Can the Chicago Bears land both Caleb Williams and a new stadium? Seems like a Hail Mary

It’s a good thing Wednesday’s news conference started with a prayer.

The Chicago Bears are probably going to need some divine intervention to pull off their latest plan for a new stadium.

“We thank you for all the people who will benefit by the Bears staying in Chicago,” the Rev. Charlie E. Dates of the Progressive Baptist Church said. “I don’t know that you played football, but I am asking you to help us, help us to win some games, help us to get a Super Bowl here, help us to play in a Super Bowl and bring back the 1985 roaring, cheering fans we had, for your glory and for our good.”

Let us pray. pic.twitter.com/LWEEecWOHE

— ✶ Ⓜ️𝕒𝕣𝕔𝕦𝕤 ▶️ ✶ (@_MarcusD3_) April 24, 2024

Now, Dates, who surely knows how to work a congregation, admitted he was joking with the part about God playing football. But it does raise the question: If the Almighty is a Bears fan, why has he been testing Chicago for so long?

Dates, whose church is located a home run away from Guaranteed Rate Field, kicked off Wednesday’s news conference in which the Bears unveiled renderings and lofty promises for a new stadium and public-friendly development on the lakefront.

According to the team, the stadium’s projected cost is around $3.2 billion, of which the team promises to pay $2 billion, along with $300 million in loans from the NFL. That would put the public on the hook for $900 million for the stadium and anywhere from $325 million to well over a billion dollars for infrastructure improvements. The stadium would be a public-private deal and would have a roof.

Bears project funding breakdown:
Stadium alone: $3.2B (with $900M in public money)
Required public infrastructure improvements: $325M
Optional public infrastructure improvements: $1.175B

Total, if team/city pursue all infrastructure upgrades: $4.7B ($2.4B public; $2.3B private) pic.twitter.com/WQRJR13aP7

— Mariah Woelfel (@MariahWoelfel) April 24, 2024

The Bears will need the state’s support for the plan, which is centered around extending a hotel tax, preferably before the end of this legislative session, which is coming soon.

Gov. JB Pritzker has had reservations about giving money to the team for years, and the days of an Illinois governor and speaker of the house stopping the clock in Springfield to get money for a stadium are pretty much over. You can also factor in the “Friends of the Park” group, which helped scuttle a George Lucas museum on the museum campus. They aren’t enthused about this proposal, either.

.@GovPritzker, responding to @JeremyGorner’s question about the Bears’ plans to ask for about $2.3B in public financing for a new lakefront stadium: “I remain skeptical about this proposal… I’m not sure that this is among the highest priorities for taxpayers.” #twill pic.twitter.com/ubrZQnnrvC

— Brenden Moore (@brendenmoore13) April 24, 2024

Who really wants to give the Bears taxpayer help? Public money for stadiums has been proved, over and over again, to be wasteful spending, but no matter where they build a new home, the Bears are going to need help paying for it. Like all sports teams, they’d prefer to get that help from the public. So why not ask? That’s fair, but beyond the money, there are a lot of questions left unanswered like: Why build a domed stadium in a location where the views are part of the allure? Is this stadium really going to hold only 65,000 (give or take) fans, when the low seating capacity is a main argument to leave Soldier Field?

We can also ask: Why did the Bears choose to hold this news conference, which they had to have known would get negative press coverage, a day before drafting Caleb Williams with the first pick? Why usurp that positive moment? They could’ve held it in a week or two. What’s the rush?

Bears chairman George McCaskey hired Kevin Warren to be the team’s president to get this deal done, by hook or crook. On Wednesday, he was spinning faster than a Williams spiral.

Warren promised that this plan, which involves adding green space where Soldier Field stands now and erecting a new stadium just south of it, could fix everything from Chicago’s reputation as a big-event city to its crime rate.

According to Warren, Chicago will have a Super Bowl, a Final Four and peace in the streets.

“This will have 14 acres of athletic fields and a recreational park to allow, as I mentioned earlier, for our youth to be able to come together and do things in a productive manner,” Warren said. “We have a crisis in this world with our young people. And there’s a race to who gets to our young people first, the streets or us.”

And if this deal helps Warren’s reputation, makes the McCaskeys wealthier and entertains the Grabowskis, even better. To his credit, Warren also made some more, uh, grounded promises.

“We’ll build restrooms,” Warren said. “We’ll make this a place that people want to come and spend time.”

(If you’re like me, you read that and imagined James Earl Jones saying, “We’ll build restrooms, Ray.”)

All of these stadium plans (and Olympic bids) include some kind of public good that could conceivably happen without the billions spent for an actual stadium. Warren isn’t talking about building parks in the pockets of the city where kids really need them, and it’s not as if the museum campus is easily accessible for kids in the West and South sides. But the whole “we’re doing it for the kids” rigmarole sounds better than just admitting, “Give us money for a new stadium.” We all know that’s the truth.

White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is trying to pull off a similar trick just west of Soldier Field. That’s going over even worse because he’s not promising much money to help, he already did this in the late 1980s and everyone (most notably White Sox fans) already blames him for the team’s state of disarray.

Like the Sox, the Bears got state help to redo their stadium and it was just two decades ago. How did that work out? We still have an astounding amount of public debt for the Spaceship on the Lake and the team wants to move. (The fans don’t like it, either, but if the Bears were any good, they wouldn’t care as much.)

The Bears have been looking around for a new home for years, and it was just last year they closed on the Arlington Park racetrack in the northwest suburbs. It seemed certain they would build a new stadium with a mixed-use business development on the 326 acres. I mean, they actually own the land. They would own the stadium. It would make sense, right?

Not for the Bears, who aren’t exactly known for their management success.

Their grand plans were halted by a disagreement with suburban school boards about real estate taxes, and now the Bears, led by Warren, who lives downtown and has made friends with Mayor Brandon Johnson, have pivoted back to the city and a stadium they wouldn’t fully own.

Some people thought this was all just posturing. But the village of Arlington Heights and the school districts are willing to negotiate, and Warren still seems focused on staying in Chicago.

Years ago, the Bears fought with former mayor (and Bears season ticket holder) Lori Lightfoot, who sarcastically told them to worry about beating the Green Bay Packers. Though the Bears haven’t done that since 2018, before Lightfoot was even elected, they have found more success dealing with Johnson. Now they just have to charm Pritzker and the state legislature.

Good luck.

In the news conference, Johnson predictably mentioned Daniel Burnham, the father of the Plan of Chicago and the hero of the city’s protected lakefront. It’s the politician’s version of invoking Papa Bear Halas or Mike Ditka.

“Daniel Burnham’s vision for the lakefront was to center it around people, the people of Chicago,” Johnson said. “He envisioned an active lakefront with space and amusement for everyone to enjoy. The plan revitalizes that vision.”

Burnham died in 1912, nine years before the Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago, so we’ll never know what his feelings are on domed stadiums versus “Bear Weather.”

But he’d agree that Warren and the Bears aren’t making small plans here. Will these plans be realized? I don’t know about you, but until a shovel hits the ground, I’m going to remain skeptical that this Hail Mary gets completed.

(Top rendering of a proposed Bears stadium courtesy of the Chicago Bears)