CHICAGO -- Standing in his Soldier Field suite on Dec. 22, 2024, Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles felt mixed emotions as he watched the Detroit Lions score their final touchdown in a 34-17 rout.
On one hand, losing to a division rival while in the midst of a 10-game losing streak in a stadium full of fans cheering on the visitors, stung. A lot.
But there was something about this play that tempered Poles' frustration.
The infamous play known as "Stumble Bum" was the brainchild of offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. The play began with quarterback Jared Goff taking the snap and faking a stumble as he dropped back. Running back Jahmyr Gibbs dove to the ground as if trying to recover a fumble. After Bears defenders bit on the fake, Goff delivered a 21-yard touchdown pass to tight end Sam LaPorta with 12:18 to play in the third quarter.
Poles looked to the Lions sideline, where players and coaches exploded with excitement.
"You're definitely frustrated in the moment," Poles said. "You feel like someone's kicking you while you're down.
"At the same time, I admired the creativity and execution of it."
He wasn't the only member of the Bears' brass who felt that way.
"Fooled me," Bears chairman George H. McCaskey said. "I was like, 'Hey, the quarterback's on the ground.'"
Johnson was already a top target of the Bears' head coaching search by that point. Thomas Brown was finishing the season as the Bears' interim coach, and this moment exemplified the type of creativity and boldness the Bears wanted in their next playcaller.
But Johnson's uniqueness extends beyond trick plays. Those who know the coach's son remember him diagramming plays as a kid while pretending to be Joe Montana, spending entire nights in the office as a Miami Dolphins quality control coach and reading extended passages from a book about achieving goals in the military while standing in front of a packed room. He's an innovator and a borderline cocky competitor who doesn't mind taking a playful jab at an opposing coach. And now he's tasked with developing a franchise quarterback in a city that hasn't had one in 80 years and guiding a team to its first playoff win since the 2010 season.
As the Bears open both their 2025 season and the Ben Johnson era Monday night vs. the Minnesota Vikings (8:15 p.m. ET, ESPN), it will be a culmination of what can be described as a lifetime of preparation for this moment.
"You guys just watch, we got a good head coach," Bears special teams coordinator Richard Hightower said. "I've been around a lot of them. Damn good. Special."
SOME OF JOHNSON'S earliest memories are associated with numbers. He can still recite the rhythmic cadence his mother, Gail, used to help his older sister, Kasey, remember multiplication tables while they drove to school.
6 times 6 is 36 ...
Math came easy and piqued Johnson's interest from a young age. When he was in kindergarten, his parents bought him a spiral notebook to allow his mind and organizational skills to go to work. Each day after school, the 6-year-old wrote out numbers from 1 to 10,000 -- for fun. When one page filled up, he'd be on to the next, until the notebook was filled with every number in sequential order in neat columns.
"It wasn't addition or subtraction or any of that kind of stuff, but he went through the numbers and made sure he had them all right," said Ben's father, Don, who was a high school principal as well as a football coach. "He really did get to be a pretty bright kid in terms of the different math qualities."
As a middle-schooler in Asheville, North Carolina, Johnson's love for math grew along with his passion for football. He became involved with MathCounts, a national series of in-person math competitions.
"In between tests I took the rest of the [math] team out to the football field and we threw the ball around," Johnson said. "[Math] wasn't something I really worked at. It was just that I was good at it, but that wasn't really where my heart was."
JOHNSON'S FOOTBALL BIO at the University of North Carolina, where he walked on as a quarterback from 2004 to 2006, lists numerous athletic and academic achievements from his days at A.C. Reynolds High School in Asheville. He was the conference player of the year as a senior quarterback after leading the Rockets to a 4A state championship in 2002. He ran track and finished among the top five in his class academically.
There is also a fun fact that speaks to Johnson's earliest influences: "Pretended to be Joe Montana as a kid."
Don Johnson always had the San Francisco 49ers on television when his children, Kasey, Ben and Kyle, were growing up. A former offensive coordinator at The Citadel from 1983 to 1985 and later a high school football coach, Don noticed Ben picking up on small details that he would hear the announcers dissect on TV.
"He understood the game a lot better than most kids his age," Don said.
Around middle school, Ben began demonstrating his own creativity. He'd diagram formations, draw up ways he'd envision the offense scoring and take his ideas to his father for feedback.
"And a lot of it comes back to Joe Montana, because [Ben] would see a television program about Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, and they would show some of the plays that they've drawn up," Don Johnson said. "He saw how those plays were diagrammed, and those were things that he thought he could buy into."
The majority of Ben Johnson's high school football career was spent in a split back, I-formation offense predicated on running the ball. It wasn't until his senior year in 2003 that his former quarterbacks coach Steve McCurry took over head coaching duties and the Rockets began to expand their playbook.
Johnson had a strong understanding of his role in the offense, which allowed McCurry to dial up more pass plays for his quarterback. It soon became a skill that his coaches would lean on in games.
"He's so cerebral and so smart, he could tell the offensive linemen who to block, tell the running back where he needs to go, tell the receivers what routes to run," McCurry said. "When we had timeouts and had our meetings on the sideline, I always listened to him, our offensive coordinator listened to him, we relied heavily on him to tell us -- what are they doing here? What do we need to do?
"If I knew what I know now, I would've let him call the plays for us, be a player-coach on the field."
AFTER TWO SEASONS as a graduate assistant and one year as the tight ends coach at Boston College, Johnson got his first shot in the NFL as an offensive assistant with the Dolphins in 2012.
Mike Sherman, the Dolphins offensive coordinator (2012-13), demanded a lot of Johnson, whose first gig in the pros called upon him to put Miami's playbook together. Having the best playbook in the NFL was something Sherman prided himself on, and it went far beyond the complexity of each play and formation. Accessibility and being able to call up a menu of specifics in the Dolphins' electronic system would allow coaches to see how plays could be used to counter various defenses.
Sherman would draw an overview of each play, and Johnson was responsible for putting pencil to paper and getting every detail and nuance of the play drawn. He then manually inputted this information into the Dolphins' system. This process took hours.
"He could draw some great pictures," Sherman said. "One thing that I can say about him, the guy has unbelievable endurance. That's what he impressed on me the most was his ability to work and just grind it, grind it, grind it. There were times that I might've gone home at 2 o'clock in the morning, roll around, come on back in about 5:30 and he's still working on the pictures. He knows they have to be exactly right, so he was somebody that when he got the book to do the pictures, I knew it was going to get done and be on my desk when I get in in the morning. And he was adamant about getting those pictures done and doing a good job, and he did an unbelievable job.
"The longer I took to hand over the red zone, the third downs, the short yardage, the later he had to stay. And he never complained one time. I'd come in the morning, he'd have those droopy dog eyes and he wouldn't say much, but the pictures would be on my desk, that's for sure."
JOHNSON'S SISTER, KASEY King, knew the inevitable was coming. The Dolphins had struggled through back-to-back losing seasons and fired their coaching staff following the 2018 season. That meant that Johnson, who had spent eight seasons with Miami, including the last as the wide receivers coach, was without a job.
King texted her brother and let him know that a bottle of bourbon was being delivered that day.
"There's nothing you can say or do that's going to make anybody feel better," King said. "The guy likes to work, and he likes to keep his mind going.
"For him, that was just pretty painful to just not have the next task."
Johnson and his family stayed in South Florida while he volunteered in a non-coaching capacity at FIU, the college program headed by his former UNC coach Butch Davis. At the last minute, an offer from former Lions coach Matt Patricia came through for Johnson to get back in the NFL as an offensive quality control coach for the 2019 season.
"I just remember telling him, Ben, you got to find a way to make this work," Joe Philbin, the former Dolphins head coach who hired Johnson in 2012, said. "They're going to see the quality of coach you are, and you'll find a way to make it work."
The job was a step back from being a position coach, but it would serve as a launching point for Johnson's career.
"The humbling part was being on the street and seeing the NFL offseason and training camp move on without you," Johnson said. "It wasn't humbling for me to go to Detroit and take a lower position. I was getting there right at the end of training camp, and players and coaches alike were a little bit tired. They had gone four to five weeks, nonstop. And now who's this young guy coming in with a big smile on his face all the time?
"When football gets taken away from you and you get it back finally, it doesn't matter what role you're in, you're going to appreciate every second of it."
Johnson worked his way back into the position coach ranks with Detroit's tight ends the following year and became the team's passing game coordinator in 2021, when he was retained by Dan Campbell after Patricia's firing. Campbell knew Johnson from their time in Miami and learned just how much he could lean on him.
When Campbell demoted former offensive coordinator Anthony Lynn in mid-November 2021 after the Lions' 0-8 start, he enlisted Johnson's help in calling plays.
While preparing to play the Lions on Dec. 26, former Atlanta Falcons coach Arthur Smith noticed subtle differences that showed up on film. The Lions were a two-win team at that point and in line for a high draft pick, but the playcalls were still designed to put players in position to be successful. The creativity on third down was there. So was the way Detroit used its tight ends.
Smith, who played with Johnson at North Carolina, confirmed his findings with his former teammate before kickoff.
"It looked different when that switch took place," Smith said. "It was very practical what they did to try to win those games late in the year."
The following season, Campbell promoted Johnson to offensive coordinator, the position he held from 2022 through 2024 while developing one of the NFL's most explosive offenses. And although he got onto the radar of the Bears and numerous other teams because of the creativity his units displayed, what stood out more than scheme and trick plays was the buy-in from players that showed up from play to play.
"I think his teaching skill, to me, I see that on the film more than some mad scientist," Philbin said. "I think of football as an execution game, as an effort game, a fundamental game. When I watch his tape, that's what really impresses me, and that's a credit to him and his staff."
HARRISON FREID, WHO is in his fourth season as Bears director of research and analytics, estimates he has sat through upward of 3,000 team meetings over 10 seasons in the NFL. What he witnessed Johnson do to capture his team's attention before practice on Aug. 20 is something he'd never seen before.
For nine minutes, Johnson read from the book "Objective Secure" by Nick Lavery, an active-duty member of the Green Berets whose application of a warrior mindset extends beyond the military to personal achievements.
More than 150 players, coaches and staffers packed into the team's auditorium at Halas Hall as the 39-year-old thumbed through pages that spoke to working through obstacles even when they feel insurmountable.
"I've never seen a coach do that," Freid said. "Reading in public is something that takes a tremendous amount of confidence to literally stand up in front of people.
"He does things differently. He does things with a lot of confidence, and I think he does things with a vision of why he's doing it. It's not just he's doing it to do it."
That's what Bears players have come to learn about their head coach. Late in Chicago's 38-0 preseason win over Buffalo, cameras caught a stern-looking Johnson on the sideline as his team continued to hang points on the Bills. Johnson had handed playcalling duties to offensive coordinator Declan Doyle for the second half but remained glued to the action as if his team were fighting to come back.
"He has this demeanor to him before a game that's a little different from when you see him in practice," Bears tight end Cole Kmet said. "You can tell he's getting game-day ready, that's for sure.
"That's cool to see, to have that intensity from a playcaller and from your head coach is a lot of fun to play with."
That intense focus is something Johnson tried to instill in his players by making sure they mastered the small details first. Sessions throughout the spring and summer included additional reps during drills when the execution wasn't up to Johnson's standard. That has included everyone, particularly quarterback Caleb Williams, getting called out in front of the team when repeated errors popped up.
"He'll get up on the board, he'll say it out loud, he'll explain it to a deeper level," Williams said. "He coaches. He helps you learn.
"It's been awesome to be able to have that and then have somebody go out there and push you."
Johnson knows how to push buttons. He did it during his introductory news conference with the Bears, when he said how much he enjoyed beating Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur twice a season. Nobody ever accused Johnson of being too modest.
It's something that rubbed off on him during his time with Campbell.
"What I learned most over the last four years actually came last year, and that was how to handle the high expectations," Johnson said. "And I probably initially would've thought, 'Hey, downplay those and just focus on the main thing, focus on the next practice or the next game.'
"Whereas Dan really embraced them and said, 'Come on in, we do have the target on our back.' And it was cool to see how the players responded to it, because I thought they handled it really well. It wasn't so much downplay and be humble about it, no, it's, 'Hey, yeah, we are the big dogs' and 'Come and get us.'"
The Bears don't have the target yet. ESPN BET picks them to finish fourth in the division, but that doesn't stop Johnson from conveying confidence. It's a confidence that is based on a lifetime of preparation.
"It's a fine line," Johnson said. "At times you might overstep it, and it might come across as arrogant or cocky, but I would rather do that than be unsure or play slow or be unconfident.
"It's a balancing act, and it's a fun thing to navigate."