The Chicago Bears don’t traditionally disclose contracts or money figures for coaches or general managers. But the buzz in league circles is that the team emptied the bag in order to secure Ben Johnson as its new head coach.
Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio shares what he has heard about the contractual status of the new leader of Chicago’s football team:
We set the over/under at $14.5 million per year. That might have been high. But not by much.
The early figure on the NFL grapevine for the Ben Johnson contract in Chicago is $13 million per year.
If true (and one source characterized the figure as โspeculationโ), itโs a significant bump over the current entry-level number of roughly $8 million annually. But thatโs the kind of figure that gets the attention of a guy with choices.
Florio setting the over/under on Ben Johnson’s per-year salary with the Chicago Bears at $14.5 million might seem high in retrospect, but I understand why he went there in the first place. In 2023, there was a report floated of Johnson’s asking price on a contract to become a head coach was around $15 million per season. That seemed like a hefty total at the time. And for what it’s worth, Johnson’s representation rebuffed that report. Hence it drifted off our radar.
But here we are in 2025 with speculation surrounding Johnson’s deal with the Bears being in the ballpark of $13 million. We might not ever know what exactly Chicago’s new head coach is getting. But it is clear to me that the Bears made a sizable offer, which was among the reasons that kept him from pursuing gigs elsewhere โย like with the Las Vegas Raiders.
The Bears are finally acting like a billion-dollar entity after giving Ben Johnson a bag
In August 2024, Forbes gave the Chicago Bears franchise a $6.4 billion valuation. It was the ninth-biggest number the financial gurus gave to an NFL team when it did its annual exercise. I have long felt that the narrative of the McCaskey family being cheap was overstated, especially with Forbes listing $295 million worth of player expenses. Now, spending and spending wisely are two different things. But that is a different story for another post. My point with this post is that seeing reports of Chicago’s football team showing a willingness to shell out the big bucks for a high-profile coach feels like a change of direction from where the team has traveled in the past.
Again, we have seen this organization spend money on players (oftentimes, in unwise ways). But spending on a coach and their staff isn’t something we have seen in the past. Perhaps the times are changing at Halas Hall. Maybe Ben Johnson is truly ushering in a new era of Bears football. With that being said, maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that this is happening.
Back in December, we discussed a nugget from the Chicago Tribune’s Brad Biggs who had heard from multiple sources that Chicago’s football team “will have the green light to spend as necessary to make the right hires โ and that’s plural because a head coach is only as good as his assistants.” For me, it felt like a sign that things were going to be different this offseason. Of course, the Bears had to go out and prove it by hiring the coach and their assistants. In other words, hiring Ben Johnson is only the first step in this process.
For what it’s worth, it sounds like the Bears are on their way toward fulfilling the prophecy that was set back in December. Early reports have Ben Johnson reportedly set to line up a “star-studded” coaching staff that could include long-time NFL defensive coordinator Dennis Allen and revered special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi. We’re still early in the process, so I wouldn’t expect any immediate hires. But given what we now know about the team’s willingness to spend, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Johnson’s staff loaded with some heavy hitters in the coaching department.