LAKE FOREST, Ill. — The Bears’ defense has fought through a war of attrition.

Cornerbacks Jaylon Johnson and Kyler Gordon have missed significant time. Linebackers T.J. Edwards and Tremaine Edmunds, too. Defensive linemen Dayo Odeyingbo and Shermar Turner were lost for the season, and Grady Jarrett was unavailable for an early stretch.

Coordinator Dennis Allen has navigated those waters well, sustaining quality play despite the loss of every-down players. While injuries never are an excuse in the NFL, doing more with less is no easy task.

Allen has found a way to press forward, and he deserves tons of credit for that. HIs logic for weathering such storms is sound. You can’t just run the scheme as it’s ideally designed. You must adapt as a defensive play-caller.

“It’s challenging, and I think every year, you kind of deal with that in some form or fashion, some years more than others,” Allen said in a Wednesday press conference at Halas Hall. “So, I think the big thing is, each and every week is a new week. … It’s like trying to create a meal. What are the ingredients that we have, and then we’ll figure out what the meal’s going to be.

“And I think that’s kind of what we’ve had to do there, and you try to find out what are the skill set of the players that you have available to you. Try to put them in positions to be able to do the things that they do well, try to minimize the times that you ask them to do things that maybe they’re not as good at. And each week that might change, based on who you have available to you.”

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He has made do with little-used reserve D’Marco Jackson as his signal-calling middle linebacker, a decision that has gone so well that Jackson just earned NFC Defensive Player of the Week honors.

Allen and his defensive staff turned Nahshon Wright into a turnover machine, helped bring in C.J. Garndner-Johnson to replace Gordon, and rotated Jaylon Johnson and Tyrique Stevenson as they rebound from injury.

When Allen had a glut of good defensive backs and was down to his Nos. 4 and 5 linebackers, Bears opponents saw lots of the dime package. When his best blitzers came from the secondary, he sent those guys to great effect. He probably plays more zone than he’d like to these days, but Allen fit those options to his personnel.

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While not everything has been perfect — the Bears rank No. 24 with 345.5 yards allowed per game and No. 20 with 29 sacks — they lead the league in takeaways and are good on critical downs. That’s a recipe for success in this league, especially with a plus-20 turnover differential.

“We’re 10 off from the record for breaking takeaways, so really we’re just focusing on doing what the scheme allows us to do,” Gardner-Johnson said, “and trusting his technique coaching and really trusting DA and the scheme and go in and hunt for the ball.”

There is trust from players to coach. There’s also trust between coaches. Head coach Ben Johnson affords Allen a certain amount of autonomy on the defensive side while still offering some input and insight as a respected offensive mind.

“Ben’s the head coach. He’s in charge of all of it,” Allen said. “I think there’s a trust level, and that’s earned over time. I don’t know that it was necessarily that way from the beginning, and yet I think my résumé would say that there’s a little bit of a trust level kind of going into it. But I’m appreciative of the fact that he’s given me an opportunity to really step in and do the things that I think we need to do to be successful defensively.”

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The Bears weren’t always successful defensively in a Week 14 loss to the Green Bay Packers. They allowed three explosive touchdowns and had their worst game preventing third-down conversions. Both of those things should be considered outliers and not necessarily reflective of what the Bears might do in Saturday night’s rematch at Soldier Field.

“A lot of what they do offensively is they’re very explosive, and they’ve been explosive in a lot of games,” Allen said. “And yet that’s something that we have to work to try to eliminate or minimize in this game. I look back at the last game, I think there’s probably three or four plays that really kind of became the deciding outcome of the game. So, you look at it, there’s some lessons to be learned there. Hopefully we learn those lessons both as a coaching staff and as players, and we put ourselves in a little bit better position to minimize those things. But that was a big factor in the game the last time we played these guys, and I’m sure that’ll be a big factor in this game.”