Bears coach Ben Johnson has no qualms about making his disdain for the Packers known. Green Bay coach Matt LaFleur takes a different approach to the situation.

LaFleur explained his decision not to take Ben Johnson’s bait to reporters on Monday.

“Because this game is about players and so we’ll keep it about the players,” LaFleur said, via Matt Schneidman of The Athletic. “I’m not the one out there they’re playing. . . . Don’t get me wrong. I love the rivalry. It’s awesome. It’s great. It’s intense. You can feel it on gameday. You can feel it throughout the course of the week and also the significance, I mean, they’re the defending [NFC] North champions. So what a great opportunity, great challenge for us in our home stadium to play against the defending champs.”

For Johnson’s part, he sent a clear message to his players about Sunday’s game at Lambeau Field.

“He wants to beat them really bad like everyone else in the room, like every Chicago fan. Beat them real bad, and make them quit,” receiver Luther Burden III said, via Cassie Carlson of Fox32.

Johnson’s anti-Green Bay antics have included declaring in the locker room after a playoff win, “Fuck the Packers! Fuck them!”

“The Bears and the Packers, they should not like each other,” Johnson said in a Scouting Combine-week appearance on PFT Live. “I think it’s as simple as that. And I think that’s gonna make this rivalry, this game, something that people are going to watch here going forward.”

For fans, that’s absolutely true. Players and coaches are interchangeable. Coaches can be nomads, hopping from job to job regardless of where the job may be. And they generally refrain from making things personal because today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s employer.

Johnson, to his credit, isn’t willing to play the game. He earned his stripes with the Packers as a rival (Johnson and the Lions spoiled Aaron Rodgers’s last game in Green Bay), and he’s in position to be the coach of the Bears for a long time. He could become as beloved as Mike Ditka, in time.

He’s off to a good start. In part because he says what most Bears fans believe about the Packers.

As to this weekend’s game, which was moved out of the higher-profile 4:25 p.m. ET window for 1:00 p.m. ET, Johnson surely will say, privately and/or publicly, that the flex didn’t happen because of the Bears but because (as Johnson is more likely to say privately but who knows?), “The Packers suck.”