Ben Johnson spent the buildup making this one feel personal, and the Packers answered with a performance that turned all that noise right back on him.
Green Bay didn’t just beat Chicago on Sunday. It looked energized by the whole thing. After weeks of uneven football - the kind that featured sloppy play, stalled drives and too many self-inflicted mistakes - the Packers came out with purpose and edge, piling up a 31-7 lead before the game settled into the kind of fourth quarter that only looked lopsided because the damage had already been done.
Bears wide receiver Luther Burden III made the mood pretty clear before kickoff.
"I feel like he wants to beat them really bad," Bears wide receiver Luther Burden III said last week, via The Athletic's Dan Wiederer. "Like everybody else in the room.
Like every Chicago fan. We want to beat them really bad.
And make them quit."
That didn’t exactly age well. Green Bay did, in fact, put Chicago away, and Christian Watson had his own take afterward.
"We definitely flipped that on their head," said Packers wide receiver Christian Watson, via ESPN's Rob Demovsky.
That’s the part of the story Green Bay will like most. Matt LaFleur kept his public comments cool and refused to meet Johnson at the level of the trash talk, but his team clearly carried the temperature into Week 5.
The Packers had been hearing plenty all offseason, with Johnson treated like the league’s latest offensive guru and a steady stream of chatter about his disdain for Green Bay. Sunday felt like the response.
And the Packers needed one.
Before this game, they were a mess in the little things that usually decide whether a season stays on the rails. They looked flat in wins over the New York Jets and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, then stumbled badly in losses to the Minnesota Vikings and Atlanta Falcons. They struggled to hold up up front, couldn’t protect Jordan Love, couldn’t run the ball, and couldn’t even hang onto the football.
Entering Week 5, Green Bay led the league in drops and fumbles and sat second in penalties. ESPN had them 32nd in pass-block win rate and 28th against the run. That’s not the profile of a team ready to absorb another emotional divisional game.
Instead, the Packers cleaned it up. They were flagged only four times.
The offensive line gave up two sacks but only six pressures. Love had room to work, and he used it to carve up Chicago with deep shots all afternoon.
According to ESPN Insights, Love threw six passes traveling 30-plus air yards, completed five of them for 227 yards and two touchdowns. Ben Roethlisberger is the only other quarterback to complete five passes of 30-plus air yards since 2006, when ESPN began tracking the stat.
It was the kind of day that showed Green Bay playing lighter and faster than it had for most of the month. And if Johnson’s public jabs were supposed to motivate Chicago, they wound up giving the Packers something to push against instead.
He also made life harder on his own side of the matchup by going with Tyson Bagent over Case Keenum.
That decision looked questionable before kickoff, and it looked worse once the game started. Bagent’s stat line from the Bears’ win over the New York Jets hid some turbulence, including three throws that were erased by penalties, according to Ryan Heckman of Bear Goggles On.
Keenum, meanwhile, had just handled the Philadelphia Eagles well, throwing for 247 yards and two touchdowns while adding another score on the ground. Johnson still stuck with Bagent, and Chicago paid for it.
The broader picture is hard to ignore, too. Johnson’s record inside the NFC North is now 2-6.
The Bears were swept by the Detroit Lions last season and split with the Packers and Vikings. This season, they are 0-2 against the division.
Outside the NFC North, Johnson has been excellent, going 12-2. But that doesn’t erase how much trouble he’s had against the teams Chicago sees twice a year. The Bears may have started the season with optimism, but they now sit at the bottom of the division, and games like this are a big reason why.
The Packers won’t pretend one strong Sunday fixes everything. It doesn’t.
There’s still a long season ahead, and plenty for Green Bay to prove. But this was an early moment that mattered, the kind of game that can pull a team back to life before the month gets away from it.
On Sunday, the Packers looked like a team that heard every word and kept score.
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The edge carried extra bite because of what Bears offensive coordinator Ben Johnson had said earlier about enjoying beating LaFleur twice a year during his time in Detroit, and the Packers seemed happy to answer that kind of talk on the field. The one sour note for Green Bay came when a Packers defensive lineman had to be carted off, a reminder that even a statement win can come with a costly aftermath. [Read more 🡒]