Immediately upon Ben Johnson’s arrival at Halas Hall and Chicago Bears headquarters, the expectations around the football team changed quickly.

Landing the biggest fish on the open coaching market, the Bears followed it up with a massive overhaul to their roster, upgrading in the trenches and doing all they can to try right the wrongs of their 2024 season when they finished 5-12 with two different head coaches and three different offensive coordinators.

Advertisement

Given all the upgrades and changes the team made this offseason, they’ve been a popular pick to be one of the biggest turnaround teams in the 2025 season, but their new head coach doesn’t believe success is just in wins and losses.

During an interview on the “Mully & Haugh Show,” Johnson was asked what success looks like for the Bears this year, and for him, putting together a structure, understanding, and building momentum towards the future is equally important as wins and losses.

“At the end of the day, we as a team, I’m talking about coaches and players alike, we have to establish our brand of football going forward,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be our physical nature, we need to be poised under pressure, we need to be detailed schematically and fundamentally, and I think the results will take care of itself. It’s really that buy-in of what we’ve been talking about since the Spring to training camp, that needs to show up for us over the course of the season. We’re going to just get better and better, we’ll be playing our best football in December and January if we get that done.”

Although the NFL world, media, and fans want to jump on the Bears bandwagon as a team to turn it around in just one year, Johnson is taking a smart and patient approach to this team in his first year. Wins and losses are of the utmost importance, but the new head coach wants to set a standard and expectations for how Bears football will be played moving forward.

Follow Bears Wire on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

This article originally appeared on Bears Wire: Bears HC Ben Johnson explains what success would look like in 2025