CHICAGO — There’s not a chance Ben Johnson looks at the Chicago Bears’ current situation and feels like they have to take a step back in order to move forward.

He’s not interested in dissecting what happened before his arrival in January, but he is responsible for getting the wayward franchise going in the right direction.

From a broad perspective, it would be understandable if a reset of sorts took some time, even if that reality undercuts the offseason hope and hype for a quick journey to relevance. No one said anything about retreating — as the Bears did in Sunday’s 52-21 thumping at the hands of the angry and motivated Detroit Lions. By the middle of the third quarter, Johnson’s team was engaged in a fruitless effort to keep up.

You can’t pin the loss, which dropped the Bears to 0-2, on an offense that wasn’t prepared for a shootout. The issues are across the board.

Quarterback Caleb Williams was actually better than he was in the opener, but the defense was scorched by the Lions’ Jared Goff for 334 passing yards and five touchdowns. Goff is a leading candidate to be named NFC Offensive Player of the Week on the heels of the Minnesota Vikings’ J.J. McCarthy earning the award for his fourth-quarter heroics at Soldier Field in Week 1.

And look out, here come Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys to Soldier Field for a 5:25 p.m. ET game Sunday that will be Fox Sports’ national broadcast. Just the kind of exposure the Bears don’t need at this juncture.

Johnson’s predecessor as Bears head coach, Matt Eberflus, is running the defense in Dallas, and the Cowboys have just as many weaknesses on that side as Dennis Allen is discovering as the Bears defensive coordinator. The Cowboys survived the New York Giants in a 40-37 overtime thriller Sunday, thwarting a defense with a legitimate pass rush headed by Brian Burns, Dexter Lawrence and rookie Abdul Carter.

If the Bears can’t pose a threat to Prescott, who was second in MVP voting just two years ago, what might he be able to do? Goff completed 15 of 16 passes on first-and-10 Sunday for 245 yards and two touchdowns as the Bears didn’t muster a hint of a pass rush.

If that continues, Cowboys wideout CeeDee Lamb could challenge Flipper Anderson’s 36-year-old NFL record of 336 receiving yards in a game, especially if Bears cornerbacks Jaylon Johnson and Kyler Gordon remain out with soft-tissue injuries.

“We’ve seen that type of football and brand of football that we want to be about. We saw it throughout training camp,” Ben Johnson said in a video conference with media Monday. “We didn’t see it enough yesterday for it to be up to our standard. That’s truly the way the game went. We got outgained by a significant number of yards. It really came down to I think 10 explosive plays for over 300 yards.

“That’s not what we want to be about. We came into the game with a plan in how we want to contain these explosive athletes, and we just didn’t do a good enough job at the end of the day. It starts with how we play, less so about the scheme or anything like that. But our play style really needs to stand out in a more positive fashion going forward.”

There was no panic from the first-time head coach, and that’s the best takeaway there could be from anything he said in 12 minutes reviewing the embarrassing loss.

“My core values really rest on work ethic, selflessness and poise,” he said at his introductory news conference in January. “I expect that to be embodied to this team.”

That was also when Johnson declared the Bears a “sleeping giant.”

At this juncture last September, the Bears were 1-1 with massively troubling details. The offense generated only 355 yards through two games and was averaging a paltry 2.97 yards per play. There has been clear improvement in those areas but not to a level that would make this a competitive team.

With defensive issues — and injuries — multiplying, the level of difficulty is only increasing. Johnson expressed supreme faith that Allen “will get this thing back cranking the way we want it to go.”

The Bears have allowed a league-high 79 points — including 73 over the last five quarters. That’s the most they’ve surrendered in the first two games since the start of the John Fox era in 2015, when they opened with a 31-23 loss to the Green Bay Packers and were crushed 48-23 at Soldier Field by the Arizona Cardinals, the most points they’ve ever surrendered in a home game.

“I don’t know if I can isolate the fact that we’re 0-2 to one position,” Fox said at the time. “As a football team we need to execute and play better, and we have to coach and prepare them better.”

That sounds applicable to the current team as well — and that was two months before Fox succinctly observed, “It’s all a problem.”

After that 2015 loss to the Cardinals, outside linebacker Pernell McPhee stated the obvious that the Bears “got disrespected.” Again, that’s along the lines of what defensive end Montez Sweat, seated at his locker at Ford Field after the game Sunday, said when he described the loss as “tragic.”

Not only are the Bears winless, they’re off to an 0-2 start in the NFC North. The schedule didn’t do them any favors opening against the Vikings and Lions, who combined for 29 regular-season victories last year. But it has provided an early barometer of how the Bears stack up against division foes, the first teams they have to conquer if they want to chase any legitimate goals.

That’s a common theme at Halas Hall, too, one that predates Johnson’s arrival and even that of general manager Ryan Poles. Yes, the Bears are 3-17 in NFC North games since Poles was hired. They’ve been above .500 in division play only twice in the last 14 seasons (5-1 in 2018 and 4-2 in 2019). They’re 30 games under .500 in the division (28-58) since 2011, the year after they reached the NFC championship game.

Johnson didn’t promise any quick fixes or solutions as the staff turns the page to the Cowboys, who like the Bears are struggling to mesh a pass rush with any sort of coverage. He alluded to an intense week of practice ahead after the team went through a short week gearing up for the Lions.

“We’re going to find out this week at practice who wants to practice hard and who wants to be a little bit more involved with the game plan going into Sunday,” Johnson said.

Competition in practice is where it starts. The Bears had spirited practices throughout the majority of training camp and, with the exception of a solid defensive effort in the first three quarters against McCarthy and the Vikings, it has been otherwise impossible to distinguish from the rest of the regular-season action.

“You have to make the decision that you’re tired of losing,” Hall of Fame edge rusher Jared Allen said after the 0-2 start in 2015 — eight days before he was traded to the eventual NFC champion Carolina Panthers.

Those Bears meandered to a 6-10 record with one division victory, and Fox had a couple of top lieutenants alongside him in coordinators Vic Fangio and Adam Gase.

These Bears are no doubt tired of losing. It’s how they react in trying to take a step forward that matters.

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