(02-25-2026 07:05 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(02-25-2026 09:36 AM)Dr Dawgma III Wrote:  While everyone thinks of the Bears-Packers as the oldest NFL rivalry, it was in fact Bears-Cardinals.

The Chicago Cardinals were the White Sox (South Side) equivalent in Chicago. So all those blue-collar fans in the SNL skits would have been Cards fans in an alternate universe. Hard to imagine!

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I'll pose this question again: if the State of Illinois loses all that NFL tax revenue, could there be a movement to build a multi-purpose dome east of St. Louis across the Illinois border? The NFL looks to have some stability for the time being, but St. Louis is an interesting case. They only lost their team because the owner wanted to move to LA; it wasn't due to lack of support or success.

It appears high ranking political officials in Missouri support the idea. So could this hypothetically open the door for Illinois to pull the ol' okie-doke if the state loses the Bears?

I don’t think all of these “If Illinois (or Chicago) loses the Bears, then couldn’t Illinois (or Chicago) build a stadium for another team?” posts are fully understanding that it’s all circular. If neither the State of Illinois nor the City of Chicago can figure out a stadium deal for the team that its residents actually cares *and* that team is even spending $2 billion of its own money towards stadium construction (which is a huge team contribution by NFL standards), then they certainly aren’t figuring out a stadium deal for a hypothetical random team that would almost certainly be asking for a fully publicly-subsidized stadium (as is the case for virtually any team that threatens to move).

It’s like asking whether someone that has failed basic arithmetic can then immediately get an A+ in AP Calculus BC. The economics of the Bears stadium deal are far easier for the politicians to deal with and less expensive to the taxpayers compared to any realistic stadium deal for a hypothetical new team. Even if the NFL cares about the St. Louis market (and I don’t think they do as they’ve set their sights on international markets as the engine for future growth), there is zero reason to believe that the State of Illinois government would somehow get a different stadium deal done with a different team (and that’s not even taking account they couldn’t even afford it even if they wanted to get that deal done).

While I fully agree that Illinois isn't going to fumble away the Bears and then magically attract the Bengals/Jags/etc, there is ample precedent for cities and States fumbling away teams and then paying 5-10x as much for a new team a decade or 2 down the road. The big difference here is that Arlington Heights is already 100% on board, it's just the State of Illinois that has been dragging their feet for literally YEARS, to the point that Warren has finally moved on to Plan C. It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but if enough politicians lose their jobs after fumbling away the Bears, then their replacements would have learned a very valuable (and expensive) lesson, and they'd be more apt to do whatever it took to return the NFL to the State. Most likely, that would just be getting the Bears to move back once their deal in Indiana expired ofc, but other options would likely at least be considered.