(670 The Score) At least one game plan coming out of Halas Hall looks worthy of respect.
The Bears seized the opportunity to purchase land in Arlington Heights with the aggressiveness that coach Matt Nagy seeks every Sunday, but with different results. This play worked as designed and ended with reason to celebrate in the end zone. The team issued a statement Wednesday confirming it had signed a purchase agreement to buy 326-acre Arlington Park from Churchill Downs Inc. for a reported $197 million.
Conspiracy theorists might call it an ingenious way for the Bears to change the subject from the team’s abysmal offense, shifting the focus away from how the team is playing now to where it will be playing in the future. That’s probably giving the team way too much credit for being savvy but, perhaps one day, a Bears official will call it good collaboration.
Nobody can argue with its execution.
As a professional courtesy, Bears chairman George McCaskey called Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot on Tuesday night before the announcement that always seemed inevitable since June when the team officially bid on the suburban patch of land. Up to that point, the Bears appeared to be intentionally vague whenever discussions with the city veered into specific demands. Appearing on the Mully & Haugh Show on Wednesday morning, Lightfoot told us she hoped to keep the Bears at Soldier Field but sounded frustrated by the lack of communication with team officials she claims have yet to clarify exactly what they seek to stay on the lakefront.
“We can’t operate in the dark," Lightfoot said on 670 The Score. “I don’t have a magic eight-ball to divine what the Bears want."
The Bears canceled a meeting Tuesday in which she planned to ask them more directly for details, according to Lightfoot.
That evasive approach represents a major reason why this development feels more like an organizational metamorphosis than a negotiating ploy, as if the Bears already have made up their collective mind to buck tradition and move to the suburbs. This essentially announces that the Bears believe they're ready to enter the modern NFL, where big-market teams own their stadiums and happily swim amid all the revenue streams that suddenly open wider. A contemporary state-of-the-art facility, with a corporate sponsor to be named later – BetRivers Stadium? – would offer the Bears the chance to stage a Super Bowl, a college football championship game, the Final Four and other marquee events 52 weeks a year. That's a world-class attraction.
Buy everything you need for a great pregame tailgate party here
Neither Lightfoot nor the City of Chicago can counter with anything that comes close to those kinds of perks, a fact that brings her closer to going down as the mayor who let the Bears leave Chicago -- even if much of this is out of her control for reasons nobody can change. Soldier Field’s landmark status, which gives it such rich distinction, makes building an entirely new stadium on the museum campus unfeasible – as well as reconfiguring it to include a retractable roof. Staying at Soldier Field, the smallest NFL stadium as well as one of the quirkiest, no longer makes sense for a franchise that has outgrown it. Deep down, Lightfoot must realize that not even the most persuasive politician can change the architectural or geographic limitations that ultimately have pushed the Bears away from the lakefront.
You can debate this point with your friends, but the move also brings the Bears closer to keeping the team under family ownership in perpetuity than selling it to some corporate billionaire. Keep in mind, by virtue of signing the purchase agreement for the land, team matriarch Virginia McCaskey will wake up Thursday morning with the value of her Bears immediately higher – and Forbes most recently estimated the team was worth $4 billion. That’s an immediate boon – and too much potential multi-generational McCaskey wealth to squander. That’s enough to let a sentimental family’s head overrule its heart.
It would be an investment in the future as wise as it is large. Besides the reported $197 million it cost to win the bid for the Arlington Park land, the Bears likely will face as much as $84 million in penalties for breaking their lease with the Chicago Park District, likely in 2026, before it runs out seven years later. That’s roughly $281 million before the first shovel hits the dirt, which seems exorbitant until you consider every NFL team will receive $321 million apiece thanks to the 11-year, $113-billion media deal the league signed last spring. When you own an NFL franchise, you make no small plans. Team president Ted Phillips, perhaps the hardest executive to fire in Chicago sports history, surely views this project becoming part of his legacy as he inches closer to retirement.
The stadium’s price tag figures to fall somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion based on industry estimates, an affordable neighborhood. The Shangri-La of NFL stadiums – SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. – sits at the high end of the spectrum at $4.9 billion. The Raiders paid $1.9 billion to build Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The cost for the Bears figures to fall somewhere in between, depending on factors impossible to predict. As the McCaskeys consider building their football palace, they should remember you get what you pay for and doing this right could make the Bears one of the world’s most valuable professional sports franchises. That’s no exaggeration.
The NFL gave the Rams $500 million to build SoFi, and it’s implausible that the Bears would get this far along in the project without receiving some assurances from commissioner Roger Goodell that the league will help in a similarly big way. Quietly, the Bears have reached out to potential investors, sources say. It figures to cost the McCaskeys at least $1 billion of their own fortune. Seeking public financing to defray costs would seem like a non-starter for the Bears in today’s economic and social climate, especially after the 2002 Soldier Field renovations saddled taxpayers with a $432-million burden. Especially because Gov. JB Pritzker said in June after the team made the bid that it "wasn’t something we’re looking at."
But the politics of a project this massive likely will remain fluid, as will the context of every conversation about Arlington Heights.
Something that won’t change? The need for the Bears to play in a more spacious stadium commensurate with how the NFL’s charter franchise has grown.
A franchise that means so much to so many deserves it, and so do Bears fans.
David Haugh is the co-host of the Mully & Haugh Show from 5-9 a.m. weekdays on 670 The Score. Click here to listen. Follow him on Twitter @DavidHaugh.