Brother, can you spare $2.3 billion?

The Bears tried to brag they have billions to spend on a stadium, but need you and me to give them billions more. It did not go well.

Brother, can you spare $2.3 billion?

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As soon as the Bears announced that they were going to unveil their plans to let the city and state build them a new stadium that they could lease, you knew that the press conference would feature Bears President of Not Being Ted Phillips Kevin Warren in full carnival barker huckster mode.

What we didn’t expect was that the whole absurd exercise would begin with a very creepy prayer where a respected (until about 12:05 p.m. yesterday) Chicago pastor would ask almighty God to deliver the Bears a new fancy lakefront stadium.

And, the whole thing somehow got worse and dumber from there.

Chairman of the Bored George McCaskey handled welcoming all the prestigious guests, which included Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Jim Belushi, Howard Ankin, Jeff Joniak, Hub Arkush, the guy from Da Bears Blog, and Mike Pantazis, the guy who jumped out of the stands to catch a field goal on Monday Night Football in 1995, and probably Patrick Mannelly.

And then Warren hulked over the podium and somehow managed to talk about himself for 20 minutes.

They pulled out all the stops. We heard from the mayor, who mostly yelled excitedly about how the city’s contributions to the project wouldn’t include any new taxes without explaining what services would be ignored so that the already tragically underfunded city could subsidize a playground for a team worth several billion dollars.

We heard from Karen Murphy, the Bears executive vice president of stadium development, whatever that is, as she explained the funding by not explaining it. Then some other lady started answering finance questions. She sort of looked like either John Mulaney’s mom or Tig Nataro, and I just wanted her to tell the Shailene Woodley joke, but she kept talking about how the project would be phased instead of where the money was supposed to come from.

The best part was Warren could tell the audience, though it was packed with Bears sycophants (and I don’t just mean the guys from Chuggo), was losing all interest in the presentation, so he said it was time to take questions, then quickly said, whoops, I forgot to introduce Charles Smith who has some phony job with the city workforce development department, and then there were TWO MORE SPEAKERS after him.

Basically, if you didn’t see this thing, you missed nothing. Except for this.

The sizzle reel of the new stadium and the accompanying presentation looked appropriately pretty, but gave you almost zero facts about what the actual stadium will include. It’s almost like they know it’s never going to be built, so why bother?

Renderings are always cool, and there’s a very lucrative cottage industry in architecture where firms get paid thousands and thousands of dollars for pretty graphics featuring stadium projects that will never, ever get made. Like this one.

But usually you hear about things like how many seats (we found out later it would be 65,000 for football games maybe), how many boxes, how big the video screens will be, some cool fan amenities, how many toilets can be flushed at once, how many parking spaces there will be (from the looks of things this stadium will have four parking spots, max), etc.

We got none of that. What we did get was a lot of references to just how much money the Bears will be pouring into this project and what a great deal this will be for the city and the state and how they’d be fools to not fund it.

Here’s the biggest problem with their presentation, and one they had to know they had coming in, but they did nothing to address.

Every time they bragged about putting $2.3 billion of their own money into the stadium, everyone watching wondered, “Why don’t you just build a $2.3 billion stadium, then?”

They pulled out all the old tricks. They talked about how the stadium would lead to incredible infrastructure benefits for the city because they’d have to upgrade roads and CTA lines and blah, blah, blah. Those are all projects that if they are so important to the city and state can be much more easily accomplished without a big football stadium in the way. They did the “no new taxes” thing over and over, but like I wrote before, they did nothing to explain what things that are currently funded by that money would no longer be funded. They talked about how the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority can refinance the existing bonds for the Soldier Field renovation that still aren’t paid off, and give some new money to this project without acknowledging that it’s a terrible time to refinance anything, and more importantly, without explaining why the hell the ISFA should do anything for the Bears until the existing bills are paid.

They didn’t invite Governor Big Boy JB Pritzker or the Speaker of the Illinois House Chris Welch because they knew neither supported using state funds for this, but then Warren got all haughty about JB telling reporters (very politely) at an event about 12 miles away, that the state had other priorities that their proposed $1.5 billion commitment could and would be used for.

Then Warren said this had to be approved before the end of the current legislation session on May 31 or it would delay the project by a full year. I get the idea that they know their only chance is to fast track this and hope nobody asks too many questions (that they can’t adequately answer), but this thing has no fucking chance.

I do believe that Warren wants this to happen and that he is not just pushing it to put pressure on Arlington Heights to cave to the Bears tax abatement demands on the more than 300 acres of land that horses have pooped on. Warren thinks it would be cool to have the Bears in a fancy stadium on the lakefront. But it doesn’t make any sense in the real world. And, if the idea was to put pressure on Arlington Heights, this clown show should have done the opposite.

There’s no worse use of lakefront than an enclosed building, even if it does have a glass barn door that points vaguely at the skyline. Plus, building this next to the existing eyesore that is Solider(s) Field with plans to turn that land into the old World War I monument pillars and some grass for kids to run around on (and not join gangs as a result, or some shit) ignores the need for actual parking next to a stadium. I’m actually surprised they are pretending to be interested in keeping the columns, considering they so badly fucked up the Soldier Field renovation that the building lost its national historic landmark protection (something so hard to botch that even Crane Kenney didn’t do it, much to Cole Wright’s eternal delight).

The Bears have no leverage in any of this. Nobody thinks they are leaving the Chicago area. When this fails they’ll be forced to go back to the original plan A and build some version of this building 20 some miles to the north and slightly west. And it’ll be fine.

Brandon Johnson made a lot of promises at the press conference, but he doesn’t have the votes to fulfill any of them.

Warren is a big ideas guy, and big idea guys swing and miss a lot. He’s emboldened by two pretty incredible accomplishments in his short stint as commissioner of the Big Ten. He stole USC and UCLA from the PAC-12, which eventually killed that conference, and he got a humungous TV contract from three different networks on his way out the door to his current job.

What he’s trying to do here is worth a shot. What if it worked? What if the Bears could get half of the stadium paid for and get such a sweetheart deal in their new stadium that it was nearly as lucrative as owning it outright (and without having to figure out how to actually run the damned thing)? It’d be great for them. There’s nothing better than being a tenant in a rent controlled lucite roofed stadium.

But it’s not going to happen. And it shouldn’t happen.

Oh, and it was great when asked why they didn’t plan for a retractable roof, Warren gave quite an answer. He said that would add “a couple hundred million to the cost, and most teams that have them don’t use them that much, but we wanted also to be financially responsible.”

Sure, $4.8 billion is ridiculous. $4.6 billion is a bargain!

The best it will be for Warren is that when they start to build their stadium in the ‘burbs he can claim, with lots of witnesses, that his franchise would be doing this in the city but those damned politicians wouldn’t let them.

Multiple speakers threw out Daniel Burnham’s name as if to channel the most famous and influential architect in the history of the city and claim that he would have loved these plans. Burnham is world famous for his work with the 1893 Columbian Exhibition and The White City. Burnham’s famous “make no little plans” quote has been bastardized out of shape over the decades, and thankfully a reporter threw all of those mentions back at them when she pointed out that Burnham was adamant about nurturing open public green space, especially on the lakefront, and that this wasn’t that.

This gas giant of a building will supposedly enhance the museum campus, but instead will just dwarf what’s already there.

You don’t need to build a $4.6 billion stadium to create park land, or a temporary ice rink or to have a fucking farmer’s market.

Take your $2.3 billion and build something in the suburbs and stop fucking up the lakefront.

I was kind of surprised that the presentation didn’t dwell more on the results of the Economic Impact Study that they allegedly did during this process. Because anybody who has ever been involved in hiring a firm to do one of those and then had to try to explain the results to anyone, understands that these studies are a heaping pile of bullshit and that the numbers can be massaged into any shape or amount. The biggest flaw in those “models” is that they will count the same dollar umpteen different ways, so that someone supposedly coming to town for a Bears game and spending money at a hotel, and restaurants and bars and a quick trip to the bath house, is supposedly only here for that purpose. Because if on the same trip they go to a show at a theater, that theater’s economic impact study will count all of those same dollars and claim them to be theirs, and if a hotel does a study they will claim all of those dollars to be theirs, and on and on and on. I worked for a public entity that did one and our president saw the number and went, “Nobody’s going to believe this shit. You need to back and come up with a less ridiculous unrealistic number.”

I don’t blame the Bears for trying this. I mean, look at how dumb Bears fans are. We thought Mitch Trubisky was a good idea once. We’ll fall for anything. But this was a pedestrian bridge from the museum campus too far. No matter how good you are at peddling bullshit you can’t convince enough people that you have $2.3 billion to build a cool stadium that will bring in all sorts of incredible events, but you somehow need another $2.3 billion to make the whole thing work.

I imagine Kevin telling George what the case they were going to make was and George tilting his head like a golden retriever who can’t believe that you swung your arm but held onto the ball again, and then realizing, “oh, it’s a profit deal!”

“George, you have taken in $2.3 billion and given away 50 cents worth of crap.”

Besides, if the Bears actually did get this deal done what would they do with the land in Arlington Heights? Trade it to the Steelers for a sixth round pick?

Hey, the long awaited NFL Draft finally arrives tonight. Not a moment too soon (and honestly several thousand moments too late.) The Bears will finally draft Caleb Williams and that dipshit former Jets scout can stop “balancing the media narrative” by Tweeting out insightful clips of Caleb throwing incompletions. I think we can see why that guy is a former, and not current, scout.

While the Caleb part of the draft is a no-brainer, what they do with the ninth pick will require some actual cogitation. Because the Bears only have four draft picks, there is conventional wisdom that they should trade back and get another pick or two for the effort. But the “only four picks” thing is pretty overrated. First of all, two of the picks are in the top nine, which seems pretty good. And they didn’t exactly do nothing with the other picks.

Their draft haul, if they don’t make any trades will be:

1st Round - Caleb Williams and whoever they draft at nine
2nd Round - Montez Sweat
3rd Round - Whoever they draft
4th Round - Keenan Allen
5th Round - Ryan Bates
Sixth Round - Whoever they draft
Seventh Round - N’Keal Harry (OK that one didn’t amount to much)

The consensus is that this draft is very good at the the top (the first two rounds) and then very bad from the third to the end. The reason is that there’s very little depth because the 2024 season is the final year that college players can claim an extra Covid season which also thinned out the seniors who are in this draft, and NIL money has led a bunch of the best juniors to stay one more year, get paid and hopefully improve their draft stock for 2025.

If the Bears have really solved their QB situation long-term, then they won’t have a top ten pick for a long time. So instead of trading out of it, just use the damned thing. Take Rome Odunze and take double advantage of having Keenan for a year or two where he can help Caleb with his adjustment to the league and be a mentor to a receiver who might pair with Williams for a decade. Plus, Rome just seems really cool.

Last week he was at a workout session catching passes from Caleb with DJ Moore and Keenan. Seems notable.

The draft rumors keep showing that it may well fall very well for the Bears to get an impact wideout at nine. It sure looks like four of the first five or six picks are going to be quarterbacks. Tackle Joe Alt is going to go in the top seven (probably to Tennessee) and because of the QB tax that inflates their value it keeps pushing the three very talented wideouts down towards the Bears. Marvin Harrison Jr. is the consensus best of that bunch, but not by a whole lot over Malik Nabers and Rome. If one of them is there, just take them. Don’t overthink it.

Don’t expect to be back in the top 10, and think of this as your last chance to draft a sure thing blue chip player for a while.

When the Bears draft Caleb, in a strange way, they’ll have Justin Fields to thank. They own that pick because of last year’s trade with Carolina, who wanted to fix their QB situation for good and were willing to give up a lot to get to the top of the draft. When they got there they had to decide between the very talented, but very small Bryce Young or the next in the line of productive Ohio State quarterbacks, CJ Stroud.

In the end, they decided that they should go with Young, despite his waif-like build because he could make all the throws. And he can. Young has a great arm, he’s decisive, he’s accurate and he not only can’t see over the line but unlike short QBs who proved to be great pro passers like Drew Brees and Russell Wilson who were only short, not small, Young isn’t built to take a lickin’.

But the Panthers were scared off by Ohio State’s propensity to field passers who put up huge numbers without it translating to the NFL. Fields’ struggles in his Bears’ career to that point, mirrored those of his predecessors like Troy Smith, JT Barrett, Terrelle Pryor, Braxton Miller, Dwayne Haskins, Cardale Jones, etc., etc. Hell, some of those guys didn’t even play QB in the NFL.

They looked at Fields, to that point the most talented QB that the Buckeyes had produced since Art Schlichter, and saw that his slow mechanics and processing weren’t an issue in college when his receivers would just get wide open, but they were death in the NFL, and they imprinted those concerns onto Stroud.

So they took Young and they compounded their error by saddling Frank Reich with an all-star offensive coaching staff of guys who’d never worked together and didn’t agree on anything, which just confused the shit out of the rookie QB and they went 2-15 and they earned the top overall pick in the draft and had to give that to the Bears.

Meanwhile, Stroud proved all OSU QBs aren’t alike and he cruised to Offensive Rookie of the Year and led the Texans to the playoffs.

It all worked according to plan.

Or dumb luck.

There’s rarely much of a difference.