Jim Tinaglia, the mayor of Arlington Heights, has been working tirelessly with his supporters and allies in Springfield to help the Chicago Bears pass the necessary legislation to begin construction at Arlington Park. So when the bill fell short in the House at the May 31st deadline, it must’ve felt like a crushing failure. Not long after that, the Bears Board of Directors voted to shift the focus to Hammond, Indiana. That town’s mayor, Thomas McDermott, pretty much declared victory in a recent speech. One would think Tinaglia would be angry that the Bears have given up.

He’s not.

He admitted on 104.3 The Score in a recent interview that he doesn’t blame the Bears at all for the decision. They had no choice. All of his criticism was leveled at the Illinois government for not finding the urgency to get a deal done. A deal that was honestly better than most states usually get in these types of negotiations. Governor J.B. Pritzker’s lack of direct leadership and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s constant interference put the Bears in an impossible situation.

Either back down and wait for a change that probably won’t be coming, or follow through on their threat to leave the state. Tinaglia is not surprised they chose the latter.

The Chicago Bears don’t have any alternatives.

Right now, their two options are to wait for next spring or pick a spot in Hammond and start building. The Illinois government won’t call a special session in the summer to address this issue, and it’s unlikely the problem will be solved in the fall session either. It wasn’t even discussed at that time last year. So you start to see the team’s situation. If they wait until spring, it will be a crystal clear confirmation that all of the Indiana antics up to this point were nothing but an elaborate bluff. It would’ve been political suicide.

As inept as Kevin Warren has been through much of this saga for the Bears, he at least understood the reality this time. You can’t back down from a bluff. You play the hand you’re dealt, and in this case, it’s following through on the threat to move. Tinaglia isn’t happy about it, but he understands it. He likely would’ve done the same in their position. This failure falls at the feet of Springfield, who had a good deal in their hands and let it slip away because of greed and disunity.

Everything now hinges on how serious the Bears are.

Remember, Warren stated he wanted shovels in the ground by last year. It didn’t happen. That should mean he and the McCaskeys are anxious to get things going. Rumors abound that they’re already communicating with potential contractors and have narrowed the site choices down to two. It may have been a bluff at first, but not anymore. This is serious. Based on the timelines involved, the point of no return for Illinois will likely be the end of November. That will be when the state’s fall legislative session ends.

If the government doesn’t accept working something out, it’s a safe bet the Chicago Bears will get shovels in the ground by Christmas. Don’t forget they play the Green Bay Packers that day. Knowing how Warren operates, he’ll make the announcement beforehand. Some Illinois officials are already working to draft a bill they believe can pass. Whether there is enough time to navigate the quagmire of Springfield is the big question. The Bears don’t seem interested in waiting much longer.

Caleb Williams became the first Chicago Bears player to ever grace the English version of the Madden cover. That it’s a quarterback must be utterly surreal for fans after decades of ineptitude at the position. Hype is already building for the upcoming release, and both covers look great. Like any celebrity athlete, Williams has gone on a media tour to help promote the game. One exercise he participated in was building the perfect NFL quarterback. He was given nine categories and asked which QB is the best ever at that specific trait.

The first five were pretty standard.

• IQ: Tom Brady
• Speed: Michael Vick or Lamar Jackson
• Size: Ben Roethlisberger
• Arm talent: Aaron Rodgers
• Juking: Lamar Jackson

All more than acceptable answers. Williams has long said that Brady and Rodgers were his idols growing up. Vick and Jackson are the unquestioned kings of mobile quarterbacks. Here is where it gets interesting. Four other categories were mentioned. Williams had the same answer for all four.

• Mobility: Himself
• Top speed: Himself
• Toughness: Himself
• Vision: Himself

Arrogant? Maybe. Caleb Williams may not be totally insane, though.

Let’s start with mobility. It isn’t a secret that Williams can run. He won a Heisman trophy at USC thanks in large part to his ability to keep plays alive. He’s been doing that for two years in Chicago, but last season was a massive step up in effectiveness. According to advanced metrics, he was 3rd in the NFL in pressure-to-sack rate and 1st in total sacks avoided. In other words, getting him on the ground was a nightmare for opposing defenses. So Williams has a strong argument in this category.

He was also correct about speed. His 21.01 mph against San Francisco was the fastest by any quarterback in the NFL last season. That is the same as Vick achieved during his peak in Atlanta. Toughness? That one is difficult to measure. Williams’ best argument is that he took 68 sacks as a rookie in 2024, along with dozens of additional hits, and didn’t miss a single game. So the Bears quarterback at least has a viable argument in three of those cases. The challenging one is vision.

Williams doesn’t have a case here.

Vision constitutes a quarterback who can see the entire field, recognize where the open man is or will be, and deliver the ball on time and on target. This is where Caleb Williams’ case falls apart. One stat that tends to highlight which quarterbacks have good vision is TTT, or Time To Throw. That measures the time between the snap of the ball and the quarterback’s throw. The lower the number, the greater the processing speed. Tom Brady, often considered the gold standard, had a career average of around 2.45-2.5 seconds.

According to Next Gen Stats, Williams clocked in at 3.17 seconds in 2025, which was actually better than his rookie season but still the highest in the NFL. He’d like people to think his decision to hold the ball so often comes from a search for big plays. In reality, it’s a mix of that and sometimes questionable vision. If there is one category he had no leg to stand on, it’s that one. Changing that narrative remains an ongoing challenge. We’ll see if he can knock it down further in 2026.

The Chicago Bears’ stadium plans have bounced around potential possibilities for the past five years. It started with Arlington Heights, moved to downtown, then back to Arlington Heights, and most recently has involved a potential site in northwestern Indiana. After the Illinois legislature failed to pass any bill that would’ve given the Bears property tax assistance before the May 31st deadline, the team held a vote to devote their attention to building in Hammond, Indiana. No specific site has been selected yet, but many feel it’s all but a done deal.

Others argue that until shovels are in the ground, nothing is decided yet. That is what longtime NFL reporter and insider Dan Pompei had to say about the situation during an interview with 104.3 The Score. Here is where it gets interesting. One must remember that the NFL has a stake in this process. They’ve been wanting the Bears to get a new stadium built for years, tired of having one of the marquee franchises stuck in an old and outdated building like Soldier Field. What is their preference in all of this, or do they even have one?

Pompei knows they do, and it’s Arlington Heights.

This puts the Chicago Bears stadium shift to Hammond in a new perspective.

Keep this in mind. The Bears hosted multiple NFL representatives for a visit to Hammond last year, including Commissioner Roger Goodell. So this report of the league preferring Arlington Heights was made with full knowledge of what the Bears would be getting if they accepted the Indiana offer. That says a lot. It also offers strong indications that this latest shift to Hammond might not be the endgame some people think it is. There is now a stronger possibility that it is a power play by the team to force the Illinois government into action.

Based on the recent string of reports, there is mounting pressure on Governor J.B. Pritzker to do something to save the situation before it’s too late. He deserves a lot of the blame for letting things get this far. Pritzker didn’t give the Bears’ stadium issue the time of day for three years, until they threatened to move to Indiana. That lack of urgency on his part now threatens to destroy one of his state’s greatest legacies. This government is controlled by his party. It falls on him to do something.

NFL pressure might be why this issue continues.

Under normal circumstances, the Bears’ stadium would likely already be under construction. After all, Indiana is offering a far sweeter deal than anything Illinois has put on the table. Most owners would’ve jumped the border by now. It is possible that power brokers within the NFL are urging the Bears to continue negotiating with Springfield over Arlington Heights. They’re fairly close. They own the property and have worked out tax agreements with the township. All they need is legislation to make those negotiations legal.

Yet the government can’t get out of its own way. Nobody can agree on anything. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is using every trick he has to block the Arlington Heights move. He says it’s because he wants to keep the team in the city, but most believe he doesn’t want to lose revenue from commuter traffic. Others want their share of the pie, making it even harder to form a coalition. Add the fact that Kevin Warren and George McCaskey have zero experience dealing with politicians, and you have the mudpit they’re stuck in.

Green Bay Packers fans were elated when the news dropped that their team had traded for Micah Parsons. Arguably, the second-best pass rusher in the NFL, behind only Myles Garrett, was coming to Lambeau Field to wear green and gold. This drastically improved their Super Bowl hopes. The results didn’t take long to follow. In 14 games, Parsons had 12.5 sacks, generating constant pressure and pushing the Packers to a 9-4-1 record with a lead in the NFC North. That included a big home win over the Chicago Bears.

Then everything went wrong. Parsons tore his ACL against Denver a week later, and Green Bay’s defense went into a tailspin. That was encapsulated in their two subsequent losses to the Bears, in which they coughed up massive second-half leads. Instead of becoming their latest moment of ascent to championship content, it became Caleb Williams‘ arrival as a star quarterback. Unfortunately, Packer fans are now learning a new reality about Parsons that goes back to his days in Dallas.

He’s not exactly big on brand loyalty. That was proven true when he chose Williams as #1 for the top 100 players in the NFL of 2026. He even used the quarterback’s newly coined “Iceman” nickname.

Micah Parsons just lit the fuse on a possible time bomb.

Packer fans already hate the Bears. It’s been ingrained in most of them since birth. Yet they’ve developed a special level of hatred for Williams over the past two years. It started in late 2024, when he beat them at Lambeau Field, forcing Green Bay into the 7th seed and forcing them to play the eventual champion Eagles in the first round. Then it was the playoff loss in the wild card round. Not only did Williams lead a comeback from down 21-3 to win, but he went on the postgame show on national TV and shredded a literal block of cheese to rub it in.

It was the equivalent of Aaron Rodgers screaming “I still f**king own you!” after beating the Bears a few years ago. Humiliating in every sense of the word. So now imagine that Micah Parsons, your best player, not only picks that despised quarterback as the best player in the league, but even uses his nickname that he largely built on the Packers’ heads. It would’ve been like Julius Peppers selecting Rodgers as #1 right after Green Bay won the Super Bowl in 2010. Utter betrayal.

Things aren’t helped by the injury situation.

Parsons already admitted that he probably won’t return from his knee issue until mid-October at the earliest. That means he is likely to miss the first matchup against the Bears. There is no way Green Bay will move him or get rid of him anytime soon. However, the relationship between him and the fans has become very dicey. The Packers gave up a ton to acquire him from Dallas. Then they made him one of the highest-paid players in NFL history. Then he gets hurt, crippling a vital season of their Super Bowl window and spends his recovery time praising the most hated player of your biggest rival.

That is the kind of stuff fans don’t forget. It serves as another reminder that, for all his brilliance on the field, Parsons is incredibly naive to how ingrained rivalries are in this sport. He did the same thing in Dallas for years, and it clearly didn’t help his relationship with Jerry Jones or Cowboys fans. It appears he’s already on the same track in Green Bay. Unless he can deliver them a championship within the next year or two, that stuff is likely to fester.

Let’s be clear here. Everybody is to blame for the Chicago Bears now being probably one final step away from making Hammond, Indiana, their new permanent home for a new stadium. It started with Ted Phillips purchasing Arlington Heights without a plan for cultivating enough relationships to make it viable. Many also point to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for not taking the situation more seriously until Indiana became a serious threat last year. However, if you follow the many breadcrumbs, all of the tributaries trace back to the same man: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. More specifically, his hold over Bears president Kevin Warren.

Everything went sideways in 2024 when Warren pivoted away from Arlington Heights to pursue a new downtown stadium south of Soldier Field. Johnson was a direct partner in that entire pitch. According to Fran Spielman and Mitchell Armentrout of the Chicago Sun-Times, experienced people down in Springfield knew immediately that the entire approach was doomed to fail.

“The Bears f—– it up by going with Johnson’s stupid thing without pulling Springfield in and having there be $2 billion in state funding required,” the source said, referring to their ballyhooed 2024 pitch for a lakefront dome south of Soldier Field. “The Bears own the first full year of failure. Then there was the second year of failure, which probably the governor owns a lot of because he didn’t get his head out of the sand until December, when Indiana became real.”

It gets better. Kevin Warren was actually warned about Johnson.

So remember the story that came out about how the Bears hired several lobbyists with knowledge of the Illinois political landscape? Warren ignored their advice. What we didn’t know was what sort of advice they provided. Now we do. It appears one of their biggest warnings was to steer clear of Johnson. They tried telling the Bears president, not once but twice, that working with the mayor was a bad idea, both because of his inexperience and his lack of strong relationships in Springfield.

The Bears had a blue-ribbon lobbying team inside the Capitol that had advised Warren not to stand alone at the lakefront in 2024 with Johnson at a news conference without Pritzker, Harmon or Welch, who all quickly threw cold water on the proposal, sources said.

Unlike Warren, who appeared to have a budding political bromance with Johnson, the Bears’ lobbying team privately advised the politically naive Bears president that Johnson didn’t have the clout or the legislative know-how to get anything done, let alone a deal as controversial as this.

Chicago sports marketing consultant Marc Ganis countered that Warren shouldn’t take all the blame because he pivoted quickly to Arlington Heights “once he realized how big a disaster this mayor was.”

Johnson clearly told Warren what he wanted to hear.

It’s been evident from the beginning that the Bears’ president fell in love with the idea of keeping the team in the city. There are multiple reasons for this, starting with his experience in the Vikings’ front office when they eventually built U.S. Bank Stadium. They, too, were lined up to build in the suburbs before a pivot saw them bulldoze the Metrodome and stay downtown. That was a major success in the eyes of many. Everybody has long associated the Bears with Lake Michigan and that iconic Chicago skyline shot. Warren admitted he fell in love with it from the beginning.

Johnson unquestionably preyed on that, selling Kevin Warren on a grand vision of a state-of-the-art stadium on the lakefront despite having no real plan on how to finance it, let alone navigate the obvious political minefield to get there. Pritzker said as much a couple of weeks ago, accusing Johnson of having “no plan” for a downtown stadium. Warren’s own people warned him about this. The man was too oblivious or pig-headed to see that he was being made promises Johnson had no way of keeping.

By the time he realized the truth, he’d already wasted a year. Yet even now, he can’t seem to quit Johnson, holding multiple calls with his people at City Hall, still discussing the hope of a downtown stadium. Lori Lightfoot gets plenty of hate for fumbling the Bears issue when it began in 2021. She should be grateful that Johnson may go down as the man who sent the franchise packing to Indiana.