Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment, we focus on Chicago Bears cornerback Nahshon Wright, who honored John Beam, his former college coach on Sunday, in an emotional play that also personified how Wright is playing his best football to date.
One of the primary reasons that the Chicago Bears are 7-3, atop the NFC North, and have the NFC’s
No. 3 seed right now — in very good shape for their first postseason appearance since the 2020 season — is that Dennis Allen has turned the defense into a turnover machine. The Bears are quite comfortably the NFL’s best team when it comes to turnover ratio at +16; the Los Angeles Rams rank second at +10. And no other team can match Chicago’s interception total of 15; the Jacksonville Jaguars are second with 13.
Unsurprisingly, three of the league’s four top interceptors play for this new Monsters of the Midway — safety Kevin Byard leads the NFL with five picks, cornerback Nahshon Wright has four, and linebacker Tremaine Edmunds also has four. And in the Bears’ 19-17 Sunday win over the Minnesota Vikings, both Byard and Wright stole passes from Minnesota quarterback J.J. McCarthy.
In Wright’s case, he was playing for something more than just a win. Not only was he facing the team that had released him back in April, but Wright also had a heavy heart because John Beam, his head coach at Laney College in Oakland, California in 2018 before Wright transferred to Oregon State, was shot on November 13 at the Laney campus. Beam died the following day. Wright and Beam had talked two days before Beam died, and he found out about Beam’s death o Friday from a fellow coach.
“He was watching over me,” Wright said after the Vikings game. “It’s crazy. He called me the night before he passed and he told me that every game he watched, I just seemed to get a pick. So I just know he was behind me today.”
The interception, which happened with 42 seconds left in the first half and the Bears up, 10-3, showed off one of Wright’s primary attributes — a 6’4, 190-pound frame that allows him to simply Godzilla his way over any receiver he’s covering. McCarthy tried to hit the 5’11, 175-pound Jordan Addison on a backdoor fade in the end zone, and that just wasn’t happening. The Vikings were playing Cover-6 — Cover-4 to Wright’s side, and Cover-2 to the other side — and all Wright had to do was to stick and stay with his guy.
“That was a huge one for us, right before halftime,” head coach Ben Johnson said of Wright’s pick. “They’re knocking on the door, in scoring range. He was the game captain here this week, he was the guest captain. I know it means something to him going against his former team and how it went down. Really good coverage. He’s so long that he’s able to knock balls away or haul them in. We definitely needed that one.”
Wright’s emotion after the play told the whole story.
“He meant the world to me,” Wright said of Beam. “When my dad was killed, he came to my house and got me out of the bed. He was someone I could confide in, someone that I just love dearly. We talk once a week, easily. He did a lot for me and my brother and my family. He been there. He’s been there every step of the way, and it won’t stop. I gained an angel.”
Byard, the veteran, knew what it meant to his teammate.
“I’m super happy for him,” Byard said postgame. “I know he’s been through a lot this week. He was playing with a heavy heart today, so I just told him how much I was proud of him, and it’s just a special moment to be able to get an interception.”
As much as Wright did this one for his coach, he’s also been quite good at tormenting his former team this season. Back in Week 1, Wright jumped a McCarthy throw on a quick out to Justin Jefferson, and returned it 74 yards for the score.
Moreover, Wright has been getting better as the season goes along. In the first five weeks of 2025, as he was getting acclimated to his new defense, Wright allowed 12 catches on 15 targets for 153 yards, 75 yards after the catch, two touchdowns, one interception, no pass breakups, and an opponent passer rating of 125.7. Since then, he’s given up 19 catches on 38 targets for 256 yards, 63 yards after the catch, four touchdowns, three interceptions, four pass breakups, and an opponent passer rating of 74.0. The more time Wright has in Allen’s aggressive coverage concepts, the better he is for it.
On Sunday, Nahshon Wright honored the coach who meant so much to him. But it’s also important to note that, from a Secret Superstar perspective, he’s becoming the player that John Beam probably always imagined he could be.
