When the Bears lose a big game, there’s usually a team full of players to blame. It’s almost never one player’s fault. The same goes for the stadium saga that has yet to have its final chapter written in the choice between Illinois and Indiana.
The General Assembly’s breathtaking decision to fumble the ball and adjourn without doing anything for the Bears has left Hammond, Indiana, in the driver’s seat. The legislature essentially called the Bears’ bluff, daring them to make the jump across the border.
It could happen anytime as soon as the Bears hammer out a stadium lease with Hoosier lawmakers who already approved a smorgasbord of local taxes to pay for a new dome, in stark contrast with do-nothing Illinois.
If the Bears pick up stakes, there’s enough blame to go around to fill a season’s worth of NFL playbooks.
The list starts with former Bears president Ted Phillips, continues with his successor Kevin Warren and goes right down the line to the officials who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get the ball over the legislative goal line.
Fans have been quick to point the finger at Gov. JB Pritzker, but the line extends to Illinois Senate President Don Harmon and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, on down to Mayor Brandon Johnson and his tag-team partner, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates — all the way to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, the county Democratic Party chair.
“There is nobody, including the media, whose hands are not on the bloody knife,” a source close to negotiations said. “Everyone’s hands are on it.
“The Bears f—- it up by going with Johnson’s stupid thing without pulling Springfield in and having there be $2 billion in state funding required,” the source said, referring to their ballyhooed 2024 pitch for a lakefront dome south of Soldier Field. “The Bears own the first full year of failure. Then there was the second year of failure, which probably the governor owns a lot of because he didn’t get his head out of the sand until December, when Indiana became real.”
Cleaning up ‘Ted Phillips’ mess’
Warren was hired in January 2023 specifically because of his track record of delivering a stadium deal for the Minnesota Vikings. The day he arrived, he named the Bears’ long-standing stadium quest for a privately built, team-owned dome as his No. 1 priority to secure the financial future of the family-owned franchise.
Early on, Warren set a series of deadlines to break ground, arguing every month without a shovel in the ground was costing the Bears millions of dollars. But his failure to deliver on the promise has now cost the team hundreds of millions due to escalating construction costs, with no end in sight.
State Rep. Kam Buckner, lead blocker for a House megaprojects bill that never got a vote in the Senate, said the Bears’ failures started with Warren’s predecessor, Phillips, who purchased the shuttered Arlington International Racecourse site for $197.2 million without first securing the legislative approval to break ground.
“They spent $200 million, which I believe is about $100 million more than the land was worth,” Buckner told the Sun-Times. “They negotiated against themselves to buy that land with no plan. After the fact, they decided, ‘Hey, we need to find a way to make this work.’ They did it backwards.
“They bought the wedding dress before they went on the first date. They brought in Kevin after the fact, then Kevin had to clean up Ted Phillips’ mess. The McCaskey family green-lit that,” Buckner said. “I don’t know anywhere in corporate America where you can make that type of purchase without having due diligence and a plan. That’s where this starts. It went wrong from the very beginning.”
The comedy of errors by team officials didn’t stop there, according to state Sen. Bill Cunningham, who tried to salvage stadium legislation with a last-ditch shot that didn’t get a House vote before the end of the spring session.
“Working with the Bears has been frustrating from the beginning,” Cunningham said.
The team had a blue-ribbon lobbying team inside the Capitol that had advised Warren not to stand alone at the lakefront in 2024 with Johnson at a news conference without Pritzker, Harmon or Welch, who all quickly threw cold water on the proposal, sources said.
Unlike Warren, who appeared to have a budding political bromance with Johnson, the Bears’ lobbying team privately advised the politically naive Bears president that Johnson didn’t have the clout or the legislative know-how to get anything done, let alone a deal as controversial as this.
Chicago sports marketing consultant Marc Ganis countered that Warren shouldn’t take all the blame because he pivoted quickly to Arlington Heights “once he realized how big a disaster this mayor was.”
But it wasn’t the only time Warren ignored the advice of his own counsel.
There were the frequent shifts in stadium focus, with Warren’s eyes wandering like a fickle teenager between Chicago, Arlington Heights and Indiana. He also seemed to humor Preckwinkle’s pitch for the former Michael Reese Hospital site that he had already dismissed as too narrow.
“They’ve pivoted between various plans, back and forth between Arlington Heights and the lakefront,” Cunningham said, adding that their late-game backchannel discussions with the city “completely undermined their efforts in Springfield.”
Johnson’s team helped sabotage the Bears by putting out word in the final days of the session of the team’s late dalliance with Johnson’s failed lakefront stadium plan. The Bears quickly denied it, but it was enough to throw a wrench in talks.
Until then, Welch said he thought the bill that passed his chamber “had some legs, to come back with some some changes, but not dramatic.”
“Certainly when that news came out, I think that really did up upend what was happening in the Senate,” Welch told the Sun-Times.
The role of a risk-averse governor
Even after Indiana’s quickie approval of a sweetheart stadium deal for the Bears forced Pritzker off the sidelines, Illinois’ risk-averse governor remained at a safe distance from negotiations.
In the run-up to the spring session, Pritzker had his deputy governor Andy Manar meet weekly with Buckner and Cunningham, which did help build some trust with the governor’s office and the Bears.
But in order to pass the Illinois House, the megaprojects bill that Pritzker has been seeking for years was weighed down by a virtual Christmas tree of goodies to benefit the city and other parts of the state.
The tax incentives for Chicago could have been used to jump-start development at Michael Reese, the 78, a scaled-down version of the stalled One Central development across the street from Soldier Field and the South Loop Amtrak railyard being eyed by White Sox chairman-in-waiting Justin Ishbia.
In spite of those Chicago goodies and the potential for state help to renovate Soldier Field and untangle the traffic bottleneck around it, Johnson mounted the legislative equivalent of a goal-line stand against the bill that would’ve paved the Bears’ path to the suburbs.
His trip to the state capital moved the needle, but even more important was the heavy hand of his longtime CTU ally, Davis Gates, who publicly slammed the megaprojects bill as a killer for education funding, already being shortchanged anyway by Pritzker, she claimed. Her opposition put the nail in the coffin for progressives reluctant to help a pro sports franchise valued at $8.9 billion.
Chicago Democrats in the Senate didn’t need all that much convincing.
“Johnson went hard against it. Davis Gates went hard against it. Toni was mute. Don Harmon was mute, and the version in the House… was too big to get done,” said a source close to negotiations.
The source added, “If I was the Bears, I would not be blowing anything up. I would hold my temper. I would smile. But I would be calling people in Indiana saying, ‘Get this thing to a place where we have something to sign. We’re ready.’”
Ganis was incredulous that the House and Senate weren’t in session at the same time until the final days and that Welch and Harmon “never got together to agree on what they were prepared to do” for the Bears.
“That, to me, is where the greatest fault lies, that these three people who were supposed to be working together never got together and came to a conclusion themselves,” Ganis said.
“That is entirely indicative of the dysfunction of our government here. I also believe it’s a reflection of the control certain parties have over the Chicago delegation in Springfield. Certain non-elected parties, and I do mean Stacy Davis Gates. If people didn’t know this before, they need to look at what happened here. She is clearly the most powerful person in the state of Illinois and city of Chicago politics,” Ganis said.
Ball now in Bears’ hands
In the end, the legislature’s decision to punt puts the ball squarely in the Bears’ hands to name their destination.
“If they really want to build a stadium, I don’t know that they’re going to be able to build a stadium in Illinois,” another source said. “They’re not going to get what they want here without extracting multiple pounds of flesh.
“It really just shows you how dysfunctional things are in Illinois. The fact that they’ve been trying to get a stadium for three years, they pass a bill in the House, we wait weeks and weeks and weeks for the Senate to tell us what they think they’re going to do and then, the Senate files a bill at 11 o’clock at night? It wasn’t serious. They’re checking a box.”
Hammond is the only choice “if the Bears really want to build a stadium,” the source said. “If you don’t really want to build your own stadium, then start having conversations and work on how to fix Soldier Field.”
It’s all a loss for Pritzker, who has long called for Illinois to join dozens of other states with megaproject incentive legislation.
“Thirty-eight states have a PILOT megaprojects law,” Pritzker said. “We are literally behind the curve. All we’re doing is organizing the way that they negotiate — they’ve always been negotiating about property taxes all across the country. It’s just in Illinois where we’ve had a disorganized, dysfunctional endeavor forever.”
The message that the General Assembly delivered by doing nothing was not simply a message to the Bears, who pretty much need to make the move to Indiana to maintain any credibility at all.
“The politics are too bad here to make a bet on Illinois,” said a source close to the stadium negotiations. “That’s the message.”