Bears coach Ben Johnson is bold, brash, and would love to go bare-chested after beating the Eagles (again).

Yeah, John Bunting saw Ben Johnson rip his shirt off. He saw Johnson go full-Hulk Hogan after the Chicago Bears beat the Eagles last season, and he laughed about it, even though Bunting remains proud that the Eagles were the only team he played for during his terrific 11-year career as an NFL linebacker. Even though Dick Vermeil — Bunting’s head coach for seven of those years, a man Bunting considers a second father — could have drowned all the rats in Veterans Stadium with his postgame weep-fests but wouldn’t have been caught dead screaming and flexing in the locker room like a bro dad who had dipped into his kid’s Ritalin. Even though, as a walk-on scout-team quarterback for Bunting at the University of North Carolina, Johnson tended to remain fully clothed.

“I never saw that,” Bunting, the Tar Heels’ head coach from 2001 to 2006, said by phone recently. “But I’ll bet you his players love him. He’s that kind of guy — a great leader.”

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Just ask Johnson himself about his leadership, his qualities as the Bears’ head coach, and he might say the same thing. If his 21 games in charge have done nothing else, they’ve shown that he might just be capable of building a team that can back up his boasts. And if he isn’t, at least his rise and fall will be a hell of a ride. An 11-6 record and a playoff victory last season, a 59-point mushroom cloud on the Carolina Panthers in Week 1, a three-point washout against the Minnesota Vikings in Week 2: Johnson and the Bears do nothing but go to extremes whenever they’re on the field, or he has a mic and camera in front of him.

The Eagles will head to Soldier Field on Monday night still smarting from the Bears’ 24-15 Mack-trucking of them on Black Friday. Caleb Williams’ tender hamstring could prevent him from playing, but Johnson could still cook up something to keep Vic Fangio and his defense off balance, and for the Eagles, the risk isn’t just in losing to the Bears again — and maybe to third-string QB Case Keenum. It’s in listening to Johnson remind the world of his own awesomeness … at their expense.

Don’t believe he’d do such a thing? Please. This is a coach who, as a precocious offensive coordinator for the Detroit Lions, called several trick plays in a 47-9 rout of the Dallas Cowboys in 2024, including some after the Lions had taken a comfortable lead. This is a coach who told The Athletic in August that he was shooting for “more than” a Super Bowl, that he wanted the Bears to go unbeaten and be the highest-scoring team in league history, as if they played half their games in a dome or in Southern California and not amid Lake Michigan’s freezing winds and frequent snow.

To beat the Eagles with a backup quarterback would be the sweetest treat that Johnson could hope to taste, and just because Keenum might have to suit up doesn’t mean Johnson will call nothing but basic, boring handoffs to D’Andre Swift and Kyle Monangai, though that strategy worked well enough last November.

“He’s not fearful,” Bunting said. “There are a lot of coaches who are. He’s not that way at all. He is willing to take a chance, and he’s motivated to do that. That’s part of his thought process. ‘Hey, we’re going to take chances.’”

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A coach who, as a high school quarterback in Asheville, N.C., orchestrated a run-heavy I-formation offense and, as an undergraduate at Chapel Hill, earned degrees in computer science and mathematics doesn’t at first seem the sort to be so bold. That background suggests a certain set of principles — weigh the angles, crunch the numbers, stay conservative — that don’t apply to Johnson now and never have. He wasn’t always this brash, but he has never been shy about saying what he thought to be true, even during his first full-time coaching gig as a Boston College grad assistant under offensive coordinator Gary Tranquill.

“I mean, he didn’t mince his words,” Tranquill, who had been Johnson’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at UNC before hiring him at BC in 2009, said in a phone interview. “He comes right to the point. When he said something, he was assured that that was the right thing to say and he would say it. He didn’t hem-haw around. When he was coaching with us, he did all the scouting. When he would tell you something about the other team, what they were doing, what coverages they were doing, he was very explicit and knew exactly what he was talking about.”

Looks like little has changed over the subsequent 17 years. Johnson is still treading that fine line that his counterpart Monday, Nick Sirianni, has walked with the Eagles for the last six years — still raising and answering the same questions. Is it possible to be too emotional, too demonstrative, too arrogant if, above all, you are authentic?

“The last thing that you can worry about as a head coach is trying to please anybody outside your building,” Sirianni said. “You’ve always got to be yourself. … Regardless of what you do, if you take your shirt off, if you don’t take your shirt off, if you’re emotional, if you’re not emotional, some of the people are going to say, ‘Man, I like that.’ Some are going to be like, ‘Man, I don’t like that.’

“That’s leadership. That’s what it is. Your job is to be yourself and do everything you can do as a head coach to get your team ready to play and to get your team better on a daily basis. You can’t look outside to see how you can please [people] because it’s an impossible task. Just win games.”

Sirianni-Johnson might be the most compelling comparison and matchup Monday night. There are no two more polarizing coaches in the NFL for their demeanors and personalities, and neither appears in any hurry to apologize for who he is. “That’s the other side of Ben Johnson,” Bunting said. “He’s still in many ways the kid from Asheville. He has great enthusiasm for the game itself and for his players and staff. He is emotional, and when there’s a time to celebrate, he’s going to do it.” It’s on the Eagles to deny the Bears and their bare-chested leader that opportunity.