Brian Flores and Ben Johnson are back in the spotlight this week, and that old chess match is once again front and center for Vikings-Bears.
The two will meet for the seventh time Sunday at Soldier Field, with Chicago’s new head coach and Minnesota’s defensive coordinator bringing a rivalry built on stress, disguise and constant adjustment. The winner does more than grab a little edge in the moment. It comes away with important ground in a division race that figures to go down to the wire.
This matchup has never been about one simple answer. Johnson’s offense is built on creativity, detail and a long list of ways to make a defense hesitate. Flores’ side leans into fearlessness, attacking with blitzes because that’s what the Vikings believe gives them the best shot at the right result.
Flores made that clear Tuesday afternoon when he talked about what Chicago puts on tape.
“They do a great job,” Flores said Tuesday afternoon. “There’s shifts, there’s motions, there’s a lot of eye candy. They do everything that could potentially give a defense problems.”
That kind of challenge is exactly why these meetings keep feeling so layered. It’s not just about whether Minnesota brings pressure or Chicago counters with protection. It’s about safeties, pre-snap tells, protection rules, down-and-distance, run concepts and the endless game of trying to spot the crack before the other side does.
Flores even laid out one branch of that decision tree ahead of Sunday. If Minnesota plays with one deep safety, Chicago’s receivers could work against man coverage. If the Vikings go with two deep safeties, the Bears may try to lean on the run and test Minnesota there instead.
And that’s only part of it.
Former Vikings defensive lineman Harrison Phillips once compared playing Johnson to trying to read a volatile stock market. That fits this matchup pretty well. Every drive feels like a new forecast, a fresh calculation, a new chance to guess wrong.
Johnson has seen plenty of Flores by now, and Flores has seen plenty of Johnson. That familiarity matters, but it doesn’t make the answers easy.
Johnson said ahead of a highly anticipated Vikings-Lions game in Week 18 of the 2024 season, “Each week, you try to find a weakness in the armor and look to attack it,” Johnson said ahead of the highly anticipated Vikings-Lions bout in Week 18 of the 2024 season. “This defense doesn’t have much, and it’s been that way for two years now.
You can tell that this whole unit has been together. They have the answers.
They know how to respond when they get hit with something.”
Their first meetings in 2023 and the rematch in 2024 showed how quickly momentum can swing when these two staffs start trading answers. In the Week 7 game between Johnson’s Lions and Flores’ Vikings in 2024, Minnesota held Detroit to a 21.4 percent success rate in the first quarter.
Detroit answered with a 61.1 percent success rate in the second. The Lions kept rolling with a 54.5 percent mark in the third, then Minnesota shut things down again in the fourth by limiting Detroit to 27.8 percent.
Detroit still won 31-29, but the numbers told the story of a game that kept changing shape.
Johnson also said before that Week 18 meeting that the Vikings had become a defense that could absorb a punch and answer back.
“This defense doesn’t have much, and it’s been that way for two years now. You can tell that this whole unit has been together.
They have the answers. They know how to respond when they get hit with something.”
Last season against Flores, Johnson mixed in condensed formations, quick snaps and a heavier dose of third-down runs. Flores, for his part, kept max-pressure looks to a minimum and leaned mostly on zone coverage out of heavier personnel to try to slow down Chicago’s run-pass flexibility.
That’s the part both coaches seem to appreciate. They know the other has a plan.
They know the other has counters. And they know this one is going to keep turning into a sequence of adjustments, one drive after another.
“It’s one of the things I love about coaching defense in this division in the NFC,” Flores said. “It’s a lot of fun.”
It should be a lot of fun to watch, too.
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