Anyone can aspire to win a championship, something that happens every year. Bears coach Ben Johnson is aiming higher.
“You’ve got 31 other teams coming to training camp saying, ‘Our goal is to win the Super Bowl,’” Johnson told Dan Pompei of The Athletic. “I want more than that. I want to have the highest-scoring offense ever, which happens to be the 2013 Denver Broncos. I know how many points per game they scored [37.9 per game], and I want to surpass them. I want shutouts. I want blowouts.”
Johnson asked Pompei about the record for consecutive wins. It’s 21, set by the Patriots from 2003 though 2004.
“Why can’t we do that?” Johnson said. “There has never been an undefeated season [since the Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972]. The moon is the Super Bowl, but we’re shooting beyond that, for the stars. And I want these players to feel that each and every single day they come in.”
There’s a certain logic to setting goals higher than the ultimate goal. Still, the only goal that matters most to NFL fans is winning Super Bowls. Scoring doesn’t matter. Winning streaks don’t matter.
The goal is to get to the playoffs and then be the one team that runs the table.
The fact that the coach of the Bears is able to semi-plausibly articulate those goals is good news for Bears fans, who have gone more than 40 years without winning a title — and 20 (as of this year) since getting to the Super Bowl.
Last year, the Bears gave the Rams all they could handle in the divisional round. This year, Johnson has far bigger plans for the team that he has acknowledged is the league’s No. 1 regression candidate.
But even if the Bears break Denver’s 13-year-old record, there’s an important caveat to the Broncos’ achievement. The year they set the scoring record, they didn’t win the Super Bowl.
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