The Chicago Bears put together a press conference featuring the team chairman, president, general manager, and head coach, with the main topic of discussion being how and why they were running it back in 2021. This isn’t to say that George McCaskey, Ted Phillips, Ryan Pace, and Matt Nagy provided satisfactory answers as to why they’re all back again. It’s just that it happens to be the case.
And in essence, that brings Bears to a place wondering how and why it’s happening at all.
I think George McCaskey’s words tell us everything we need to know:
George McCaskey was asked who he consults and confers with when making big organizational decisions and the first people he mentioned were other NFL owners he trusts. Then he mentioned the family and board of directors.
— Adam Hoge (@AdamHoge) January 13, 2021
Let me get this straight. When the Chicago Bears make important, potentially landscape-shifting decisions, the chairman consults rival owners and leans on nepotism? That’s madness. Imagine a wild hog consulting a lion on what its lunch plans happen to be for the afternoon. Because that’s essentially what that is in my eyes. Consulting competing NFL owners – even the most trustworthy ones – whose self-interests differ from yours is ridiculous. After that, McCaskey mentions family and the team’s board of directors.
In other words, McCaskey meets with no one with a football background when making important football decisions.
To say that’s a “big yikes” doesn’t do it any justice. For what McCaskey admitted today is that the Bears have no system of checks and balances within their organization. There is no depth or perspective when it comes to the decisions that impact a billion dollar entity. Moreover, McCaskey essentially confessed to not truly grasping the value in structuring a franchise that had such checks. That’s in addition to not understanding the cutthroat industry that is professional football. We probably could’ve come to that conclusion on our own. All we had to do was base it on the franchise’s performance over the last 30 years. But to see it spelled out like this really drives it home.
Damning confessions all around have me wondering how the Bears emerge from this mess. I guess we have an entire offseason to figure it out.