What ails the Bears? Let's start at the top
On Sunday, Bears principal owner Virginia McCaskey turned 102.
Team founder George Halas’ first child was born before penicillin. She was a little girl when Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. She was a teenager when Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936 and when the Hindenburg blew up in 1937.
And she was 63 when the Bears last won an NFL championship in January 1986.
This isn’t a woman to be trifled with. Fifty percent of her DNA is from the man who was one of the founding fathers of the NFL. Think about that.
When the bags on heads popped up and the chants of ‘‘Sell the team!’’ echoed through Soldier Field as the Bears went on a 10-game losing streak this season, did people know deep down what they were asking for?
There clearly is something flawed in the Bears’ culture, and it must be the historic ownership that’s at fault. What else could it be? Everything starts at the top. The axiom holds, from wolf packs to corporations.
After a 5-12 season, two playoff appearances since the 2010 season, one playoff victory since the 2006 season and one championship since the Beatles released ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ 61 years ago, the McCaskey family — headed by Virginia McCaskey — has failed.
No one knows what will happen after the longtime matriarch leaves this mortal coil. The likely tumult means anything is possible.
Virginia had 11 children, and son George is the Bears’ chairman, having replaced brother Michael. The ownership of the team is complicated. There are a lot of hands in the pie. Most are McCaskeys, but there’s also businessman Pat Ryan and the estate of businessman Andrew McKenna.
Selling the Bears would create an earthquake unrivaled in the NFL. You don’t blow up the Bears casually.
One might say Virginia McCaskey doesn’t have hands-on control over the Bears and their operations. This is true. She is very hands-off, very private. But she is the mother, the figurehead for all those kids, the oldest descendant of ‘‘The Old Man’’ himself, and her quiet, restrained, church-going severity permeates the Bears like a fog. When son Michael (who died in 2020) was demoted from team president in a news conference at Halas Hall in 1999, she was sitting beside him. She did the deed.
When the Bears went 5-11 in 2014 and coach Marc Trestman and general manager Phil Emery were fired, son George said his mom was ‘‘pissed off’’ at all the losing. He added that her ‘‘dissatisfaction is shared by her children, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren.’’
Terrific.
The McCaskeys have failed that anger. People say they’re cheap. What they really are is uninventive, staid, old-school, stuck in something like a Bronko Nagurski/T-formation time capsule.
I asked Michael McCaskey some years back, when he was still the Bears’ president, what he called George Halas when they were together.
‘‘Grandfather,’’ he replied.
It’s hard to forget stuff like that.
Let Jeff Bezos buy the team, online squawkers say. Or Elon Musk. Or George Soros. Or a private-equity dude. Any billionaire will do.
Billionaires, as we know, rule the day. From business to politics to music (thinking of you, Taylor Swift), billionaires are the gods we worship. But how would one of them — or a consortium of them — run the Bears? Jerry Jones is a billionaire, and his Cowboys are stuck in a rut even his money can’t figure out how to fix.
This was an interesting year. Two quarterbacks the Bears could have gotten via trade or draft — veteran Sam Darnold and rookie Jayden Daniels — were voted to the upcoming Pro Bowl. The Bears’ Caleb Williams, of course, was not.
But neither was Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, a generational talent and, yep, another player the Bears could have had.
Little decisions, little twists make all the difference in the NFL. You wonder whether a rich new owner of the Bears would know what they are doing.
When I think of Virginia McCaskey, I think of Loyola University’s famed nun, Sister Jean, who is 105. I think of Mary Melberg, who at 106 was the oldest living Cubs fan when I visited her in Texas in 2011. These women are tough, they’re feisty, they don’t quit.
Nobody lasts forever. Things change. But for now — believe it — the Bears are 100% not for sale.