Ben Johnson's message about start to Bears voluntary minicamp

It's here where Johnson needs to be told to lose the linear reference or he'll lose the crowd, after Eberflus used that same statement numerous times last year.
"We're going to go up and we might go down and up and down and up and down, but the end game is to get Year 2 of Caleb being significantly better than Year 1 of Caleb," Johnson told Canellis.

Understood.

More pertinent than rehashing Flus-isms is the upcoming start of spring practices. The players show up to work out at Halas Hall on April 7 with strength and conditioning.
Johnson revealed the next step, the voluntary veterans minicamp, is going to seem less like football than at some other similar sessions under past first-year coaching regimes.

The NFL allows teams with new coaches to have the extra voluntary veterans minicamp and the Bears will hold theirs the week of April 21, just prior to the start of the April 24 draft.
"We're going to be a little bit more, I don't want to say conservative, but we're going to be very smart with how we approach that minicamp," Johnson said. "The rules would allow us to have OTA-like activities on the field."

The OTA-like activities means some offense vs. defense running plays without contact. No pads are allowed, although players are in helmets. It sounds as if Johnson will limit the amount of this largely because they're coming out of strength and conditioning. No sense pushing things then.

It might take on more the look of a meeting on the field than practice.
"It might not be the smartest thing to go straight from the weight room to going (to) that high of intense football activity," he told Canellis. "So we're going to have a nice balance there to transition us from Phase 1 (conditioning) into the voluntary minicamp, into Phase 2, where we are able to go on the field and have more meeting time with the players and then finally we'll hit our OTAs and our mandatory minicamp there, end of May, going into June."

The insatiable Bears fan appetite for knowing what they're doing and exactly how they're doing it will just have to wait, to a large extent. No doubt this will lead to disappointment
They'll not show a lot until they get into May OTAs, after rookie camp.
It makes sense considering Eberflus once had them lose a June practice because he had too much hitting going on during non-padded offseason practices earlier in his first offseason.

That really didn't lead to improvement, linear or otherwise.