George McCaskey, meet Mark Walter. The youth baseball umpire should say hello to the potential tax fraudster — one man should sell the Chicago Bears for $13 billion after the other sold the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion. Welcome to the private equity screech of American sports ownership, when it’s no longer relevant that George Halas founded the NFL franchise in 1920 and McCaskey happens to be his grandson.
Just as Walter dumped the Lakers, to help his future with the U.S Attorney’s Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission, why must tortured people sit through another ignorant press conference when McCaskey and Kevin Warren say they might move to Indiana — when they’re lying? They keep playing games with Illinois legislators, as they have for too many years. Rather than let another season rot away without a dose of real stadium news, how about a perfect option in 2026?
Know how many multi-billionaires would engage in buying the Bears for $13 billion? McCaskey has said repeatedly that he won’t sell, but now that Walter has taken an all-time amount from Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, would he and his family actually say no to wild financial bundles? This is a man who should not be owning a team as a chairman. This is a man who doesn’t belong in the same ballroom as Jerry Jones, Bob Kraft, Stan Kroenke and the league’s power forces.
Someone make him an offer. Show him the amount on a computer.
Thirteen billion smackers.
McCaskey will say yes. And a big shooter will arrive on his private jet, cut deals with the Illinois governor and Chicago mayor, and end all ridiculous thoughts about property tax certainty. A beautiful stadium will sit on the lakefront, paid for by the new owner. The city actually will seem like the nation’s third-largest market, which can’t happen when McCaskey and the Reinsdorfs run three of the five major sports teams.
The circus has reached the point where the Bears think they’re bigger than the state, which isn’t possible when they haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1985. Gov. J.B. Pritzker said McCaskey and Warren, the president and CEO, have “not presented a bill” in recent months about a new stadium in Arlington Heights.
“Part of the Bears’ job here is, of course, to talk to legislators,” Pritzker said at the Illinois State Fair. “Remember, everyone, we passed a bill in the House, we passed a bill in the Senate. Those bills were not combined. There was no compromise reached between the two bills, but the Bears themselves have to figure out which ones of the parts of those bills they want in a final bill and, of course, to gather support from the legislature.”
The Bears don’t agree. Their phone doesn’t dial out. They only take calls. “We’re all adults here,” McCaskey said. “We can have constructive conversations, and I don’t think it has to be who calls who first. If there are substantive discussions to be had, let’s have them. In Indiana, they have been very proactive, very communicative, very solution-oriented.”
Pritzker continues to protect taxpayers. The Bears want tax certainty. Does George know how piddly he sounds as the owner of a massive franchise? “We felt we had presented a pretty compelling case that a stadium in Arlington would be beneficial not only for the Village of Arlington Heights, but for the community and for the entire state really,” McCaskey said. “Tremendous driver of economic activity. Job creation. Tax revenue. Sales revenue. Ultimately, that argument was unsuccessful.”
Then sell the team. He is on the downside of sports valuations, even at $9.45 billion, when the Dallas Cowboys are worth a record $15.5 billion. The idea is to build a mixed-use development — a ripoff of the extremely profitable Battery in Atlanta, by the Braves’ ballpark — and that cannot work in Hammond, Ind. McCaskey is so twisted, he actually believes fans in a nine-million-population sphere would focus on the Hoosier State.
“It’s going to require an adjustment — but when I’ve driven that route, other than a sign telling me so — I wouldn’t know that I’ve just crossed a state border,” he said. “As Kevin said, once people see the building, once they get in there, once they understand that our top priority from day one was a world-class stadium experience, we think we’ll make that adjustment. We think Bears fans are up for that.”
The NFL has yet to buy in, as McCaskey pointed out. The Chicago Bears want to play in Lost Marsh and Wolf Lake Terminal? When the skyline is at least 18 miles away, how foolish will that look on TV for 30 years? McCaskey was left to mention the Chiefs, who moved from Missouri to Kansas, to commissioner Roger Goodell. Kansas is a legitimate part of the Kansas City metro area. Northwest Indiana is a wasteland.
There are days, I’m sure, when McCaskey drives past the Guggenheim Partners firm in the Loop and knows Walter turned multinational investments into TWG Global. Did he also allow billions in loans to float toward his insurance companies? If nothing else, McCaskey and his late mother have run the Bears in good faith. Give them that.
But when Kushner and Iger buy the Lakers, where are the Chicago monsters more than one-fourth into the 21st century? Time to find out. Make the bid.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.
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