To paraphrase the late Dennis Green, in a spotlight game on Sunday afternoon versus the Dallas Cowboys, the Chicago Bears proved that they might be who we thought they were heading into the 2025 season. Facing questions about their competency and competitive fire, the Bears momentarily quieted the critics, earning a 31-14 win over the Cowboys, giving Ben Johnson his first win as an NFL head coach.
Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the Bears played a perfect game. There’s still room for improvement, areas of concern that will need to be monitored throughout the season and fundamental flaws with the way this team has been constructed… but now there’s also proof of concept, because this was the sort of win we expected to see when Ben Johnson made the jump from Detroit to Chicago last January.
After a three and out on their opening drive of the game, the Bears offense looked like a well-oiled machine for the rest of the afternoon, overwhelming the Cowboys defense with explosive plays in the 1st half, and then breaking them down with body blows in the 2nd half. Consider, the Bears had five plays of 25 yards or more in the first half, including a jaw-dropping Holy Cow, Look At That Cannon of an Arm flea flicker from Caleb Williams to Luther Burden III.
Caleb also found Colston Loveland for 31 yards on the opening drive, and followed that up two plays later with a 35-yard touchdown pass to Rome Odunze. There was a 41-yard screen pass to D’Andre Swift and a 29-yard laser to Burden again to set up the final score of the 1st half. Do yourself a favor and go back and watch that 29-yarder to Burden again. The touch that Caleb had to put on that ball to layer it over multiple defenders was next level.
Bears Run Game Comes Alive in 2nd Half
Speaking of next level, we once again found out at halftime that Ben Johnson is a next level competitive psycho, because his takeaway from the 1st half — a half in which Chicago led 24-14 and had nearly 300 yards of total offense — was that the Bears were relying too much on chunk plays.
Technically, he wasn’t wrong. The Bears managed only 36 yards on 10 carries in the 1st half, highlighting a problem that had plagued them through the first two games of the season. But then after forcing the Cowboys to punt on their first drive of the second half, the smashmouth rushing attack that Johnson had on display so frequently as the offensive coordinator of the Lions came alive against the Cowboys.
On the Bears first drive of the 3rd quarter, they methodically worked the ball down the field on a 19-play, 76 yard, 9 minute and 54 second drive that included 11 consecutive plays where the Bears kept the ball on the ground and imposed their will on a Dallas defense that was all out of sorts with all of the motion and misdirection the Bears were throwing at them.
In typical Ben Johnson fashion, the drive concluded with a pass to a wide open DJ Moore on 4th and goal from the 4-yard line. Nail, meet coffin. Ben Johnson, grab yourself a game ball.
A visit to Las Vegas comes next Sunday afternoon, and based on what both the Raiders and Bears looked like today, there’s good reason to believe that Chicago could leave Las Vegas with a win. Then comes a bye week, and after that a primetime matchup with the Washington Commanders, where the Bears season, for all intents and purposed, ended last year.
They’ll need to take care of business on the road in Vegas and get healthier over their bye week, but it does appear that there could be a golden opportunity for the Bears to begin to write a far different story in Washington than the one that unfolded there last season, because unlike last year, the Bears might be who we thought they were this year.