Chicago Bears wide receiver Luther Burden III did not need a long answer when he was asked what the thought of the Green Bay Packers does to the building he walks into every day.
The second-year weapon described a mood that has already settled over the Bears, and he put Ben Johnson at the center of it. Johnson, Burden said, wants to beat Matt LaFleur’s squad badly.
“I feel like he wants to beat them really bad, like everybody else in the room, every Chicago fan,” Burden said of Johnson, per Michael Dwojak of Bears Insider. “We just want to beat them real bad and make them quit.”
That is a different temperature from the usual pregame talk about respecting a rival. Burden was speaking on Monday as the Bears prepared to open Week 5 at Lambeau Field, a game Chicago is expected to play without Caleb Williams, who remains out with a Grade 2 hamstring strain and will miss a third straight week.
Johnson has already named Tyson Bagent the starter. The backup is walking into one of the loudest buildings in the league, and the message from the head coach, filtered through a young receiver, is that the scoreboard is not the only thing that matters. The Packers are supposed to feel it.
Burden has his own history with that feeling. Last season his back-and-forth with Packers cornerback Keisean Nixon went viral, the kind of exchange that gets clipped, replayed, and treated as evidence that the oldest rivalry in the sport still has teeth. Asked about it, he did not retreat.
A rivalry game, he said, is a place where things can get out of hand. He is fine with that. The chip on the shoulder is not an accident of one heated series. It is the tone Johnson has set, and Burden presented it as something the room has absorbed rather than something the players invented on their own.
The dislike does not stop at the franchise. Johnson’s public record with Matt LaFleur is already sharp enough that Burden’s description of the mood inside the building reads as personal as well as professional.
When Johnson was introduced in Chicago, he said he had enjoyed beating LaFleur twice a year from the Detroit sideline. LaFleur answered that he did not know him.
After the Bears’ playoff win over Green Bay last January, the postgame handshake was a brush of the hands and a walk-away. In the locker room Johnson was filmed shouting that he hated those guys.
On Monday he declined to frame any of it as a private feud and called it a rivalry that needs to stay a rivalry.
The distinction is thin. A coach who will barely linger at midfield, who has already said the quiet part into a camera, and whose players now talk about making the other side quit is not managing a polite divisional disagreement.
Chicago is a three-point favorite on the road even with Bagent under center, helped by a Packers injury list that includes Edgerrin Cooper for the year, Micah Parsons not practicing, and Josh Jacobs still off the active roster.
None of that is what Burden was describing. He was describing the air in the meeting room: a head coach who wants this one badly, a roster willing to match him, and a week pointed at LaFleur’s team with something closer to contempt than courtesy.
