The Chicago Bears fancy themselves as a good team, but head coach Ben Johnson knows they have at least one fatal flaw, and he is not letting it go unchecked.
Johnson met with the media some 24 hours after his team defeated the visiting New Orleans Saints in Week 7. He praised them for starting fast, but also because they “weathered the storm” of the Saints’ rally to end the first half and begin the second.
Bears HC Ben Johnson Sends Clear Message After Beating Saints
Ben Johnson: Bears Must Clean Up Mistakes
The Bears committed 10 penalties for 92 yards in Week 7, and they entered Monday tied for the seventh-most infractions in the NFL, per FootballDB. Some of the calls against them may have been questionable at best.
Still, the Bears lead the league in false starts and unnecessary roughness calls through six-plus weeks of the season.
They also had several other errors in the game that do not show up in the box score.
Asked which of the Bears’ issues topped their list to address, Johnson told reporters on Monday “All the above. We got to get it all cleaned up. Good teams don’t have so many self-inflicted wounds.”
The Bears have stalled drives and taken points off the board with their miscues, which surfaced early on in the offseason program and have lingered through more than one-third of the regular season. Pre-snap penalites were the biggest culprit during the summer. The issue has evolved into postsnap woes since.
Bears Not Concerned With Officiating
Before that, Johnson noted that he does not pay much attention to how a game is being called while it is happening. It is a notable stance with players like Colston Loveland, Jaquan Brisker, and Nahshon Wright among the Bears who are victims of questionable calls.
However, there are some items they would like clarity on from the league.
“Generally speaking, I don’t put too much stock in how the game’s officiated. There’s things beyond our control. We’re going to coach it up as well as we possibly can. And then over the course of those 60 minutes, we just stay consistent. Some calls are going to come our way, some aren’t, and we’ll keep it moving. If I feel like there’s something that we don’t have clarity on, then I’ll just stay away from some of those play calls that might give us a bad spot or something like that,” Johnson said.
“There are some things over the course of the first six weeks that we need a little clarity on from the league in terms of how we can coach it better, and that’s what we send in. But other than that, we don’t talk a whole lot during the game about it.”
Johnson also blamed himself for a stretch of plays at the end of the first half that saw the Bears go three-and-out, so his decree of cleaning up mistakes extends to himself as well as the team. Up next, Johnson and the Bears travel to take on the Baltimore Ravens in Week 8.