Heading into the regular season finale against the Detroit Lions, with only a playoff seed to potentially be determined by the result, Chicago Bears head coach Ben Johnson made it clear what the plan for the game was.
"We’re playing to win this week."
That meant the Bears were, rightly by the way, prioritizing beating the Lions to absolutely secure the No. 2 playoff seed and a rematch against the Green Bay Packers in the Wild Card Round.
The Philadelphia Eagles and head coach Nick Sirianni took the opposite approach, which there is nothing wrong with, valuing rest for key players over winning in Week 18 and trying to earn the No. 2 seed. Sirianni's comments during the week made it clear that the Eagles did not care which seed they were in.
The Bears, of course, lost their regular-season finale to the Lions, as the Eagles also did to the Washington Commanders. So nothing changed, and the Bears maintained their standing as the No. 2 seed.
For three quarters of the game against the Lions, the Bears were not the best version of themselves. Johnson was clearly not thrilled with the showing (no one was), and his demeanor during his postgame press conference made that clear.
Ben Johnson sort of calls out possible playoff opponent for their Week 18 approach
In light of the loss to the Lions ultimately not proving costly to the Bears' playoff seed, Johnson was asked what the message to his players was.
"We're quickly turning the page here. Everyone's disappointed...I appreciate their effort."
"Some teams, they rest their starters. We don't. We play football. We felt like it was really important that were playing our best ball here today, and we didn't get that job done."
Johnson has unsurprisingly taken the same approach to resting starters as his former boss, Lions head coach Dan Campbell. With that in mind, no game is absolutely meaningless.
In this case, for the Bears, though, Week 18 was pretty meaningful. The only way to absolutely guarantee the No. 2 seed and play the Packers rather than the 49ers or possibly the Rams (with the Eagles playing at the same time) was to beat the Lions. They didn't get it done.
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With his "we play football" comment, Johnson may have given the Eagles, whom the Bears could see again in the playoffs, a little bit of bulletin board material by highlighting how different the approaches to Week 18 were.