​(Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) | Getty Images Ben Johnson, born in 1986, grew up in the heyday of the Madden era. Johnson’s signature style of play calling has always seemed heavily indebted to the way someone would play video game football, with aggressive fourth down calls, intricate passing designs, and a love of mobile quarterbacks. The Chicago Bears head coach couldn’t hide a smile when a reporter asked if he ever played Madden as a younger man last season. “I always liked taking the bad teams in franchise mode and try to build them up from there,” Johnson said. Johnson is now living the dream of thousands of kids who learned about football in part from playing Madden. I’m one of those people. I’m a year younger than Johnson, and spent way too much time as a teenager simulating Madden dynasties, making trades, managing the salary cap, and throwing darts in the draft when I should have been, I don’t know, talking to girls or something. I even wrote a cool 500,000-word series during the pandemic about taking Western Illinois from worst-to-first in College Hoops 2K8, a game released when Johnson was a senior at North Carolina.Johnson rose to prominence as the NFL’s next great offensive mind during his time as the coordinator of the Detroit Lions. He could have had a head coaching offer from the Washington Commanders during the 2024 offseason, but he pulled his name out of the running to return to Detroit for one more year. That decision paved the way for Chicago to hire him a year later following a disastrous season from Matt Eberflus that highlighted all the ways the Bears were horribly mismanaged in Caleb Williams’ rookie season.Johnson has been nothing short of a godsend for Chicago since taking the job, and on Monday night, he cemented himself as one of the game’s best head coaches already by leading the Bears to a shocking 27-7 win over the Philadelphia Eagles with his third string quarterback.One of the talking points coming into the night was how Johnson had never called plays for a QB who wasn’t selected No. 1 overall in the NFL Draft. The Bears coach was humbled by Brian Flores’ blitzing defense in a rain-soaked 9-3 loss to the Minnesota Vikings the previous week, and now he was set to be without Williams for multiple weeks as he recovered from a Grade 2 hamstring strain. With backup Tyson Bagent getting concussed on the last play of the Vikings loss, Johnson turned to Case Keenum, a man only 21 months younger than himself, and someone who had not started a game since 2023. The whole world expected the Bears to come out trying to establish the run. Instead, Johnson had Keenum firing from the opening snap, with pass attempts on the first two plays of the game followed by a gutsy fourth down call that saw the veteran QB connect with rookie Sam Roush to keep the chains moving. The Bears eventually punched it in on their first drive with a crafty little shovel pass to Luther Burden. It set the stage for an i