The Bears rallied Saturday night after Brandon McManus’ 28-yard field goal had extended Green Bay’s lead to 16-6 with 5:03 left in the fourth quarter. Taking over at their own 32 needing two scores, they hoped to generate a touchdown to make it a three-point game.

“We understood how quickly we needed to score,” Johnson said. “When you’re down by 10 like that, the simple thing is, ‘Hey, we can get the field goal and then the touchdown.’ But in reality, you want to get that touchdown on the first possession as often as you possibly can. When you look at these around the league over the course of 10-plus years, your chances of scoring a touchdown are a lot easier on the first possession than the second possession. So that’s the intent.”

If they had to settle for a field goal, the Bears—with two timeouts remaining—hoped to kick it before the two-minute warning to preserve one stoppage of the clock. But even though they snapped the ball on third-and-9 with 2:44 left, they were unable to get the kick off until the two-minute warning following Williams’ 5-yard completion to Moore over the middle.

“We could’ve handled that third down into fourth down better as an offense and as a special teams unit, and that’s on me,” Johnson said. “That’s 100% on me. I have to do a better job coaching that with all the players involved, all the coaches involved, and I think we’ll be better for that going forward.”

Asked what could have been smoother, Johnson said: “I don’t want to put our field goal unit in that position to start with, with the clock running like that, so ideally, that third-down throw is either past the sticks or it’s clearly going to be out of bounds, to where we’re not having a running clock and we’re forcing our field goal unit out there. I can do a better job communicating that we need to kick that thing as soon as we possibly can. That being said, they’re getting the ‘K’ ball in there. At one point that thing was fumbling around on the ground, and the umpire stood over the ball for a longer period of time than I had hoped for, and so we weren’t able to get the kick off nearly as quickly as I had foreseen in my head. There were a number of things that had happened there.”

There also were a number of things that happened Sunday in the waning moments of the Steelers’ 29-24 win over the Lions—a result that enabled the Bears to clinch a playoff berth. Detroit had two apparent touchdowns nullified by offensive pass interference penalties in the final :22 of the game.

“It’s pretty wild to watch that one unfold,” said Johnson, who was hired by the Bears this year after spending the previous six seasons as a Lions assistant coach. “It goes from Pittsburgh missing a field goal to Detroit taking it all the way down there and having a chance. That’s the league, right? I mean, that’s what makes it so much fun to watch. I know it’s a tough way for them to go out at home, and I feel for a number of those guys. I’m still fairly close with a number of them. And yet that’s how this game goes sometimes.”

The Bears have now won six games this season after trailing in the final 2:00 of regulation, the most in the NFL this year and the most in franchise history. They are 6-1 in games decided by five points or fewer in 2025 after going 1-6 in contests decided by five points or fewer last season.

“We all prefer to have the lead going into the fourth quarter if we had our druthers,” Johnson said. “But it’s just not the way it’s gone for us this year, and yet the guys are still finding a way to come out on top.

“This is an important thing, though. You want to be a clutch team. You want to be able to handle the pressure and rise to the occasion. We’ve got a team built like that. There’s guys on offense, defense and special teams that they rise up and they play their best on the biggest stage and in the biggest moments.

“That’s really important. That’s a great quality to have as a team and as a locker room and certainly when I came in, it felt like in previous years, having competed against this team. [the Bears] didn’t win those types of games. To see that shift in our favor, that’s a great thing. And we can still get better to the point where we’re not putting ourselves in those situations as much and going to the fourth quarter with a lead and potentially close out games that way.”