CHICAGO — Al Harris had a profound impact on the Chicago Bears long before being hired as defensive backs coach/passing game coordinator.

A two-time Pro Bowl cornerback for the Green Bay Packers, Harris is the assistant who was tasked with piecing things together while Jaylon Johnson and Kyler Gordon missed much of the season. He’s the guy who vouched for Nahshon Wright before the Bears signed him in April — seven months before he was named NFC Defensive Player of the Month for November.

Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen put a wire cage — the kind you see in a physical education class — in the unit’s meeting room to fill with footballs as the defense collected takeaways this season. With five games remaining, there isn’t a lot of room left. The Bears have 26 takeaways and 17 interceptions — tops in the NFL in both categories — with Harris’ defensive backs accounting for 13 of the picks and six fumble recoveries.

The story of Harris would have taken a much different direction if it weren’t for Bobby DePaul and Indianapolis Colts general manager Chris Ballard, who in turn had their careers launched at Halas Hall because of their relationship with the player.

DePaul, now the college director for SumerSports evaluating NCAA football, was a young pro scout in Philadelphia when roster cuts were looming in August 1998. The Eagles were hurting for cornerbacks as Bobby Taylor was sidelined with a broken scapula. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who drafted Harris in the sixth round out of Texas A&M-Kingsville the previous year, were heavy at the position. DePaul figured a cornerback or two would be cut loose.

One young player got just a few snaps all of preseason. He rarely left the sideline.

“Very accurate,” said that player, who happened to be Harris.

The Bucs were planning to waive Harris with the goal of re-signing him to their practice squad for the second straight year. A bump-and-run cornerback, he wasn’t a great fit for coach Tony Dungy’s scheme, but the team, and especially director of player personnel Jerry Angelo, liked Harris.

“Tampa had overdrafted so someone good was going to be cut,” DePaul said. “Now, I am watching the tape and I got my eyes on them. I think Al may have played five snaps all of preseason. It was very few. It just so happened one of the plays was a go route. He was in press man. The guy tries to shake him. Al, who is over 6 feet and has the length, flips his hips and he turns and runs the guy out of bounds. Plays the ball. The whole thing. I said, ‘Oh, my god, there is no way they are cutting this guy.' ”

Director of pro personnel Mike McCartney, now a Downers Grove-based agent, was involved. DePaul said he floated the idea of offering a late-round pick to the Bucs for Harris. He described an almost Abbott-and-Costello routine in talking with Eagles GM Tom Modrak about a deal.

“I’ve never heard of this guy,” Modrak said.

“Tom, everybody is looking for corners right now,” DePaul said.

“Nobody knows who this guy is,” Modrak said. “You got any tape?”

“I got a couple plays,” DePaul said.

“What do you mean?” Modrak said.

“Well, he didn’t really play,” DePaul said.

“So now you’re telling me the guy never really plays?” Modrak said.

“I only needed one play,” DePaul said. “It just happened to be the play that showed me he could do it.”

Modrak came up in the business as a scout for the Steelers in the 1970s when Dungy was a player in Pittsburgh. They had a relationship. There was a phone conversation, according to McCartney, also involving Eagles coach Ray Rhodes. Dungy recommended Harris as a good fit for the Eagles. Modrak decided to place a waiver claim.

“I’ve got the anxiety of a scout because I’ve got to wait it out,” DePaul said. “On the one hand, I hope 10 teams claim this guy just to shove it up (Modrak’s rear) because I’m pissed off he didn’t trade fore the guy, right? These are the emotions you go through. Then, I am thinking, ‘No, I want the guy.' ”

The Eagles wound up being the only team to claim Harris, leading Modrak to deliver a very direct “I told you so” to DePaul. Harris hit the practice field. Defensive coordinator Emmitt Thomas instructed a receiver to run a go route. Harris was in his hip pocket all the way downfield.

“Emmitt comes over to me and Harold (Carmichael) and he says, ‘He’s starting on Sunday,' ” DePaul said. “It’s a true story.”

Rhodes and his staff were fired after the season. Andy Reid took over and with defensive coordinator Jim Johnson, Harris’ career took off playing slot cornerback for one of the first defenses in the league to really lean into sub packages.

‘A special place’

Fast forward to June 2001.

Angelo was hired as GM of the Bears and in one of his first moves, he chose DePaul to be the pro personnel director based on the time he sniped Harris from the Bucs. DePaul worked for the Bears for nine seasons and was instrumental in helping build the offensive line of the Super Bowl XLI team around center Olin Kreutz.

At the same time, Angelo hired Ballard as a college scout, giving him his first NFL job. Ballard had been the secondary coach at Texas A&M-Kingsville. Ruston Webster was the Tampa scout who covered the area, but the Bucs were pulling so many players out of the school — at one point in the late ’90s, they had five Kingsville players on their roster — that Angelo started making the visit too. He was impressed by the work Ballard did with Harris and another cornerback, Floyd Young, who spent time in Tampa.

“Al made a big difference for a lot of us in our careers,” said Ballard, who spent 12 seasons with the Bears.

A year later, the Bears nearly engineered a trade for Harris when Reid called looking to move up during the draft. DePaul and Ballard were excited, knowing he would be a good fit for defensive coordinator Greg Blache, but it didn’t come to fruition.

The Eagles, stocked with cornerbacks in 2003, finally dealt Harris, knowing they soon would owe him a big raise. Reid shared with Harris a list of teams interested in him.

“He said, ‘You can go to these other teams and there’s no doubt that you will play,'” Harris recalled. “ ‘But if you go to Green Bay, that is a special place.’ I said, ‘Say less, Coach.' ”

He moved to outside corner in Green Bay and his play took off. Harris intercepted the Seattle Seahawks’ Matthew Hasselbeck and returned it for a touchdown in overtime of a wild-card playoff game at the end of his first season. He had 64 pass breakups in his first four years with the Packers and was named to the Pro Bowl in his fifth and sixth seasons.

What is the first name Hall of Fame Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson mentioned when asked who the toughest cornerback he faced in his career was?

“When I first came into the league, nobody liked playing Al Harris,” Johnson told the “Pardon My Take” podcast. “We played him twice a year. We had Roy Williams at the time and he always hated play Al. And I didn’t know nothing about Al until I heard Roy talking about him in the week before we played him. He was like, ‘Man, all he does is put his hands in your face. The referee will let him get away with it.’ I’m thinking, ‘OK, I ain’t got to worry about that. You’re the No. 1 receiver. You got his ass.’

“Lo and behold, halfway through the game, they switch him over to me and I got a good taste of it. He was the one who I, not modeled my game after, but as far as the aggressiveness that it came with, the fight at the line of scrimmage, it was all tailored after playing against Al Harris because I knew the kind of fight and nastiness I had to come with.”

Harris finished a seven-year run with the Packers in 2009, intercepting Jay Cutler in his first start with the Bears to seal a 21-15 victory at Lambeau Field in the season opener and, by that time, he knew he wanted to pursue coaching when his playing days were over even if it wasn’t something those around him could foretell.

“I never thought he would be coaching,” said Hall of Fame cornerback Charles Woodson, whom Harris teamed with for four seasons. “I joke with him all the time that I can’t believe that the guy who only worried about who he was guarding in a particular game, or just playing right corner, would be one day leading a whole secondary and now is a passing game coordinator to go along with it.

“Not only that, but it shocks me that he would want to be a coordinator and/or head coach at some point. But judging by what his players say about him and the results he has gotten everywhere he has been, I now do not put anything past him.”

Harris was inducted into the Packers Hall of Fame in 2020, one of four teams he played for over 14 NFL seasons. That’s when he reached out to DePaul to thank him for the role he played in his career.

“Al said, ‘I know what you went through as a scout,' ” DePaul said. “ ‘And for that to happen, it took a tremendous amount of faith in my ability not knowing who I was but it just reinforces to me how much the DNA on that tape matters. And that helps me as a coach.'”

Said Harris: “Anybody that took a chance on me, I am extremely grateful. Being in this business for so long, you know how it goes. Sometimes guys just need someone to believe in them or see the vision. I was grateful for that.”

‘A beautiful mind’

After an unpaid internship with the Miami Dolphins in 2012, Harris hooked on with the Kansas City Chiefs as an assistant defensive backs coach in 2013, reuniting with Reid, Thomas and Ballard, who was the Chiefs director of player personnel at the time. Harris became the secondary coach in 2016.

“It has been very rewarding to watch him from being a player in Kingsville to where he is now,” Ballard said. “He worked very hard at becoming a great coach. The success he is having in Chicago is no surprise.”

Harris landed in Dallas in 2020 with his former Packers coach, Mike McCarthy, and ran the secondary before adding the title of assistant head coach last year. His contract expired after the season, and before new Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer could consider retaining him, the Bears pounced. The connection? GM Ryan Poles was in Kansas City to witness Harris’ coaching career take off.

The Bears considered it a coup, a huge addition for Ben Johnson’s staff, and at Halas Hall, one source said Harris possesses “a beautiful mind.” His physical playing style, after all, was a perfect fit for the vision Allen has for the secondary.

Wherever Harris goes, the takeaways follow. From 2013-18, the Chiefs ranked second in takeaways, tied for third in interceptions and first in defensive touchdowns. Over the last five seasons, the Cowboys were second in takeaways, third in interceptions and first in defensive touchdowns.

Asked for a commonality in the three teams and the takeaways, Harris launched into a long answer.

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “If you’re not coaching takeaways, you’re not going to get takeaways. Everybody has good scheme. Everybody thinks they have good scheme. Places that I have been, I have been fortunate to work in a variety of different schemes — all good ones. But if you are consistently coaching scheme, all you’re going to get is a bunch of guys that know the check to three-man, two-man and know the verbiage. You’re going to teach that anyways. Once we get the initial teaching of the scheme, now from there on out I am never teaching guys to couple wideouts ever.

“I have a saying in the room: Unless you see somebody that was at the Last Supper, he’s got an (offensive) scheme he has to run. So everything I am doing, I am defending their system. If you watch from Kansas City to Dallas to now, a lot of the times we’re beating the receivers to the route, to the ball. It’s because we’re defending the scheme not so much the wide receiver. … That way I’m never talking about knocking the ball down or anything like that. That’s a given. If your eyes are in the right place and the mindset of taking the ball away is there, you’re going to get the pass breakup. That’s a given. The ending to each drill, the ending to each play in our minds is the takeaway.”

‘He’s that guy for me now’

Harris began fostering a relationship with Wright before the Cowboys drafted him in the third round in 2021 with the cornerback sharing details of a phone conversation that covered everything but football.

“When I got drafted, I called him back and I’m like, ‘You didn’t tell me nothing or give him no hint,' ” Wright said. “He said, ‘The phone call in itself should have told you how I felt about you.' ”

While Wright dealt with injuries in Dallas and other young cornerbacks emerged, Harris still believed in him. The coach was bummed when the team traded Wright to the Minnesota Vikings in August 2024. Wright occasionally sent Harris clips of him from practice last season in search of pointers.

When the Vikings released Wright on April 7, the first call he received was from Harris.

“He told me to call my agent and tell him to call Poles,” Wright said. “They had a conversation and later that night I was on a plane.”

On April 8, Wright signed with the Bears. As soon as one door closed, another opened. Sure, Harris had a lot of personal experience with Wright, but he was vouching for a player who had a thin resume, just like Harris once did when he was released in Tampa.

“He’s that guy for me now,” Wright said.

Twenty-four years later, Harris is still making an impact on the Bears.

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