Inside the Bears’ ‘chess match’ vs. Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores

When the Miami Dolphins hired Brian Flores as their head coach in February 2019, he had a chance to retain incumbent wide receivers coach Ben Johnson on his offensive staff.

Imagine the possibilities: a Flores defense paired with a Johnson offense, had Johnson risen the ranks. But Flores let him go.

Flores himself was fired after three seasons in Miami, and after a one-year stop in Pittsburgh, he signed on as the Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator in 2023.

Johnson, meanwhile, moved on to the Detroit Lions, first as tight ends coach and later as offensive coordinator, before the Bears hired him last year as a first-time head coach.

If there are hard feelings, they aren’t evident.

“Ben and I, we text back and forth a little bit in the offseason,” Flores said on retired quarterback Chris Simms’ podcast, “Unbuttoned.” “He’s a friend. Also it’s like, let’s call it a respectful rivalry.”

Perhaps it’s better this way.

Week 2 presents a matchup between Flores’ blitz-happy defense and Johnson’s high-flying offense, which put up a league-high 59 points in a season-opening win over the Carolina Panthers.

It’s as if you could bump each unit’s rating to a 99 in Madden.

Flores walks into Sunday’s matchup at Soldier Field (noon, Fox-32) with a weighty reputation of bringing the blitz — and the 78.3% blitz rate he employed during a 39-22 win over the Green Bay Packers in Week 1 was extraordinary even by his standards. By comparison, the Bears had the sixth-highest blitz rate of the week at 39.5%.

Last season the Vikings led the league with a 46.1% blitz rate (the Bears were 12th at 28.7%).

But it’s no guarantee Flores will send extra rushers after quarterback Caleb Williams on Sunday.

“It’s case by case and week by week,” Flores told Simms, “and I think mixing it up is always kind of the right way to go. I think the coordinators in this league, if you’re doing the same thing over and over again, if you don’t have variety in your coverages, your fronts, your techniques, fundamentals, they’re going to find a way to find an advantage.”

Flores changes things up to throw play callers off their plan. Sometimes keeping the same call sheet is the “change.”

“You try to have answers for everything,” Johnson said.

This is Flores’ fourth season in the NFC North, “and you’d like to think he’s put everything he could possibly do on tape,” Johnson said, “until you play him next and you realize he hasn’t yet.

“So it’ll be something new. There always is with him, and that’s what makes him such a good coordinator. It’s a great challenge.”

First-year Bears center Garrett Bradbury has seen how Flores operates from day to day, practice to practice. He was a Viking from 2019-24, overlapping with Flores for two seasons before playing last season with the New England Patriots, who traded him to the Bears in March.

“The variability, I’ve seen it, I’ve gone against it,” Bradbury said. “So have these guys (on the Bears). I mean, these guys played him twice last year. There’s a lot of film out there, so everyone’s watching it.”

‘Mental war’

Even as the Vikings fell behind 22-10 to the Packers in the third quarter Sunday, Flores kept bringing extra rushers or simulating pressure.

He would bring five or six rushers to the line and back them off into coverage. Or he would back off an extra man from the left tackle’s side and still rush from the right. Or he would send everyone.

Blitzes opened some big-play opportunities for the Packers early on, but eventually the extra rushers began to land. The Vikings recorded four sacks and an interception — all in the second half.

Packers quarterback Jordan Love faced the second-most pressures (23) of Week 1 and a league-high 19 pressures from blitzes, according to NFL Pro’s Next Gen Stats.

“You never know where it’s coming from and when it’s coming because they make it all look the same,” Packers right tackle Zach Bako-Bewele said. “I mean, that’s kind of their whole M.O.”

That’s part of what makes Flores a menace, the boogeyman of the blitz. He can keep you guessing what he’ll do — and second-guessing yourself.

“I’m in that path right now,” Johnson said with a laugh. “I mean, there’s a lot of that.

“It comes from all over the place,” he added of Flores’ pressure. “He’ll hit you in the A gaps. He’ll hit you from outside the tackles. He likes to bring (Cover) Zero more than any other coordinator in this league.

“In any situation, normal downs, second-and-long, third down, red zone — it really doesn’t matter. He keeps you on your toes.”

Williams certainly is on his.

“You’re getting a little less sleep,” he said. “This week is not fun.”

As a competitor, though, he said the challenge excites him. Williams said he and coaches would be spending five or six days studying Flores, looking for advantages, because they expect to see a fully plotted-out defense from him.

“He’s going to game-plan all the way up to the tee, from first snap to last snap,” Williams said. “Coach (Johnson) calls this ‘mental war’ when you go versus him, and that’s what it is.

“You’ve got to (realize) bad things are going to happen. You’ve got to be able to fight back and stay steady. That’s one of the biggest things is not allowing his defense to fluster you and get in your mind.”

Offensive coordinator Press Taylor agrees that it’s mental warfare.

“That’s exactly what it is,” he said. “You can find a little bit of everything in the defense through years of tape with him. Every game looks a little bit different with the … call sheet, whatever it is from him.”

However, Taylor said you don’t want to oversimplify your offense because you wanted to stick to your guns as a play caller and then find out “you showed up without enough ammo.”

That anxiety works both ways. Flores told reporters that Johnson plays a “chess match,” just like the Packers’ Matt LaFleur.

“Any type of offense that’s out there, whether it’s ground-and-pound, whether it’s run-and-shoot, whether it’s RPO (run-pass option), whether it’s 4-by-1 (quads formation), he’s got it,” Flores said of Johnson. “So what are we getting week to week? It’s hard to know.

“A lot of the game is adjustments. If they do this, we want to do that. If they do that, we want to do this. And we’re going to have our own game plan to start things off. And it’s the same thing on his end. What are they doing and how are we going to counteract what they’re doing?”

What’s past is prologue?

Since Flores took over the Vikings defense in 2023, Johnson has pitted his offenses against Flores’ defense six times: four times as Lions offensive coordinator and twice last season as the Bears play caller. Johnson’s teams went 5-1 in those games, with several of the wins featuring strong running games.

The Vikings allowed their second-most passing yards (311) in 2023 to the Lions and their most points (31 in both meetings) in 2024. But that was a different offense with a different quarterback, Jared Goff.

The Vikings blitzed Williams at the sixth-highest rate (50.6%) last season and 10th-highest (35.2%) in 2024. They blitzed on 13 pass plays during last season’s opener at Soldier Field, then ramped it up to 22 plays when they hosted the Bears in Week 16.

In the opener, the Vikings forced seven incompletions from the 13 blitzes, but the Bears scored a fourth-quarter touchdown on one blitz. Of the 22 blitzes in Week 16, the Vikings forced 10 incompletions and sacked Williams for a 12-yard loss.

Over the two matchups, Williams’ 34 pass attempts against the Vikings blitz were the most among 13 qualifiers, and he had a minus-19.5% completion percentage over expected, which ranked fifth-worst, according to Next Gen Stats.

“Everything that Flo wants to do is confuse the quarterback,” Bradbury said. “He wants to get him uncomfortable and wants to get him nervous, try and get in his head.”

So what’s the answer?

Johnson conceded this is one matchup in which he might have to feel it out in real time and make adjustments on the fly.

“I might be in the tablet a little bit more than I’d like to over the course of the game,” he said, “but that’s how these ones have tended to go in the past.”

Williams’ offensive teammates said they have to be mindful of the details, especially with their blocking.

“They do a lot of exotic things,” running back D’Andre Swift said. “Just making sure we are on our ‘A’ game, knowing what we need to do and what we need to look at.”

In particular, the Bears want to keep an eye on third-year outside linebacker Dallas Turner at all times. Against the Packers he had a sack and seven quarterback hits and forced a fumble by Love, which Bako-Bewele recovered.

“He looks like a different player to me,” Johnson said. “We’re highly aware of where he can line up. They put him all over the place, they do a great job. … If our tackles are matched up on a one-on-one, then that’s when we’ve got to dig in and hold up.”

For Williams, it starts with recognizing coverages before the snap and how they match up against the play call, Taylor said.

“What are the answers when things happen fast?” he said.

He doesn’t want Williams to get bogged down in what Flores might do.

“It’s on us (coaches) to simplify his thought process as much as possible,” Taylor said. “If this happens, here’s your answer. If that happens, here’s your contingency plan.

“They’re going to throw wrinkles at us, so now you’ve got to fall back on the standard operating procedure we set in place right here.”

Bradbury put it even more simply.

“They’ve got 11 guys over there,” he said, “and we’ve just got to figure out who those 11 are and identify it.”