The Illinois legislature adjourned Friday without approving any Chicago Bears stadium bills, and people be reacting:
- Phil Rogers, writing as a Forbes “contributor,” reports that “the wait goes on as the team tries to find the necessary funding for needed infrastructure upgrades and assurances on property taxes.” Inserting both “necessary” and “needed” is piling on the sports owner perspective a little thick, but probably on brand for a guy who once co-wrote a book with Bud Selig.
- Gene Chamberlain, the Bears correspondent at Rogers’ old workplace, Sports Illustrated, complains that the the McCaskey family is only “looking for a frozen tax rate which has already been negotiated with surrounding taxing bodies, and about $855 million for infrastructure,” but Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “falsely depicted the Bears as attempting to get the stadium built by public funds,” because infrastructure isn’t a stadium and tax breaks on a stadium aren’t … wait, let me start over.
- Bloomberg News calls it a Bears “fumble,” because you know how non-sports news outlets especially always love the sports puns. Bloomberg also describes the Bears as “stuck with an outdated stadium and fans longing for a new football coliseum,” which 1) Soldier Field may be unloved, but it was just completely rebuilt in 2002 which isn’t all that long ago and 2) fans don’t especially seem to be longing for what the Bears owners want to build.
- The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “Bears sources” say the team could start looking at stadium sites outside Cook County, writing that “numerous suburbs have courted the team,” though notably not by offering any of the money that the McCaskeys want. Also said Chicago suburbs are all in Illinois, which is the state whose legislature just declined to approve that billion dollars or so in tax money, so this may not be as promising an option as you think, Sun-Times.
So anyhoo, the McCaskeys did not succeed in getting around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, will continue to seek ways to get around a billion dollars from the state of Illinois, stop the presses. This is pretty much the exact same set of stories that ran back in June when the state legislature adjourned then without giving the Bears owners a wad of cash. At least this time around the Sun-Times didn’t describe the session as expiring “without the Chicago Bears breaking the line of scrimmage in Springfield” after the failure of legislation that “could’ve thrown the team a block in their rush to the former Arlington International Racecourse” and Bears lobbyists being “left on the Capitol sideline” — though the paper’s headline did say that the owners’ last-minute offer of $25 million “doesn’t move ball forward in Springfield for new stadium,” it’s a sickness, I tell you.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I took the “look outside Cook County” threat as code for “Indiana”. To which I say “good luck with that!”
I thought of that, but it doesn’t track with “numerous suburbs have courted the team.”
Yeah, the Indiana threat just isn’t believable. The state line is only 15 miles from Soldier Field, but the people with the money are the other direction. Hammond and Gary have their charm, but all those alleged non-football events that are supposed to make the new stadium a money making bonanza for everyone involved, that’s gonna require people coming from the not-Indiana side of the border. From a place like, Arlington Heights.
It’s believable if the Indiana legislature shows them the money. The Bears aren’t a serious organization,
Nobody in the Indiana General Assembly wants anything to do with Chicago. Such would hold true even if Indiana wasn’t a blood-red state.
Wait, Phil Rogers is still a thing?
After ghostwriting, sorry “collaborating”, with Bud Selig on that hacky For the Good of the Game HOW does that guy still have a job?
And now I see why…
I was amused a few games ago when announcers brayed about the Arlington Heights hype like it was a sorely needed done deal.
I remember that. I forgot who the announcers were, probably because they are forgettable people.
I’m surprised I heard it cuz I hit 30-second skip after each play. Works great outside of hurry-up offense.
Announcers are like notorious NHL and MLB officials: The names don’t register unless they’re atrocious.
Except for Mark Sanchez, who has become imfamously famous.
For a big city, Chicago has notoriously bad sports media.
So are most US sports media. Ignoring soccer, reducing women to WAGs, calling the domestic league winner “world champions”, etc., etc.
They ignore soccer that doesn’t garner ratings- Premier league gets pretty good coverage despite the time zone change.
I assume the WAGs issue you bring up is about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? That’s a ratings thing.
A friend of mine worked in sports talk radio for a long time. Whenever they talked about anything besides the NFL or NBA trades/unhappy players- the ratings collapsed. That was all the consumers of mass media responded to. He could get time in spring early summer from the MLB team/ but if they sucked, they’d get back to the NFL asap.
The NFL just pushes the conversation in way that it’s really not even fair to consider MLB, the NHL and NBA on the same level.
The most popular sport in America to watch on television is the NFL, the second is college football and the rest aren’t even close
For the millionth time, da Bears could have had a dome 30 years ago next to McCormick Place. McCaskey wanted an open air stadium on the Soldier Field site. Now live with it, or move to Greensboro. Why should Arlington Heights waste half of a prime development site on a blue and orange elephant that will sit empty 350 days a year?
A dome built 30 years ago would be just as “obsolete” as Soldier Field is now (at least that would be the Bears’ perspective). Only it probably would’ve been even more expensive.
Thankfully that didn’t happen.
It would have been interesting 40ish years ago though, like around the time the Silverdome was being built. Chicago was the number 1 destination for conventions up until the mid 90s.
A dome on the west side of McCormick Place might have cost slightly more, but could have been used as part of the convention center. Also, that would have eliminated that flying saucer on the lakefront. It’s also about time to get rid of that hideous black blob scarring the lakefront called McCormick Place East. Back to the greedy NFL owners, I know who is encouraging this extortion activity by the NFL. The real NFL commissioner, Jerry @#$& Jones.
The number of times a convention center needs a stadium-sized plenary hall isn’t never, but it’s statistically indistinguishable from never. Cf. the St. Louis Rams dome.
There’s a perfectly good dome down in St. Louis… maybe the McCaskey’s moribund franchise can follow their former city cousins all the way to Missouri…
St. Louis no longer wants any part of the NFL.
Actual Bears STH, can speak for lifelong buddies that have adjacent seats as well. None of us want this. None of us are buying a second PSL for a stadium out there. None of us want to go to games in Arlington Heights. We’ve told the Bears this for years…
“Forbes contributor” remains one of the most low-key scams running on the internet
I need to dig up the email they sent me like 15 years ago asking me to be a “contributor.” It was a masterpiece of “You’ll get paid in exposure!”