The Bears are down to their last two weeks to get ready for the regular season, and they’ve hardly smoothed everything out. Before the Vikings visit for the opener Sept. 8, there’s still plenty to settle.
Quarterback Caleb Williams and the offense have been up and down throughout training camp, and the first-team defense looked lost in the preseason finale Friday against the Chiefs. Coach Ben Johnson wasn’t happy about much after that one.
The expectations are as high as ever, especially after the Bears signed Johnson to a massive contract, but the optimism at Halas Hall always seems to fizzle once the season starts. If Johnson wants to change that narrative, he has to answer these five questions before the Vikings come to town:
Can D’Andre Swift do what the Bears need him to do?
The Swift question is really a two-parter. The Bears want him to be reliable and powerful running between the tackles, and it’s also likely they’re going to ask him to take on a bigger share of the offense than he has carried before.
Swift’s history with Johnson is interesting because Johnson was with the Lions when they decided to trade Swift in 2023 and Swift was already with the Bears when they hired Johnson. Nonetheless, Johnson has been raving about Swift throughout the offseason, and it looks as though he will be the focal point of the offense as a rusher and receiver.
‘‘He’s hitting it hard,’’ Johnson said last week. ‘‘I see him turn on the gas when he sees a little crease. He’s dynamic and explosive. You feel that.’’
Swift used too much lateral movement while trying to turn nothing into something last season, but sharper focus on north-south running and a revamped offensive line should make a difference. And the Bears need that because he’s by far their most talented running back.
Where’s the pass rush?
Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen has to solve the same problem that flummoxed former coach Matt Eberflus in trying to engineer a pass rush. The Bears added two new starters on the defensive line in tackle Grady Jarrett and end Dayo Odeyingbo, but so far it appears Allen will have to be a smart blitzer.
The Bears’ best bet is defensive end Montez Sweat, their highest-paid player this season with a $25.1 million salary-cap hit. He was an instant hit when they traded for him in 2023, but he had the second-fewest sacks of his career last season at 5½.
Allen has to figure out how to set up Sweat for success, and it’s unknown whether Odeyingbo will be enough of a presence on the other side to draw attention away from him. The Bears signed Odeyingbo for $48 million over three years, putting him 20th in average salary at his position, but it was a projection of where they think he’s headed. He has only 16½ career sacks in four seasons, including three last season for the Colts.
How much can Williams handle?
Johnson undoubtedly has big plans for the offense this season, but those ideas won’t be any good if the Bears can’t operate on that level yet. He has to make a realistic assessment of what Williams and the starting offense can do and put that into place soon. The team likely will begin practicing specifically for the Vikings on Monday or Tuesday.
Johnson was upset about how the first-team offense looked against the Chiefs and conceded he might have to scale back the playbook in the short term. He said he went into camp ‘‘open-ended’’ while evaluating how much the Bears are ready to handle.
He said the volume ‘‘might have to ebb and flow’’ for a while, but he hoped to have a grip on it by the bye week in Week 5.
‘‘It’s placed at just the right time to identify who we are and what we’re going to be for the rest of the season,’’ he said.
What’s going on at cornerback?
The Bears are expecting to have top corner Jaylon Johnson back for the season opener, but there’s a lot to sort out after that.
The good news is that corner is their deepest position. Even with the loss of Terell Smith to a season-ending knee injury, the Bears have starting-caliber outside corners in Nahshon Wright and Tyrique Stevenson, plus a quality nickel in Josh Blackwell to back up Kyler Gordon.
Assuming Johnson is good to go for the Vikings, by the way, he finally will get the assignment he has been craving: tracking wide receiver Justin Jefferson all game. With the Bears playing predominantly man-to-man coverage under Allen, they’ll have Johnson follow the opponent’s top receiver.
It looks likely Stevenson will get the second starting job on the outside over Wright, but whether he holds it is another story. Allen loves tall cornerbacks who can jam receivers at the line of scrimmage, and Wright was having a tremendous preseason before a rough night against the Chiefs.
Do they have a left tackle?
The Bears hoped one of their four candidates for starting left tackle would blow them away and leave no doubt. That didn’t happen. Instead, Braxton Jones appears to have claimed the job by default after rookie Ozzy Trapilo struggled, Kiran Amegadjie faded and Theo Benedet’s late push came up short.
Jones was a good find by the Bears in the fifth round out of Southern Utah in 2022, but he has been a question mark during his entire time with them. The Bears have weighed drafting a replacement multiple times and probably would have taken Texas’ Kelvin Banks if he had lasted one more pick in April.
Jones, however, will get one more chance to prove himself, and there’s a lot on the line. He’s going into the final year of his rookie deal, and the gap in contracts for starting tackles versus backups is tens of millions of dollars.
He has the advantage of 40 career starts, compared with one for Amegadjie and none for Trapilo and Benedet, but experience alone won’t carry him. He has to prove he can hold off the best pass rushers in the league. Otherwise, it’ll undercut the improvements the Bears made in the middle of the line.
NOTE: The Bears put cornerback Terell Smith on injured reserve Sunday, one week after he suffered a season-ending knee injury. They also waived six players: wide receiver Samori Toure, guard Chris Glaser, linebacker Swayze Bozeman, tight end Thomas Gordon, safety Mark Perry and cornerback Jeremiah Walker.
The Bears have to whittle their roster to 53 players by 3 p.m. Tuesday.