Bears owner George McCaskey: Legacy, tradition won't stop potential move to Indiana stadium

PHOENIX — Bears fans better wrap their minds around the team moving to Indiana. George McCaskey already has.

Tradition and legacy are incredibly important to McCaskey, the Bears’ chairman and the grandson of George Halas, and the team has been in his family for more than a century. But as stadium plans in Hammond, Indiana, get increasingly serious, he is at peace with being the one who moves the team out of Illinois and assumes the fan base will move past its initial backlash to the idea.

“I don’t think, in the end, it’s going to matter to people,” he said Wednesday at the end of the NFL annual meeting. “Back in 1976, the New York Football Giants went across state lines to New Jersey. They have been there ever since. The Jets joined them shortly thereafter. And then 35 years later, both teams had an opportunity to reevaluate their situations and recommitted to New Jersey.

“And somehow, the Republic has survived.”

That’s a glib response to fans who were irritated when president Kevin Warren went public last December, leading up to a massive game against the Packers, with the idea of building a stadium in Northwest Indiana.

The Bears have played at Soldier Field since 1971, interrupted only by one season at the University of Illinois during renovations, and were at Wrigley Field for 50 years before that. Nearly their entire history has been in Chicago, which made a potential move to the old Arlington Park racetrack site in Arlington Heights a bit hard to accept for some, let alone venturing outside the state.

Again, if that happens, the Bears’ message is get over it.

“Whether we go to Arlington Park or to Hammond, there is going to be an adjustment period,” McCaskey said. “People are allowed some time to get used to it. I think Bears fans are up to it.”

There was no news on the stadium as McCaskey and Warren talked Wednesday morning. There was insight, such as McCaskey’s comments about potentially moving to Indiana and the tension he expressed about his family having to borrow $2 billion to build, but no actual movement.

That’s a story in itself. June will mark five years since the Bears began this process — Matt Nagy and Justin Fields were on the team — and they still can’t even say in which state they’ll build the stadium.

Warren didn’t express any frustration over the slow pace. He maintained the Bears, despite the delays, are in “an excellent position” with two very appealing options.

The Bears own a 326-acre property in Arlington Heights and are exploring a 340-acre purchase in Hammond. They have the legislative approval they need in Indiana, but don’t own property there yet. In Illinois, it’s the reverse as they seek tax certainty from the state legislature, which ends its session May 31.

It’s no coincidence that date lines up with Warren’s remark Wednesday that the organization wants to make a decision by “late spring, early summer.”

Anything resembling a deadline, of course, is written in pencil.

It would seem the main reason to stall now rather than proceed toward Indiana is that the Bears would truly prefer to go to Arlington Heights and are giving that as much time as reasonably possible to materialize.

Warren repeatedly expressed confidence the Bears would get “shovels in the ground” by the end of last year, which would set a timeline for the stadium opening for the 2028 season, but that didn’t happen. Now they’re looking at the 2029 season, and meanwhile the team will continue playing in a building that commissioner Roger Goodell said is “not at the top of the list” in terms of modern amenities and elevated fan experience.

Perhaps it was incidental, but as McCaskey discussed the stadium options with a small group of Chicago-based reporters, with Warren sitting in the back of the room, he called Arlington Park “shovel-ready.”

When the Bears hired Warren in 2023 to replace Ted Phillips, his mission was to get them going the right direction on the field, in business and in their pursuit of a new stadium, but the public perception was primarily that he was brought in to get the stadium deal done after he’d been at the forefront of the Vikings’ stadium project.

The Bears just had their best season in more than a decade, going 11-6 and winning a playoff game — the business is doing fine, too, with a recent Forbes valuation of $8.2 billion — and Warren told the Sun-Times that gives him a little extra fire to accelerate the stadium.

“And we will,” he said firmly. “That is the dream, to have a world-class team playing in a world-class stadium.”

If that happens in Indiana, so be it.

It certainly wasn’t Plan A and still might not be. But the Bears — and, most importantly, McCaskey — are comfortable with it.