them and communicated them to the quarterbacks and the offense.

“It was completely different than anything I had experienced before,” Johnson said. “That was really the first time I felt there was a direction for me to go as well.”

Shoop had a saying, “Hey, we’re going to talk fast, we’re going to meet fast, so we can play fast.” It had some Jon Gruden to it — Shoop was Gruden’s quarterbacks coach in Tampa Bay.

“It’s a little bit of a dynamic personality where you’re talking fast,” Johnson said. “It’s a lot of information, but he was able to make it streamlined in such a way that you could digest it all and apply it on the practice field. I always thought that was very unique.”

Whether it was at Boston College, where Johnson was a grad assistant and tight ends coach, or Miami, where he held five titles with the Dolphins, or his start in Detroit as a quality control coach, Johnson didn’t let his mind wander too much into play design.

“My approach has always been, whatever role I was currently in, how do I best at that particular role,” he said. “I wasn’t necessarily looking at becoming a play caller — I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to be a play caller, much less a head coach. For the longest time there in Miami, it was about, how do I break through and be a position coach in this league.”

While he went through the NFL coaching path, he picked up on traits from play callers like Mike Sherman and Adam Gase. He learned how the job wasn’t just about putting a play up on the board.

“It’s not so much about telling the players what to do, it’s also some salesmanship to it,” Johnson said. “You want them to believe that this play is not only going to work, but it’s going to make a difference.”

The famous “stumble bum” play, when Lions quarterback Jared Goff acted like he fell and fumbled to fool the Bears defense before throwing a touchdown, was inspired by a Packers-Bears game the year before.

But Johnson’s best ideas often don’t come from watching tape. They pop into his mind in a way that’s quite relatable

“You know where the best thinking comes into play is if I get a chance to get a workout in the morning, in the weight room, when I’m lifting; or in the shower,” he said. “For whatever reason, those two spots for me, my mind is — I don’t know if it’s relaxed, but it’s free to end up swimming around and you find something.”

“Stumble bum” is a prime example of something that Johnson drew up, specifically for the Bears defense, and watched it work to perfection.

“That’s really the beauty of football,” he said about plays that go right from design to install to execution.

But that’s evolving in today’s game.

“I feel like we’re going in a different direction right now because there’s so much out-of-structure and improvised play,” he said. “The whole league is. And that’s just the style of athletes that we have coming in. Now, I’m excited to go that way with Caleb (Williams) as well.

“But there’s something to be said that, it doesn’t matter how flashy a play is, to see a well-designed, well-blocked play up front executed, whether it’s a run play with a running back or it’s a pass play where it all beats the coverages. I think there’s something beautiful about that.”

Johnson built a staff of coaches from different coaching trees. He has to balance the parallel tracks of continuing to evolve as a play caller, building an offense for Williams and helping the Bears finally be a force on offense. He also has to lead the team — overseeing defense and special teams, managing the game and dealing with everything off the field that comes with being a head coach.

“You’ve got (running backs coach) Eric Bieniemy, who was in Kansas City, you’ve got (offensive coordinator) Declan Doyle, who’s spent time with Sean Payton,” he said. “We’ve got (passing game coordinator) Press Taylor, who was with Chip Kelly in Philly and Doug Pederson in Jacksonville, and I can keep going on and on and on.

“I trust those guys and the structure we have in place on that side of the ball to bring those ideas to the forefront so we can stay cutting edge.”

Bears fans will be glad to hear that the biggest difference between Johnson drawing up plays as a high school freshman and the one who will craft Chicago’s offense is line play. That’s how the mind evolves.

“In high school, I wouldn’t have cared about the protection aspect of it,” he said. “And at this level, that’s really where my mind starts. How do we find enough time to get the ball off? Because we can all draw up coverage beaters for everything, but really the sauce is whether we get it off fast enough or how do we buy a little extra time so that we can push it down the field.”

Johnson has now reached the pinnacle of the profession, a job he never thought was attainable during those early days in Miami. The doodles that became plays that boosted the Lions to becoming the No. 1-scoring offense in football in 2024 are coming to Chicago.

And sometimes — like when a play is designed for offensive tackle Penei Sewell to throw the ball — it doesn’t work. That’s just part of the gig. Johnson appreciated Campbell because he created an environment in which Johnson could “throw some stuff against the wall and see what sticks. … Wild and crazy was accepted.”

It could look cool but fall flat. Every game is different for Johnson. He said he usually starts from scratch. And then it’s on to the next play on his call sheet.

“That’s the cost of doing it, though,” he said. “You have a design for a certain defense or a certain coverage, and if you mistime it, then that’s the consequences of it.

“You’re not going to bat 1.000. We all know that. But we’re going to try to get as close as we can. It’s fun.”

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