Chicago Bears president and chief executive officer Kevin Warren watches against the Carolina Panthers during last month’s game in Chicago.
AP
IF HALAS HALL WAS A FORTRESS — and many days it seems that way — multiple cannon would be threatening the walls.
There’s a big one aimed at the football side. That’s where a season of development for rookie QB Caleb Williams has swiftly devolved into a guillotine countdown for head coach Matt Eberflus.
From the business bunker, “Bear Down” right now can be more appropriately replaced as a chorus of chaos by the Temptations’ classic “Ball of Confusion.”
That’s what their world is today — hey, hey.
MANAGEMENT WAS HAPPY TO TRUMPET a memo of understanding Monday about reduced property taxes with the three school districts that oversee the wilting acres of Arlington Park.
It was ballyhooed as some sort of landmark breakthrough.
But was it?
Or was it a face-saving courtesy extended to George McCaskey, Kevin Warren and all as the governing powers in Arlington Heights, Palatine and Rolling Meadows know time and logic regarding the optimum location of a new Bears stadium is 100% on their side?
THE FIGURES INVOLVED ARE LAUGHABLE — except for those with vested interests in the profitability of the Bears.
As reported by multiple credible media, if the MOU is approved by the boards of school districts 214, 211 and 15, the stipulated annual taxes of the Bears will drop from $9M to something closer to $4M.
That’s a savings of $5M per year. That number comes against the backdrop of Warren’s now-mythic statement that every week of delay in getting “shovels into the ground” will cost the Bears $3M in increased construction costs.
So, by spending a minimum of 30 weeks — and in full truth closer to 100 — engaging in a battle minuscule with good-faith school districts in impacted suburbs, the Bears will save $50M in their first decade of ownership of AP acreage while already having lost at least $90M in higher building costs — and counting.
THAT’S MARVELOUS FINANCIAL CONCEPTUALIZATION if a business is trying to go tapioca.
But that’s also what a sports entertainment franchise with major-market exclusivity and the golden safety net of shared TV and ancillary revenue streams can get away with.
That is, as long as that company doesn’t mind spending much more on a generational project than it has to.
FOR BEARS WATCHERS KEENLY INTERESTED in following the unbalanced balls, here are two concurrent realities:
— This autumn, the football side is failing. The huge catastrophe that could await is a serious injury to Williams in the season’s final six weeks, beginning Thanksgiving Day against the take-no-prisoners at Detroit (11:30 a.m., CBS).
There is a coherent proposition that he should be shut down ASAP. Washington’s Jayden Daniels got off to a tremendous start in his inaugural campaign but has already been diminished by repeated poundings.
The play-to-play safety of rookie QB Drake Maye with the Patriots is a prime topic of concern in New England. Even Denver’s Bo Nix — now a very solid candidate for Offensive Rookie of the Year — is one bad blow away from sidetracking Sean Payton’s latest thrust at coaching redemption.;
—WHILE FOOTBALL OPS IN LAKE FOREST FLAILS, the business side is no better. There’s an air of toxicity that has been introduced into the halls of Halas in the 22 months since Warren was hired. Even George McCaskey has been handling some matters with methods that suggest either burnout or atypical autumnal callousness.
That ham-handed aura led to some staff deletions during the off season that have negatively impacted.
Front and center is a brutal trim in media relations that’s left some remaining McCaskey loyalists understanding why Eberflus goes out week after week and appears increasingly defenseless against freshly fanged rows of reporters.
That Eberflus is not equipped to be head coach of a pokey, lowbrow franchise like the Bears is evident. That a decent human being now has to appear after every loss and look like out-of-date Hungarian kielbasa from Toledo isn’t fair to a man capable of being coached up as a public persona.
KWESI ADOFO-MENSAH IS the sharp GM of the Vikings, a group showing how a future-is-now urgency can successfully play out.
Long before his competitors thumped the Bears last Sunday, he had a relevant observation on how an NFL front office blends attitudes:
“There isn’t a football side culture and a business side culture. There’s one culture. Professionalism is a standard of work and a standard of excellence. Everything connects.”
AT HALAS HALL THESE DAYS, little connects.
The team isn’t winning. The pursuit of a new stadium lacks singular focus and twists like an open Cole Kmet waving to for a touch.
If winning teams in the NFL got the lion’s share of television and other revenues, the McCaskeys would have been forced to sell years ago.
Instead, pro football’s expedient embrace of corporate socialism keeps the walls of their besieged fortress from giving way.
It’s not capitalism’s way.
But it keeps paying Bears fans on the hook for ceaseless broken hopes and heartaches in the herd.
Jim O’Donnell’s Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at [email protected]. All communications may be considered for publication.