The Head Coach Just Made Our Argument For Us

Ben Johnson told The Athletic the power of Soldier Field in winter 'is a real thing' and 'should be a major advantage for us.' His front office is shopping for a dome. Both cannot be the Bears' position.

By Dear Kevin Warren · 2026-08-12

Seven months later, the playoff loss still eats at Ben Johnson.

Dan Pompei of The Athletic spent a 14-hour training camp day with the Bears' head coach and published the profile this morning. Most of it is what you'd expect from a Pompei piece: granular, patient, humane. Read the whole thing. But buried in the middle is the most important Bears quote of the year, and it has nothing to do with the depth chart.

It's about the building.

What he said

Go back to January. Divisional round, Rams at Soldier Field. Winds at 25 miles per hour, wind chill of four below, snow coming sideways off the lake. The Bears lost 20-17 in overtime, and the season ended right there on the lakefront.

Johnson told Pompei he expected a shootout against Sean McVay and the league's top-scoring offense, and he coached like it. He was, in his words, mentally unprepared to downshift to a more conservative attack. He passed on a first-quarter field goal try, went for it on fourth-and-2 from the Rams' 21, and watched Caleb Williams get picked off. "I kick myself when I think about that game," he said.

Notice what he doesn't blame. Not the wind. Not the field. Not the hundred-year-old bones of the stadium his bosses keep calling obsolete. He blames his game plan. And then he says this:

> "I should have changed the mindset. I know now that the power of Soldier Field, particularly at that time of year, is a real thing. And it should be a major advantage for us, provided we recognize it and play with a certain style." > > — Ben Johnson, to Dan Pompei of The Athletic, August 12, 2026

Read that again. The power of Soldier Field is a real thing. A major advantage for us. A fan with frostbite and a podcast didn't say that. The man who calls the plays said it, on the record, in the paper of record.

He built a process around it

Here's the part that should worry anyone hoping this was a throwaway line. Johnson didn't shrug off the Rams loss as bad luck. He spent the offseason turning it into homework. Per Pompei, Johnson now holds weekly game-management sessions with Harrison Freid, the team's director of research and analysis, grinding back through roughly 200 critical decisions from every week of the 2025 season.

The lesson he took from all that film and all that math: play to the building. Fourth quarter, January, wind off the lake, snow in the lights. That's a Bears environment, and the Bears should coach and roster and scheme like it belongs to them. Because it does. Green Bay figured this out generations ago. Buffalo just opened a brand-new stadium with no roof, on purpose, in one of the snowiest cities in America. Nobody in western New York thinks the weather is a defect. They think it's a moat.

So does the Bears' head coach, apparently. Which brings us to the awkward part.

The two-position problem

While Johnson was reviewing 200 decisions a week and concluding that winter at Soldier Field should be a weapon, the Bears' front office spent the same months shopping for a climate-controlled box in Arlington Heights or Hammond, Indiana.

Kevin Warren's stadium pitch has been consistent on exactly one point: the roof. The April 2024 lakefront proposal was a dome. The Arlington Heights renderings are a dome. As recently as last month, Warren was reviving the fixed-roof events pitch, pointing to Chicago missing the 2026 World Cup as if FIFA's decision turned on weather rather than capacity. In Warren's telling, the lake wind is a problem to be engineered out of existence, at a cost of billions, some of it public.

His head coach just told The Athletic the opposite. The weather is the feature. It "should be a major advantage for us."

Both of those things cannot be the Chicago Bears' position. Either winter football on the lakefront is a competitive edge worth building an identity around, or it's an embarrassment worth spending billions to escape. The coach says edge. The president says escape. One of them is wrong, and the one with the headset spent his offseason doing the analysis.

We've been saying this since day one

Forgive us a minute of told-you-so. This site has argued from the start that outdoor lakefront football is a real advantage, not nostalgia. It's the spine of our manifesto. It's why outdoor wins. Mike Ditka said it plainly: "Chicago Bears football weather is a great part of the team's legacy, and all of that legacy in Chicago in my life has been outdoors."

Ditka is history. Johnson is the present tense. A 40-year-old coach who won the NFC North in year one, who studies analytics with a full-time research director, looked at the coldest, windiest, most miserable building in the NFL and concluded it should be a major advantage. Not was. Should be. He's planning on more Januarys there.

You cannot get chills in a dome

One more thing from Pompei's piece, and it's the detail we can't shake. Walking to practice, Johnson thinks back to the playoff games last winter. The crowd made so much noise that Soldier Field trembled. He replays it: downtown buildings lit up orange and blue, Jim Cornelison singing the anthem, snow flurries falling. He gets chills remembering it. "I will never forget it," he told Pompei.

Chills. In August. From a memory of January.

Nobody gets chills remembering a game in a dome. Nobody remembers the temperature of a climate-controlled concourse, because there's nothing to remember. The snow, the anthem hanging in the frozen air, the buildings glowing down the lakefront. That's what seared the night into a head coach's memory, and it's exactly the stuff a roof deletes.

Kevin Warren wants to sell us convenience. His own coach just described what convenience costs.

Mr. Warren, your head coach has the game plan right. Play to the building. Keep the roof off.