Luther Burden got the highlights. Caleb Williams got the stat line. But the play Bears fans kept texting each other Thursday night involved neither of them. It involved a 301-pound left guard, a football and a flag.
Here’s the Ben Johnson trick play, start to finish. Second quarter, second-and-3 at the New England 8-yard line. The Bears put tight end Colston Loveland at left tackle and sent left tackle Ozzy Trapilo out to the right of the right tackle, a formation that looked like a typo on somebody’s clipboard. Williams faked to D’Andre Swift, then handed the ball forward to Joe Thuney. The guard rumbled four yards. Then came the flag: illegal forward handoff. The gain vanished.
Ben Johnson Trick Play: The Four Yards That Never Happened
Thuney doesn’t need a highlight reel. He’s a four-time Super Bowl champion and the first player in NFL history to start a Super Bowl in each of his first three seasons, all with the Patriots, the team that drafted him and the one standing across from him Thursday night. In 11 NFL seasons he’d never carried the ball, unless you count falling on the occasional fumble. Afterward he summed it up in seven words: “It was fun, but illegal, I guess.”
It was also costly. A legal four-yard gain means first-and-goal from the 4. Instead the penalty pushed the Bears back five yards, Odunze was flagged for offensive pass interference on the next snap, and Chicago settled for a 31-yard Cairo Santos field goal. That’s four points left on the field in a 30-24 win that wasn’t truly safe until Santos’ career-long 58-yarder.
The Rule Caleb Williams Didn’t Know Existed
The rulebook says a forward handoff can only go to an eligible receiver, and offensive linemen aren’t. A guard can take the ball only if it goes backward, so Thuney had to be behind Williams. He’d stepped up out of his stance and backed up to take it. He just didn’t back up far enough. Williams said he didn’t know the rule existed, and he had company: no team had been flagged for it in 16 years, since the Lions.
Give Johnson credit, because there was no coach-speak. On Friday he explained that the Bears installed the play weeks ago and first practiced it with Williams setting the ball on the ground for Thuney to scoop up, the old ‘fumblerooskie’, which would have been perfectly legal. In hindsight, he admitted, that might have been the better route. Then he put a bow on it: “It’s one of those things where shooters shoot. We shot, we missed.”
Ditka Night Made This Play Impossible to Ignore
Here’s what turns the Ben Johnson trick play from a funny penalty into a story. Thursday was built to honor the late Mike Ditka, against the same Patriots his Bears flattened 46-10 in Super Bowl XX. And in that game, Ditka did something eerily similar to what Johnson tried: he handed the ball to a defensive lineman. William “Refrigerator” Perry, all 335 pounds of him, lined up in the backfield and plunged in from one yard out in the third quarter. That put the Bears up 44-3 and made Perry the heaviest player ever to score a Super Bowl touchdown. It’s a play that irks some Bears fans – like myself – to this day. Perry outscored Walter Payton that day.
I’m not claiming Johnson drew this up as a Ditka tribute, and he hasn’t said it was. But a 301-pound lineman carrying the ball against New England on Ditka night, 40 years after the Fridge? Call it coincidence if you like. Chicago won’t.
Why Johnson Keeps Taking These Swings
This is who Johnson is. Last season his flea-flicker became a 65-yard touchdown from Williams to Burden against Dallas. In January he went for it on fourth down six times against Green Bay, converted twice, and defended the approach afterward. He isn’t a coach who counts his misses. He counts his shots.
Four decades ago, Ditka gave a big man the ball against New England and got a touchdown. Thursday, Johnson gave a big man the ball against New England and got a flag. Same opponent. Same instinct. The only real difference was legality. The Ben Johnson trick play won’t show up in the box score, but it will outlast most of what does, and a coach who’ll take that swing with the goal line in sight is exactly the kind Bears fans spent decades waiting for.
Ben Johnson Trick Play: The Fridge Would Have Understood