Bears president/CEO Kevin Warren’s timing has always been intentional.
His letter Wednesday, though, was as smooth as the false starts the Bears piled up in the first month of the season.
Warren’s declaration Wednesday the Bears would look outside Cook County — and even into Northwest Indiana — for a new stadium site rained on what was supposed to be the most thrilling week of the most exciting year the Bears have had since 2018.
Packers Week is all about the fans, not the transient players and coaches. Warren’s letter reopened, for public consumption, an argument between the state and a franchise valued at a reported $8.8 billion with promises of suites and Super Bowl tickets that few can afford. The letter reminded Bears fans of their franchise’s failure to, as Warren once promised, get shovels in the ground to start construction by the end of the year.
There have been countless Decembers when Bears football was so soulless, so meaningless, that a stadium hunt would provide a welcome distraction. Not this one. If there was ever a week to skip the off-field drama, this was it.
It’s all so exhausting. Why didn’t Warren do this two weeks earlier or two weeks later? Why didn’t he wait for the season to end?
If his past is any indication, the answer is because the Bears are about to be the center of the football universe. Their game is in prime time on Saturday night, and Warren wants to take public-relations advantage.
He’s done it twice before.
One day before Caleb Williams became a member of the Bears, the USC quarterback threw footballs to kids on the site of the former Tiger Stadium in Detroit as part of the NFL’s pre-draft events. Afterward, he spoke passionately about the opportunity that was about to be afforded him as the No. 1 pick in the draft.
Watching Williams from a corner of the field, one NFL official looked up and wondered what the heck the Bears were doing back at the exact same time back home — and why Warren wanted to command so much attention one day before the biggest draft in Bears history.
That day, the Bears held a boisterous press conference touting the team’s $3.2 million plan to build a stadium on the Lakefront. The pastor who said the opening prayer asked God to “help us win some games.” Mayor Brandon Johnson called the proposal the “crown jewel” of downtown revitalization.
The Bears wanted to tie their stadium plans to the excitement surrounding Williams — and for the national networks to show the artist’s rendering of the stadium on draft night, serving as a commercial for the Bears’ progress.
Warren tried the same tack on opening day this year. Four-and-a-half hours before Ben Johnson made his regular season coaching debut on “Monday Night Football,” Warren sent an email to season ticket holders stumping for a different site — Arlington Heights. More than half of the team’s season ticket base lives within 25 minutes of the northwest suburb. The team hoped to build there soon to “house what is irreplaceable to this franchise: You. Our Fans. Our Family.”
Attaching the Bears’ public stadium pitches to thrilling franchise moments hasn’t worked. There’s no reason to think this will either. Warren’s letter quickly prompted derision from a Gov. Pritzker spokesperson who called it a “startling slap in the face” as well as a “let’s-get-it-done” message from the Indiana governor.
Warren got out of the way Thursday — he gave no additional interviews to detail the Bears’ latest gambit.It would be wise for him to stay out of the way — if he can resist it — the rest of the season. For the first time in a long time, Bears fans have real football to worry about.
