CHICAGO — Asked about the overall trajectory of his offense, Chicago Bears coach Ben Johnson elected for a visual representation over a verbal one. He moved his hand up and down in front of him, undulating like a wave rolling up onto the shores of Lake Michigan.

“Up and down,” Johnson said. “That’s what we’ve looked like. We haven’t hit our stride yet offensively. We’re capable of a lot more.”

The Bears were fresh off Sunday’s 26-14 win over the New Orleans Saints at Soldier Field. The team had just won its fourth consecutive game, giving the franchise its first four-game winning streak in nearly seven years.

And yet, the coach was far from satisfied.

“We’re not complimenting our defense on a regular basis,” Johnson said. “With the number of turnovers we’ve had the last four games, we should be able to turn those into more points.”

The defense had another four takeaways Sunday, its fourth consecutive game with at least three. It has 15 takeaways over four games.

The Bears moved to a 4-2 record, the exact same start they had one year ago. When the Bears beat the Jacksonville Jaguars in London to move to 4-2 last year, the narrative was about whether quarterback Caleb Williams had arrived and whether the Bears had bigger things ahead.

They proceeded to lose the next 10 games. A year later, the Bears aren’t running any victory laps yet.

“We certainly didn’t play a perfect or a really clean game,” center Drew Dalman said.

The Bears are learning, under their first-year head coach, what it takes to win games in the NFL. That isn’t always pretty.

On Sunday, for the second game in a row, it was in large part thanks to a heavy dose of the run game. Running backs D’Andre Swift and Kyle Monangai were the engines behind a 222-yard rushing effort.

Swift went for 124 yards and a touchdown on 19 carries. Monangai, a rookie seventh-round draft pick out of Rutgers, totaled 81 yards and a touchdown on 13 carries. Those were the only touchdowns of the day for an offense that went 2 for 6 in the red zone.

Johnson leaned on that rushing attack. The Bears ran the ball 40 times, their most in any one game by a wide margin. The run game is proving itself to the play caller.

“The more and more we show that we can do it, the more confident (Johnson will be in us) and the more he’s going to call those runs,” said Monangai, whose touchdown was his first in an NFL uniform.

Johnson is a coach who runs the football. Trick plays make for great clips on social media, but his Detroit Lions offenses were powered by one of the league’s best rushing attacks. Through his first four games in Chicago, the run game wasn’t having the success he wanted.

But the last two games after the bye week have been a different story. Swift went over 100 yards in both games and the team had its two best efforts of the season.

The Bears don’t think there’s any secret to making that happen. It has simply been a commitment to the details and to keep doing what they’ve been doing. They believed they were going to turn a corner, and they just might be doing that.

“You see it start to come to life a little bit,” Johnson said.

A week ago, the Bears leaned on the run game to close out a one-point win over the Washington Commanders. In Week 3, Johnson called 11 consecutive run plays during a second-half possession that ate up nearly 10 minutes of game time and sunk the Dallas Cowboys.

On Sunday, with the passing attack struggling, Johnson stuck with what was working. He said the passing game “wasn’t nearly efficient enough.”

“I didn’t play well today,” Williams said.

The quarterback completed 15 of 26 passes for 172 yards with an interception. Several times when he looked to make something happen on a broken play — typically an area of the game where he thrives — Williams couldn’t find an open target. The Bears built a 20-0 lead in the second quarter, but couldn’t squash the Saints when they had the chance.

“There’s a lot of growth that can be had,” Williams said. “It’s insane to think that we’re 4-2, (and) about how much growth we have left, myself included.”

Johnson was a part of some good football in his days with the Lions. But his decade-plus as an NFL coach has also seen its share of disappointment. He was a member of coaching staffs in Miami and Detroit that were fired. When the Bears hired him, he liked to point out that he had learned as much about what doesn’t work in the NFL as he has about what does work.

He has also learned that a week like this one, when his team didn’t play its best but still won, is when a coaching staff can make some of its biggest strides.

“When you win, you can usually coach a little bit harder,” Johnson said. “We’re always truth tellers, on Monday in particular. When it’s good, we’ll tell them when it’s good. When it’s bad, we’ll tell them what we’ve got to clean up. There’s a number of things there today that we can get better at.”

A win’s a win, and the Bears have won four in a row. But Johnson has this group thinking differently.

“We have yet to play clean football for four quarters offensively,” Swift said. “So I can’t wait to see what that looks like.”

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