Lions showed Bears they're still 'f***ing fighters' and had no intentions of letting up on Ben Johnson late in 52-21 rout
Yes, a point needed to be made.
You could see it all week for the Detroit Lions, who had seemingly lost that tough-but-collected demeanor of head coach Dan Campbell. The scrappers and kneecap biters were uncharacteristically irritated after a season-opening road loss to the Green Bay Packers — which had oddly seemed to strip away everything from Detroit’s two-year image revival.
Suddenly, the offensive line was a weakness. The big plays had dried up. The commanding running game was lost. From the outside looking in, the narrative had become something about former offensive coordinator Ben Johnson packing up all the juice into his suitcase and relocating to his new home as the Chicago Bears head coach. Leaving behind a naked Campbell, who apparently had no part in his team’s prior offensive success. All of this after one game and one loss against an obviously very good Packers team.
One game? And that was it?
This seemed to be Campbell’s attitude in the lead up to Sunday's game. He even had a tense exchange with a local reporter who asked about perceived differences from Johnson’s scheme, and whether it would have been “feasible to run the exact same offense as last year.”
“So after one game,” Campbell shot back, “tell me what it looks like if it’s drastically different.”
Campbell’s tone was less of a question than a prickly you don’t know what you’re talking about retort.
By the time Sunday rolled around and Johnson returned to Detroit with his Bears, the narrative of the 2025 Detroit Lions season was already — and quite absurdly — shaping into Season 3 of "Ted Lasso," showcasing how a wunderkind assistant coach can leave town and take his former team’s thunder with him.
It was a ridiculous overreaction, of course. But Week 1 in the NFL is sewn together with ridiculous overreactions. And that’s what often makes Week 2 so sweet — because it gives teams like the Lions and coaches like Campbell a chance to deliver an instant rebuttal. And for Detroit, that opportunity came against the guy whose departure to the Bears had seemingly started the litany of problems the Lions suddenly faced.
One 52-21 trouncing of the Bears later — after Campbell had declared the Lions were going to win the game, because they “had to” — Detroit has gotten itself back on the train tracks that its head coach likes to invoke so ofter in the wake of victories.
“I know this: That was a tough loss [to the Packers] last week,” Campbell said after the win over the Bears. “That was tough. We went out there and we expected to play much better than we did. And we didn’t give ourselves a chance. Green Bay got after us pretty good. I think more than anything, that was a big part of it. I think we answered a lot of questions. I’ve said this all along, this train keeps rolling, man. We’ve got plenty here and it’s always going to start with the players. We’ve got players, we’ve got playmakers and they’re made the right way. They’re the right kind of guys. They know how to get in the ditch and just start digging. They don’t worry about the other stuff.”
Campbell was a little more pointed in his postgame speech to his players, at one point declaring defiantly, “It’s like they forgot that we’re f***ing fighters!”
But this is also what happens with franchises that are historically downtrodden and suddenly have a starburst of success. It takes only a few setbacks to shake two years of foundational winning. For the Lions, those two setbacks were in the massively deflating loss to the Washington Commanders in the playoffs and then the first-game flop out of the gate this season. Two defeats that screamed for analysis about what was wrong and who was most responsible for what had been right before it. After the loss to the Packers, the answer became Johnson — despite his being in the midst of fixing his own issues with the Bears.
Those issues were clearly on display Sunday. Johnson has a quarterback in Caleb Williams and overall offense that is making painful and incremental strides; a defense that has gotten rocked over the past five quarters of football; and an overall culture installation that is going to require patience over the balance of the entire 2025 season. At the bottom of the ledger, the reality is the Bears have talent and hopefully the right quarterback and coach combination. What they don’t have yet are the building block wins that turn a franchise around. It's a formula where you first learn how to beat teams with lesser talent, then learn how to win against opponents with comparable talent … and then finally, gain the traction to beat anyone, anywhere. The Bears aren't there yet. The Lions were, and still might be.
If Detroit’s foundation is legitimate, the Bears are the kind of franchise that these Lions should still beat up when they need a win, especially at home and with something to prove. That’s what ultimately unfolded Sunday, and it was pulled off by Campbell and the Lions in a fashion that Johnson was familiar with when he was calling the plays — explosives that tear a game open, an offensive line and running game that dominate the line of scrimmage, a quarterback who is operating with pinpoint accuracy, and a general mentality of never letting up.
That includes the fourth quarter, when the Lions had a stranglehold on the game at 45-21 and chose to throw for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal at the Bears' 4-yard line, rather than take a “sportsmanship” field goal. It's the kind of thing that either looks like running up the score and teaching a former assistant coach a lesson, or it is Detroit’s standard operating procedure of never taking a foot off the gas pedal.
When Johnson was asked about that particular moment after Sunday’s loss, he saw it as the latter.
“What’s he supposed to do?” Johnson replied in an irritated tone when asked if he saw the touchdown throw as Campbell running up the score. “It’s fourth-and-goal. What do you want him to do? Yeah, he could have kicked the field goal. They don’t kick field goals. They go for it there. So he was doing what he’s supposed to do. That’s what he does.”
Asked if the he felt demoralized by the loss, Johnson was defiant.
“It’s not demoralizing at all,” he said. “We’ve got to play better.”
In that moment, he sounded like Campbell did at times when Detroit was trying to find its footing and climb up from a 4-19 start to their time together. That included a 44-6 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles and 51-29 loss to the Seattle Seahawks in 2021 and back-to-back losses to the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys in 2022 that saw Detroit get outscored a combined 53-6. Those were the kind of days when you learn lessons and move ahead. Where you — in the parlance of Campbell’s world — learn to become “f***ing fighters.”
Two weeks into the 2025 season, the Detroit Lions are still that. The Chicago Bears? They’re learning to be that. And that’s the point that was made Sunday.