There will be a difference from what the Bears have done in the past at a voluntary minicamp, the new Bears coach said at the NFL owners meetings.

One of Matt Eberflus’ most-often repeated, tiresome phrases was how progress with either his Bears team or quarterback Caleb Williams was not “linear.”
From that perspective, new Bears coach Ben Johnson is already off on the wrong foot.
However, things are going to be different in this regime for the Bears and the specifics of this are already apparent.
Johnson, speaking at the NFL owners meetings with Fox Sports’ Lou Canellis, insisted Williams’ bottom line for Williams will be overall improvement.
“It’s not going to be linear growth,” he said. “We’re hoping that we’re starting here and we’re going to end here (higher, pointing with his hand) at the end of the season, but it’s not going to be a straight line to get there.”

It’s here where Johnson needs to be told to lose the linear reference or he’ll lose the crowd, after Eberflus used that same statement numerous times last year.
“We’re going to go up and we might go down and up and down and up and down, but the end game is to get Year 2 of Caleb being significantly better than Year 1 of Caleb,” Johnson told Canellis.

More pertinent than rehashing Flus-isms is the upcoming start of spring practices. The players show up to work out at Halas Hall on April 7 with strength and conditioning.
Johnson revealed the next step, the voluntary veterans minicamp, is going to seem less like football than at some other similar sessions under past first-year coaching regimes.

The NFL allows teams with new coaches to have the extra voluntary veterans minicamp and the Bears will hold theirs the week of April 21, just prior to the start of the April 24 draft.
“We’re going to be a little bit more, I don’t want to say conservative, but we’re going to be very smart with how we approach that minicamp,” Johnson said. “The rules would allow us to have OTA-like activities on the field.”

The OTA-like activities means some offense vs. defense running plays without contact. No pads are allowed, although players are in helmets. It sounds as if Johnson will limit the amount of this largely because they’re coming out of strength and conditioning. No sense pushing things then.

It might take on more the look of a meeting on the field than practice.
“It might not be the smartest thing to go straight from the weight room to going (to) that high of intense football activity,” he told Canellis. “So we’re going to have a nice balance there to transition us from Phase 1 (conditioning) into the voluntary minicamp, into Phase 2, where we are able to go on the field and have more meeting time with the players and then finally we’ll hit our OTAs and our mandatory minicamp there, end of May, going into June.”