CHICAGO — For as long as the Chicago Bears have been piecing things together on the offensive line, this season’s transformation from one of the worst units in the NFL to one of the best has happened with remarkable quickness and little fanfare.

Directing the unit behind the scenes is 65-year-old Dan Roushar, who was about a month into retirement when the opportunity came along. He’s an old-school coach with a knack for reaching Gen Z, and while he’s not particularly interested in sharing his story, it’s quite a tale of commitment to the craft for a guy from Clinton, Iowa, who grew up a Bears fan and played quarterback at Northern Illinois.

How big of an issue did Roushar inherit when he was hired Feb. 3? The offensive line was the topic of the fifth question Bears coach Ben Johnson received at his introductory news conference. As the hot-shot coordinator of the high-flying Detroit Lions offense, how are you going to fix a mess that contributed to Caleb Williams being sacked a league-high 68 times?

Johnson expressed confidence in crafting a plan with general manager Ryan Poles. Less than two weeks later, that led to hiring Roushar — who had not worked with Johnson previously — to lead the way.

When Johnson called Roushar, he had recently retired after a two-year stint as Tulane’s offensive line coach. The pull back into the business was too much to resist for Roushar, who initially transitioned into a student assistant role at NIU under Bill Mallory in 1983 and continued in that role the next year under Lee Corso.

He had tried the retirement thing — briefly — after then-New Orleans Saints coach Dennis Allen fired him following the 2022 season.

“I was power washing my deck for the third time in two weeks, and my wife (Patti) looked at me and she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do, but you’re going to do something else,'” Roushar said.

So he said yes to Green Wave coach Willie Fritz in 2023 and stuck around the next season when Jon Sumrall took over, with the understanding it would be a one-year deal and he could help groom a younger coach to take over the O-line.

When Tulane’s season ended with the Gasparilla Bowl last Dec. 20, Roushar figured it had been a heck of a 41-year run, one that included a decade with the Saints, two stints each at Illinois and NIU and five other college stops.

Five weeks later — out of the blue — Johnson called with a question: Is this something you are interested in?

“As I said to my wife, ‘We could be traveling and doing these wonderful things,'” Roushar said. “And she said, ‘We wouldn’t be doing any of that.’

“Coach (Johnson) reached out to me, and this story unraveled.”

It’s unusual, to say the least, that a former quarterback who also dabbled as a wide receiver would wind up as an offensive line coach. It’s a career path Roushar never would have imagined and just sort of fell into.

Corso was deliberate in assembling his NIU staff. Roushar was eager to do anything he could to fit in, so the Huskies had him head out on the road recruiting as they added assistants. When he returned, Dave Magazu — later a Bears offensive line coach under John Fox — and Lawrence Cooley had been hired to run the O-line. Corso didn’t have a tight ends coach, so he allowed Roushar to work with that position.

“At that moment, I was starting to be exposed to real offensive line play,” Roushar said. “I started to see the game differently.”

When NIU offensive coordinator Bill Lynch took the head coaching job at Butler in 1986, he brought Roushar with him as an assistant. He eventually became the offensive line coach and offensive coordinator.

At that point, Roushar immersed himself in learning the nuances of the position, traveling whenever possible to clinics and taking opportunities to visit staffs at higher levels, including a trip to see the Bears when Tony Wise was the line coach under Dave Wannstedt. During his second stint at NIU, he befriended Harry Hiestand at Illinois.

“People were so kind to share,” Roushar said. “Others had given me thoughts about how to do things, and at the end of the day, you watch your guys play and you’re like, ‘Maybe those words don’t exactly fit what we’re looking for.’ And then you kind of evolve.”

Along the way, he was a coordinator and coached linemen, quarterbacks, tight ends and running backs. Through time on task, he built an understanding of how all the pieces fit together.

“That can be beneficial,” said Hiestand, who worked with Roushar at Illinois under Ron Turner, “knowing what’s hard for the running backs or the quarterback or tight ends and trying to balance the decisions you make weekly: What are we going to run and who is going to put stress on and who can handle it?

“Dan’s approach has been simple his whole life. And I know from the day he took the job, he was on a mission to handle three things: help the Bears win, have the best possible unit and bring out the best in each guy. When you think of things in that order as a coach and the players know it, it’s inspiring.

“Everybody knows this isn’t about what’s best for their career or for how much money they’re going to make. When you actually care about doing everything you can in those three areas and in that order, you’re going to have success. That’s who Dan is.”

The line coach was a critical hire for Johnson, who couldn’t bring the Lions’ Hank Fraley with him. In addition to Roushar, the Bears brought in Penn State’s Phil Trautwein and Ohio State’s Justin Frye (who wound up being hired by the Arizona Cardinals) for interviews.

It was a pivotal decision for Johnson, too, with his offense rooted in a powerful running game. Coming from the Lions, who were blessed with an elite O-line, Johnson knew it was a hire he had to get right.

“When I listened to some of these other coaches — who I think are outstanding and they’re going to be really good coaches for a long time — I knew that there was going to be a learning curve,” Johnson said. “When Dan got up there, it was like we were speaking the same language, which for a first-time head coach not sure necessarily of all the issues that I was going to run into, I thought that was going to be a big deal.”

Offensive coordinator Declan Doyle, who was a young assistant in New Orleans with Roushar, supported the hire, as did Allen, whom Johnson had hired as his defensive coordinator. Lions coach Dan Campbell, who also had been with the Saints, added a stamp of approval.

“I’ve always thought he was an outstanding offensive line coach,” Allen said. “In New Orleans, there are a lot of other circumstances that went around (his firing). It had nothing to do with the coach, the person. I said I would hire him in a heartbeat.”

Next, Poles revamped the interior, trading for guards Joe Thuney and Jonah Jackson and signing center Drew Dalman in free agency. The left tackle situation everyone wondered about wasn’t addressed, and on the outside, there was concern it would be the downfall of the offense.

Roushar stayed the course, expressing optimism as the Bears started training camp with a three-man competition for the job that expanded to four when Theo Benedet emerged in late August.

The results, entering Friday’s game in Philadelphia, are impressive. The Bears are second in the league in rushing with 142.3 yards per game. They ranked 25th last season.

Williams has been sacked 17 times, and the 4.64% sack percentage is sixth-best. The Bears were 32nd — by a wide margin — at 12.01% in 2024. Last week the Pittsburgh Steelers, who entered third in the NFL in sacks, registered one quarterback hit.

Accountability was a big buzzword around the Bears during the offseason, and Roushar embodies that by being a plain talker. Ask him a direct question and you’ll get an equally direct reply.

In training camp, he noted that right tackle Darnell Wright was inconsistent and had “just not been able to stack it play after play after play.” That’s something the previous coaching staff encountered.

Suffice to say, Roushar has gotten through to the former first-round pick, unlocking a level of play the Bears imagined when they bypassed defensive tackle Jalen Carter in the 2023 draft, traded down one spot with the Eagles and selected Wright. He has been a consistent and dominant force while playing with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.

As one team source noted, Wright recently bounced out of the players lounge with his tablet in hand. He was excited to get to a review of a walk-through.

Assessing Benedet earlier this month, Roushar said: “It’s not consistent enough. It’s not effective enough for us to do the things we want to do at a high level. But he’s working at it.”

That’s the kind of real talk you don’t often hear from position coaches. Many prefer to tiptoe around hard questions. Roushar takes them head on and answers with no spin or agenda.

“He’s straight,” Jackson said. “And I think it’s great. Guys know where they stand and you know how you’ve got to go about certain things. This is a business. This is a performance-based thing, and he’s going to let you know how it’s going.”

Roushar is intensely detailed in the meeting room. If a lineman’s head isn’t aligned properly on a play, it will be pointed out even if the running back went through the hole for 10 yards.

“Dan is one of the rare coaches where the result of the play does not trump what happened, meaning if you did it the right way,” said Hiestand, who sat in on meetings during a training camp practice. “The standard is the standard on every play for every player.”

There’s another person in the building who appreciates Roushar’s candid nature.

“He’s been such a good fit for me personally, too, because I am naturally pretty critical,” Johnson said. “I like to say what we can do better on a regular basis. Well, he might be to another degree. And so when we’re watching the tape together and he beats me to the punch on a lot of this stuff, I’m not as negative. I’m like, ‘Man, it makes me feel good.’

“So I’m trying to, like, lift the room up. It makes me a better coach. I can’t say enough about the work he has done with those guys.”

In light moments with the group, players will tease Roushar about getting his Medicare enrollment straight. A new group that has come together quickly has become a family.

“He cares so much,” Thuney said. “And you feel it every day. He just cares about the O-line, the team and pours his heart and soul into it.”

Maybe Roushar can find time during the offseason to make sure the deck is spotless. Who knows, perhaps there will be an opportunity for one of those trips he mentioned to his wife. For him, the chance to work for the Bears was better than retirement.

That’s how a former NIU quarterback, over the decades, turned into a regarded coach in the trenches of the NFL.

“Through, I guess, trial and error, you end up doing it,” Roushar said.

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