In August 2018, Mike Martz, the architect and play caller of the St. Louis Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf” offense, visited the Miami Dolphins’ training camp at the invitation of head coach Adam Gase.
“Usually when you go into those deals — and I’ve done a lot of that stuff — they ask you about what you did and how you did it,” Martz said. “You put it on the board and you talk to them.”
Sometimes, there’s a few questions to answer. The coaches in the room will nod their heads, take notes and everyone moves on. But Martz’s trip to Miami was different because of one young assistant coach who had more questions than usual.
“He knew (the offense) almost as well as I knew it when we talked about it,” Martz said. “He wanted the intimate details.”
Martz recognized that this assistant had watched plenty of film of his offense, that he studied it closely, that he learned it.
But now, he wanted more answers.
“How did you do this?” Martz said. “What’s this based on? How are you trying to affect the linebacker? Does the receiver go around the linebacker? Or is he supposed to cross him?”
Martz left that meeting with the Dolphins’ assistants with a question of his own for Gase.
“Who is this guy?” Martz asked.
“He’s going to be a superstar,” he recalled Gase replying.
The young assistant coach was Ben Johnson, the new head coach of the Chicago Bears.
Bears general manager Ryan Poles highlighted Johnson’s “progressive offensive mind” and his “mind toward innovation” in a statement announcing the hiring on Tuesday. It would seemingly make him an ideal fit for quarterback Caleb Williams.
But it took Johnson years to reach this point. His list of influences is as long as the stats that illustrate how dominant his Detroit Lions offense has been over the past three seasons.
How good is Johnson? It might be best to ask other offensive minds.
“A no-ego, low-key brilliant guy that will be just an outstanding head coach,” Martz said. “I think he’s the best (play caller) I’ve seen, to be honest with you. Sean McVay is great, obviously. Sean Payton was really good when he came out. When they were young guys coming up, they were top-notch. I would put him in that category at least.”
It was around 12:30 a.m. when Mike Sherman, the former offensive coordinator of the Dolphins under coach Joe Philbin, left work. Or it might have been a quarter to 1 a.m. The work that day was done. But it was another long one. Leaving, Sherman saw Johnson.
“You coming?” he asked.
“No, I got to finish these few pictures,” Johnson replied.
As an offensive assistant, one of Johnson’s responsibilities was putting the Dolphins’ plays into PowerPoint for their offensive installs. When Sherman returned at 5:30 the next morning, there was Johnson.
“He’s unshaven,” Sherman recalled. “His hair was messed up, but his pictures that he drew, with the detail that he had, were just perfect.”
Johnson broke into the NFL in 2012 with the Dolphins. His career started to intertwine with different play callers and offensive coordinators. He’s not from a single offensive tree. Instead, he had opportunities to digest different schemes and see several play callers in action. It started on Philbin’s staff with Sherman, the former head coach of the Green Bay Packers, but expanded to include Bill Lazor and Zac Taylor.
“If you ask me, I’d say he’s a great teacher,” Sherman said. “I think that’s his strength, and he supports that teaching with all this other stuff that he does.”
When Gase took over the Dolphins in 2016, Mike Tannenbaum, then Miami’s executive vice president of football operations, told him that there were two young assistants the previous coaching staff absolutely loved.
“Like they counted on them,” Gase said. “These guys are reliable. They’re always here. They’re grinders.”
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One was Charlie Bullen, who is currently the New York Giants’ outside linebackers coach. The other was Johnson. Under Philbin, Johnson went from offensive assistant to assistant quarterbacks coach, where he worked closely with Taylor, the future Bengals head coach who was in charge of the position.
“Not everyone is so passionate about the football that they’re willing to put in, as a coach, the hours and the grind that it takes to really be good at it,” Lazor said, “but Ben is really passionate about the football.”
When Dan Campbell was promoted from tight ends coach to interim head coach in 2015, Johnson took over Campbell’s position group. The next year, Gase took over and made Johnson his assistant receivers coach.
“Dan giving him the chance to coach the tight ends, where you’re integral in blocking schemes, pass protection with the (offensive) line coach, you have to know all that stuff,” Gase said. “Then he’s with the wideouts. He was already with quarterbacks. He knew so many positions at such a young age.”
Ben Johnson impressed in Miami, his first NFL stop, where he held a variety of jobs under multiple head coaches. (George Gojkovich / Getty Images)
As Johnson’s titles changed, his skill at drawing up plays improved. Clyde Christensen, the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator from 2016-17 under Gase, said Johnson created a program for drafting their plays for installs as well as their inventory. Christensen described it as cutting edge at the time.
“Someone has to draw up all those pass plays that all the coordinators think up; someone has to draw those babies up,” Christensen said. “He was way, way, way superior than your average coach, who we can maybe do our ABCs on the computer. He was at a doctorate level safe to say it.”
Johnson earned degrees in mathematics and computer science at North Carolina, where he joined the football team as a walk-on quarterback. Gase described Johnson’s program as something that seemingly functioned like Google. You’d start typing in keywords, and then like that, here’s the play. It was organized. It included everything: first- and second-down plays, third-down, red zone, four-minute situations and more.
“Then he could ungroup everything and you could redesign everything if you wanted to,” Gase said.
In Dolphins practices, Johnson never stopped moving. To coach his receivers, he often became a defensive back. Everything needed to be more game-like. And he provided those looks.
“He’s athletic enough to help these guys,” Gase said. “And I just think the guys always appreciated that. They could tell he was trying to make them better, whether it be with knowledge or physicality within practice.”
Johnson would leave practice as if he had just left the gym.
“The dude would be drenched in sweat after practice,” Gase said.
Other coaches noticed the same. He had a way of connecting with those he coached.
“He was on fire when he was on the field,” Sherman said.
Years later, Christensen witnessed Johnson connecting with players off the field, too. “You’d see them hanging around his office,” he said. It included players who weren’t in Johnson’s position group. If a player had questions about certain plays or had their own projects to work on, Johnson’s door was open to them.
“He could put together a little cut-up (of film) and the players loved that,” Christensen said. “He was a tremendous resource and they just all gravitated to him.”
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Just four games into the 2015 season, the Dolphins were in flux. Philbin was out as head coach, and Campbell was in as interim coach. But Lazor, the Dolphins’ offensive coordinator, added to the situation by bringing in his own mentor, Al Saunders, whom he previously worked with in Washington.
Lazor’s in-season addition didn’t go over well with the Dolphins’ veteran coaches. Saunders was an outsider. He wasn’t there for training camp.
And he was hired just two days after Philbin’s firing.
“But Ben was the one guy that came and confronted me about it,” Lazor said.
“Here’s a guy who wasn’t afraid to have a difficult conversation. When you’re the head coach, when you’re the coordinator, you’re going to be faced with a lot of difficult conversations, and a whole bunch of people shy away from having tough conversations.”
Johnson was different. Lazor could see that even though Johnson was one of the Dolphins’ youngest staff members.
“He had the courage and the confidence in himself to say, ‘Hey, Bill, what are we doing?’” Lazor said.
Saunders stuck around and became another influence for Johnson to draw from. Similar to Martz, Saunders was from the Air Coryell system. That’s one reason Johnson was able to pick Martz’s brain so well when he visited the Dolphins three years later. He learned from Lazor and Saunders.
“Ben knew enough and Mike helped him take it over the top,” Gase said. “Ben was always really good with that. Ben was real smart. He was always like, ‘What do I got to do to improve?’ He’s one of those guys. He’s a learner.”
Coaches who have worked with Ben Johnson, left with Jared Goff, call him a teacher. The Bears are eager to see how he mentors quarterback Caleb Williams. (Mike Mulholland / Getty Images)
In Gase and Christensen, he had veteran coaches who had worked with Peyton Manning. Christensen was the Colts’ receivers coach under offensive coordinator Tom Moore before becoming the team’s offensive coordinator in 2009. Sherman worked and won with Brett Favre in Green Bay after starting as a tight ends/assistant offensive line coach in Mike Holmgren’s West Coast offense. Lazor worked under Chip Kelly for one season in Philadelphia and brought some of his run-pass options to the Dolphins.
At North Carolina, Johnson was coached by former Bears offensive coordinator John Shoop. He’s the one who encouraged Johnson to get into coaching. Johnson was a graduate assistant at Boston College for two years before becoming the Eagles’ tight ends coach in 2011 under offensive coordinator Kevin Rogers.
Johnson joined the Lions as part of Matt Patricia’s staff in 2019, reverting to being an offensive quality control coach but still working under longtime offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell. He was retained by Campbell when he took over in 2021. Johnson began as the Lions’ tight ends coach before being promoted to passing game coordinator and then to offensive coordinator in 2022.
Through it all, Johnson’s catalog of offenses and plays expanded. He learned what to do. And, just as importantly, what not to do.
“It’s one thing to have a range of influences, it’s another thing to listen to that range of influences,” Sherman said. “Ben was always taking notes, writing things up. And I would say that his offense is very unique. Yes, he’s coached with a bunch of different people, but this is his offense that he created.”
That’s what Sherman saw when he watched the Lions.
“He has created a new wave,” Sherman said. “It’s almost like Wing T football. With all the misdirection and deception and crazy formations in the run game, it’s just different. He’s created a monster.”
Gase saw a “chameleon” at work in Detroit. “He’s always going to evolve,” he said. “He’s always going to be learning because that’s just kind of the person he is.”
It comes through in his play calling.
“He’s just really good at emphasizing something that the other team’s not good at and then adjusting as the game goes on,” Gase said. “If they’re playing it a different way, then he changes.”
What really has impressed Gase is that Johnson is seemingly ready for the unexpected. That could mean unscouted looks from a defense or an uptick in blitzes from an opponent that typically doesn’t pressure much.
“That’s a good thing for you because that means you’re affecting the game in the aspect of they’re afraid,” Gase said. “They’re worried about you, too, not just the players. Not only do you have good players, you’re putting a good scheme together to where you’re helping good players get even more open than what they would because you’re attacking the defense the right way.”
Johnson answers — or counters — what defenses are doing. “Some offenses, they’re just plays,” Christensen said. But not Johnson’s.
“I see a system,” he said. “I see something that’s built right from the ground up. I see something that has maintained its toughness and it’s creativity without trying to be too cute.”
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Sherman noted how Johnson excels at making different plays look the same with different players getting the football.
“He tries to spread it around to create camaraderie amongst the players,” he said. “So it’s not just one guy getting the ball. Everybody’s getting a chance to touch the ball that gets on the bus. I just think his way of doing things separates (him). He’s unique in many ways.”
The proof is in the Lions’ record-setting offensive output under Johnson. Detroit’s 68 offensive touchdowns led the league this season. The 564 points scored set a team record. He built off his success from previous years. He was tough to figure out and stop. He’s the West Coast offense, Air Coryell and more. Over the past two seasons, Johnson’s offense averaged the most points and yards.
“He’s not patterning himself off anybody,” Martz said. “He’s gleaning what he’s learned and he’s tweaking (it). You can’t do that unless you understand the game on an intimate basis. And there’s not many people in the league that really understand the game at such an intimate level. I’m talking about the running game, the pass protections, motions, all that stuff. He understands that. Now, you don’t do that unless you’ve got great exposure or you’ve studied it over the years and retained it.”
Johnson did that. He was exposed to a lot and seemingly retained it all.
“He’s got a ton of ideas and backgrounds and philosophies and kind of made them his own,” Christensen said. “The Lions are their own. It’s Ben Johnson’s offense.”
And he’s bringing it to Chicago.
(Top photo: Mike Mulholland / Getty Images)
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