There was a holiday hootenanny on Chicago’s lakefront when the Bears bested long-time rival the Green Bay Packers in a thrilling overtime victory on Saturday night. The spectacular win meant the team clinched a spot in the NFL playoffs for the first time since 2020.
Orange-and-blue pride has swept the region. But like a lingering hangover, there remains that stadium-search buzzkill.
Kevin Warren, the Bears’ president and chief executive officer, certainly made no friends among fans or influenced Illinois lawmakers when he tossed out the possibility last week that the team might, maybe, consider moving to northwest Indiana.
Nobody believes that scenario, despite the announcement this week that the Kansas City Chiefs, in a similar situation to the Bears, are actually moving to Kansas.
Bears fans should be familiar with the shifting plans the Monsters of the Midway have spread across conference room tables at Halas Hall in Lake Forest:
First, Soldier Field, where the team’s lease runs through 2033, was proposed as home to a fancy new $3.2 billion lakefront stadium.
Then, the former Arlington Park Racetrack in Arlington Heights, which the McCaskey family purchased in 2023 for nearly $200 million, surfaced as a new Bears den. The site off Northwest Highway and Route 53, was/is going to be turned into a $5 billion, mixed-use development with a 60,000-seat domed stadium.
Now comes the threat of jumping the border into Indiana, which currently has a professional football team, the Indianapolis Colts. Some may remember the Colts were the gems of their former Baltimore home before a sneaky middle-of-the-night run in 1984 from Charm City to the Hoosier State.
In a letter to season ticket holders, Warren spelled out that although Arlington Heights is the preferred site, the team is exploring “other viable alternatives,” including a nebulous and unspecified northwest Indiana location. Prompting this latest plan is the team’s concern over the stated needs for property-tax breaks and infrastructure help from the state of Illinois and lawmakers’ cavalier attitude toward the Bears’ proposals.
Surely, if the team were serious about going to Indiana, officials there would be asked to pony up state funding to help build what would be a mammoth undertaking. If you’ve driven Indiana roads, the state isn’t exactly known for its sterling infrastructure.
One site not being mentioned by Bears’ honchos as viable is the lakefront property offered by former Waukegan Mayor Ann Taylor during the team’s early stadium search. The land on the city’s north Lake Michigan shoreline is definitely dead in the water, if it ever was floating. Also sunk appear to be sites in Aurora, Naperville and a few south Cook County suburbs.
Some may remember New York City’s pro football teams faced a similar stadium dilemma. They ended up in a multi-use stadium in New Jersey. Don’t think that movable option to another state is on the table for the Bears.
What remains on the table, however, is that Halas Hall in Conway Park, off Route 60, which has been the headquarters for the team since 1997, will stay in Lake Forest, according to a News-Sun front-page story this week by Daniel Dorfman, quoting a team vice president.
That alone is a clue the Bears will continue to be an Illinois team in a state where it was founded in Decatur in 1919 as the Staleys. By 1920, “Papa Bear” George Halas, one of the founders of the National Football League, moved the team from Downstate and changed the name to the Chicago Bears. The rest is history.
Lake Forest has been a nexus for the Bears since the team began practicing in the city, near Lake Forest College, in 1975. The first Halas Hall was built adjacent to the college in 1979. Plenty of team officials and players live in Lake County.
While the Bears flip-flop over stadium plans, officials of the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football Conference have settled on a domed stadium near Olathe, Kansas, a suburb southeast of Kansas City, Missouri. That comes less than a week after the Bears’ Indiana gambit.
The new Chiefs stadium in a mixed-use district is planned to be completed in time for the 2031 season and would cost an estimated $3 billion, with Kansas picking up about 60% of the cost for the project. The plans are similar to what the Bears have proposed.
The Chiefs currently play in Arrowhead Stadium, their home since 1972, in the Truman Sports Complex in Kansas City, Missouri. The team’s lease goes through the 2030 season at the stadium, the oldest in the AFC, which underwent $20 million in renovations in order to host World Cup games next summer.
According to Kansas City media outlets, voters on the Missouri side rejected a boost in the sales tax which would have funded improvements to Arrowhead Stadium, located near the intersection of two interstates and help finance a new stadium for the baseball Royals.
The debate over the new stadium will continue in the new year. It’s time to bear down and not hibernate for the two remaining games and the coming postseason.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor, and editor.
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