Chicago Bears team president Kevin Warren has reached the stage of “the bloom is off the rose.” People were optimistic about his hiring after Ted Phillips retired in 2021. They felt his track record with the Minnesota Vikings and time as Big Ten Commission gave him the necessary experience to handle the job George McCaskey handed to him. That was to guide the Bears through the next phase of getting them a brand-new stadium in Arlington Heights. Four years later, and he seems as far away from that accomplishment as ever.

Warren’s handling of the process has been roundly criticized, not just by fans and the media. People down in Springfield have repeatedly said his handling of negotiations has been unprofessional and disorganized. Local insiders such as Jeff Hughes of Sports Mockery said McCaskey himself is rapidly losing patience with the Bears president. The constant pivoting between Arlington and downtown Chicago and back again is getting ridiculous. He seems more interested in doing interviews, sending out press releases, and getting himself on camera as much as possible than his actual job. According to Tyler Dunne of Go Long, a former Bears executive had serious misgivings about Warren.

He even tried to warn George McCaskey about it.

“But I also can’t stop thinking of what one team exec told McCaskey on his way out.

The way people have been fired under Warren is described as borderline unprofessional. They feel as if they’re under arrest.

This person, however, did manage to get some time with the Bears chairman.

His message to McCaskey? If you’re not too careful, you’ll lose your team to Kevin Warren.”

It’s fair to wonder how much time Warren has left.

Even McCaskey, who has proven to be one of the most patient owners in the NFL, has limited. He proved that with the Marc Trestman and Matt Eberflus debacles. He is likely reluctant to fire Warren because the stadium process is still ongoing. Pivoting to a new decision-maker this late in the process might do more harm than good. Then again, given how much the powerbrokers in Springfield hate him, it can’t possibly get much worse. Also, this is McCaskey’s handpicked guy. Bringing Warren in was entirely his decision, and it was solely to get the stadium built.

Firing Warren now would be a very public admission that he messed up. Most people of power and influence would rather die than do something like that. Then again, every day this goes on is wasting time and money. George McCaskey might be a billionaire, but his pockets are not nearly as deep as those of others in the NFL. Warren paid actual lobbyists to help push the Megaprojects bill forward in Springfield, then ignored them. The only thing he seems good at is shameless self-promotion.

His only course towards self-preservation is to go to Indiana.

It is beyond clear that Warren has lost any and all credibility with Illinois politicians. They seem intent on making his life difficult, if for no other reason than they don’t like him. The only option on the table that might save his bacon is to accept defeat and start the move to Indiana. That state has already laid the groundwork. Infrastructure and property tax legislation is in place. All the Bears have to do at this point is say yes, even if it’s pretty clear this wasn’t the first choice for McCaskey.

If the Bears were truly indifferent to either site, they would’ve gone to Indiana months ago. The only reason they’ve held on this long is that they don’t want to leave Illinois. This franchise has called the state home for over a century. McCaskey probably feels like he’d be dirtying the legacies of George Halas and his mother, Virginia, by crossing the border. Unfortunately, Warren’s mismanagement has put him in this position. Unless he’s prepared to stall the process further and find a replacement, the path ahead seems clear.

Head coach Ben Johnson hasn’t hidden his desire for joint practices during the summer. The value they bring to a team can be immeasurable. After a certain point, there is only so much a team can glean from practicing against itself in training camp. Joint practices allow players to test their mettle against fresh competition, getting a good feel for where they actually are in terms of talent and preparation. The Chicago Bears recently learned their preseason schedule for this coming August. Now, news has surfaced on who their joint practice partner will be.

That is the Cincinnati Bengals. Not a huge surprise. Johnson and head coach Zac Taylor have a relationship that goes back several years, to their time together in Miami. It was easy to make that bridge. This also represents a great opportunity for both teams. They played each other in the regular season, conducting one of the wildest shootouts of the year. Joe Flacco put up 42 points while Caleb Williams compiled 47. This will be a great chance for the Bears’ defense to see if they’ve made any real progress since that game, going against Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. The same will be true for a completely revamped Bengals defense.

The Chicago Bears need answers ahead of a big season.

They play the Bengals in week two of the preseason on August 22nd. However, this year it will be different. In 2025, the Bears held two joint practices against the Miami Dolphins and Buffalo Bills. Both were at Halas Hall. This time it will be in Cincinnati at the Bengals’ practice facility. That should be an interesting wrinkle for players. Performing on an unfamiliar field always presents certain challenges. It will also serve as a perfect reminder that Johnson was correct. The team Chicago beat last year won’t be the one they face in this practice.

For one, they’ll be going against Joe Burrow this time. The Bengals star quarterback wasn’t present last season due to injuries. There is also the new presence of Dexter Lawrence. The giant defensive tackle dominated the Bears when they played the New York Giants last season. He was traded to Cincinnati a few months ago. That should present a massive challenge for Chicago’s interior offensive line, particularly for the new centers, Garrett Bradbury and Logan Jones.

There is also one added benefit.

Practicing against another team gives the Chicago Bears scouts and front office a chance to see the Bengals’ entire roster up close. That extra information could prove crucial if Cincinnati were to cut a player they liked, allowing them to move quickly to claim them off waivers. It has happened before and led to some beneficial outcomes for the team. This is why joint practices are so popular in the NFL. As the preseason loses relevance due to league schedule changes, this is becoming the preferred method for preparing players for the season.

One thing is for sure. Johnson will have his players ready for war. The Dolphins found that out the hard way last year, accusing the Bears of being way too physical and violent. Well, one team missed the playoffs and fired everybody. The other won the division and a playoff game. Something Miami hasn’t done since Dan Marino retired. If the Bengals are smart, they’ll view this as a great way to get themselves toughened up for the usual AFC North dogfight.

One would think the Chicago Bears would be pretty happy with their wide receiver output last season. Rome Odunze led the team in yards despite playing on a bad foot much of that time. D.J. Moore had two of the most meaningful catches in the history of the Bears-Packers rivalry. Luther Burden cracked 600 yards despite being a rookie. Though Moore is gone, one would think there’s some deserved optimism around the group. Yet from how you see head coach Ben Johnson talk about them, you’d think they were a borderline liability last season.

Is that being too harsh? Not according to analytics expert Warren Sharp. He did an in-depth study on the impact of every wide receiver group in the NFL last season. One category was the percentage of receiver errors that caused incompletions. This involves things like dropped passes, losing control of the ball when hitting the ground, failing to get both feet in bounds, and falling down on routes. When running the numbers, the Bears’ group didn’t come away looking all that great. They ranked sixth-worst in the NFL.

This Chicago Bears issue was largely brushed under the rug.

Conversations throughout last season were about quarterback Caleb Williams’ completion percentage. It finished as the worst of any starter in the league at 57%. Most took that as the quarterback just not being overly accurate. However, once you dig deeper into the evidence, the story starts to shift. Several of his incompletions were a direct result of receiver error. Chicago had the fourth-most dropped passes in the entire NFL last season. There were also frequent miscommunications between Williams and his receivers, with guys running the wrong routes.

It is little wonder that Johnson was so frustrated when the topic came up. He knows the Bears’ offense was hamstrung by that problem all year. They left a lot of points on the field because of it. That is why fundamentals have been a strict focal point from the moment practices began last month. Coaches are on top of guys every day about their route discipline and hand-eye coordination. If you can’t get on the same page as Williams or hang onto the ball, the team will find somebody who can.

Odunze is under the most pressure.

Of the Chicago Bears’ notable receivers, he was the one who had the most high-profile drops last season. That includes a brutal one in the playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams. Nobody disputes his talent. The flashes have been there. However, holding onto the football has been a problem for him since he was drafted. Add the health issues on top of that? It’s safe to say that 2026 is the most important season of his career. After all, it already sounds like Coach Johnson is leaning towards featuring Burden a lot more in this offense. He didn’t draft Odunze, let’s not forget.

One thing is certain. There will be no easing up. Johnson is keen on winning a Super Bowl. His standard has not and will not chase. Everybody is expected to meet it. If these guys suffer the same issues again in 2026, you can bet the Bears will be hunting for replacements next spring. The good news is that they have much more experience in the offensive system. That should make their mental workload easier, allowing them to focus more on catching the ball.

Bret Bielema knows a lot about coaching. The man has been a head coach for 17 years in the college ranks, going from Wisconsin to Arkansas and now Illinois. That run has been highly successful, including 12 bowl game appearances and 6 victories. In that time, he has sent countless players to the NFL, where many of them have had success. This has helped him establish relationships inside the league. That is probably why he was spotted at a Chicago Bears practice during OTAs last week. It was there that he got his first real introduction to head coach Ben Johnson.

One would forgive Bielema for being skeptical at first. Johnson just turned 40. He’s one of the youngest coaches in the NFL. Bielema has been around a long time. Sometimes these young guys don’t have a full grasp on what it really takes to sustain success. It didn’t take long for him to realize that it wouldn’t be a problem at all for Johnson. His experience at Halas Hall confirmed that the Bears’ head coach has it figured out. He explained to 104.3 The Score that what separates Johnson isn’t his offensive genius.

It’s his remarkable organizational skills and his ability to communicate.

It didn’t take long to see that Ben Johnson was more than just scoring points.

That is what everybody thought the Bears were getting when he was hired last year. He’d just engineered the most successful offense in the NFL with the Detroit Lions. Chicago would get an offensive wizard who could hopefully turn Caleb Williams around at quarterback. Maybe he could prove to be more than that. Boy was he. From the outset, it was clear Johnson had way more charisma and vision than anybody could’ve imagined. He knew what kind of identity he wanted the Bears to have from the moment he stepped inside Halas Hall.

Then came the intelligence. Everybody knew Johnson was a whiz kid in college, earning degrees in mathematics and computer science. To do that, you need a sharp eye for organization and detail. Unsurprisingly, that carried over into his job as a coach. Running an NFL team requires both of those abilities. Every practice must be organized if it’s to run on time. Players can’t develop properly unless the coach has a sharp eye for the details in their fundamentals and way of operating.

By the sound of things, Ben Johnson is on top of all of it.

The Bears haven’t had a coach like that in years.

While the organization has employed guys who could motivate players, none of them had the organizational skills or attention to detail to keep everybody on task. The last one who had that kind of reputation was Mike Ditka. For all the lore about his explosive personality and bluster, people often forget Da Coach was well-prepared and organized. He had a firm idea of what type of team he wanted and did a great job building it when he arrived. That shouldn’t be a surprise. He’d been mentored by Tom Landry in Dallas for years.

Ben Johnson is built the same way as Ditka was, only he might be even smarter. If that is the case, then Bielema is correct. The Bears are in great hands. Sustaining success in the NFL starts at the top. If you don’t have the right head coach, it doesn’t matter how talented your roster is. The Bears hadn’t learned this lesson for most of the past three decades. Maybe good luck was the only reason they landed Johnson. Whatever the case, he’s here and success should continue.

By now, you’ve heard the news that the Chicago Bears megaprojects bill died in the Illinois Senate. The votes weren’t there. A last-second attempt to introduce a new bill that would allow large municipalities to establish sports authorities to help the team achieve the property tax certainty they wanted did pass the Senate. Unfortunately, the House didn’t vote on it before time ran out. Much of the blame for this goes to the city itself. Reports have said Chicago politicians have gone out of their way to stonewall the bills at every turn.

Some believe this is a desperate attempt by Mayor Brandon Johnson and his voting bloc to keep the Bears downtown. However, the true motivations are far less glamorous. The running belief for the past several months is that the city doesn’t want the Bears to leave until they’ve paid off Soldier Field.

However, that theory always had holes. The Bears paid off their portion of the stadium renovations years ago. The remainder of the bill was the city’s responsibility to pay. It’s been made crystal clear that the Bears feel zero obligation to handle that burden. For the city to remain so insistent never made much sense. There has to be something else going on. Recently, another theory has surfaced online. It implies that the city would rather the Bears go to Indiana because that would mean traveling fans would likely still spend their money downtown rather than in Hammond. Such would not be the case if the Bears built in Arlington Heights.

This angle on the Chicago Bears stadium makes way more sense.

Remember the iconic quote from the movie All The President’s Men: “Follow the money.” The Soldier Field thing didn’t make sense, but the theory’s bedrock did. This wasn’t about people wanting to preserve the legacy of the Bears playing downtown. Politicians didn’t want to lose the vast amounts of money fans would spend in the city. Think about this. Hundreds of thousands of fans live in the north and northwest suburbs. If an Arlington Heights stadium is built, none of those people will have any reason to visit the city anymore. They would all congregate at the Arlington Park site and spend their money there.

That is potentially hundreds of millions of dollars that Chicago would lose. When that amount of money is at stake, politicians will do just about anything to stop it from happening. A recent study by the Cook County treasurer revealed that even a move to Hammond, Indiana, wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Its close proximity to downtown would mean the Chicago Bears would still provide the city with economic benefits, without them or the state of Illinois having to foot the $1 billion infrastructure bill.

It was always about the money.

Don’t let anybody else fool you. If the Bears were a business that didn’t generate so much revenue, the city would’ve waved goodbye as they left. Losing hundreds of millions of dollars would be a serious economic blow that Chicago doesn’t want to see. Never mind the fact that they could’ve avoided this whole mess in the first place had they mediated between the Bears and the Park District from the start. Now their complacency is coming back to bite them, and in typical fashion, they’re resorting to petty tactics to avoid losing the money.

In the end, it may all be for nothing. Recent indications are that the state government may call a special session this summer to hammer out the sports authority bill. That would enable the Bears to negotiate with Arlington Heights, allowing the township to publicly own the stadium while the team avoids property taxes. Chicago may not have enough sway in Springfield to stop it. Johnson isn’t the most popular person down there. He badly needs the Bears to lose patience and go to Indiana or he’s screwed.

Caleb Williams was outstanding last season. That is especially true in the context of where all of this started. The Chicago Bears quarterback endured a brutal rookie season in 2024. He went 5-12 as a starter and absorbed a franchise-worst 68 sacks. His bad tendency to hold the ball kept getting him in trouble. Too often, he looked lost. To go from that to last season was incredible. He took only 24 sacks, set a Bears record with 3,941 passing yards, and led the team to seven 4th quarter comebacks. Two of them came at the expense of the hated Green Bay Packers.

He won a playoff game and almost knocked off the Rams in the divisional round before falling just short in overtime. Still, it was confirmation that Chicago had finally found a viable quarterback. Hopes are high that he can build on what he accomplished last season and be even better in 2026. In fact, former player Matt Bowen of ESPN went so far as to predict that Williams will win the Most Valuable Player award, making him only the second person in Bears history to achieve that feat.

Caleb Williams will win the NFL MVP award

Williams threw for 3,942 yards and 27 touchdowns in 2025, his first season under coach Ben Johnson. With another offseason to develop in Johnson’s system, the Bears QB is primed to play at a high level in 2026. Plus, he has a versatile and explosive group of pass catchers. The arrow is pointing up on Williams — and Johnson’s playcalling. — Matt Bowen, NFL analyst

Caleb Williams has some issues to iron out to get there.

Winning the MVP in the NFL has pretty much become a quarterback race. It comes down to which one accomplishes two things: puts up big numbers and wins a lot of games. He proved last year that he can do the winning part. So this will come down to what type of stat line might be required to get the notice of voters. When calculating the stats of every MVP winner in the past decade, here is the averages they produced.

• Passing Yards: 4,166 yards
• Passing Touchdowns: 36
• Interceptions: 9
• Completion Percentage: 67.4%
• Passer Rating: 107.8
• Rushing Yards: 265 yards
• Rushing Touchdowns: 3

That is the range Williams must get to before a conversation can even start. The good news is he has shown he can hit a few of those landmarks. His passing yardage last season wasn’t too far from the 4,166 listed above. He actually had fewer than nine interceptions and can easily hit the rushing yards and touchdowns. The big issues for him are touchdown passes, completion percentage, and passer rating.

Efficiency stands between Williams and that MVP.

Head coach Ben Johnson has been on top of that from the beginning. Caleb Williams is incredibly explosive as a quarterback. What he hasn’t been yet is consistent. His completion percentage has never exceeded 62% as a pro. It was 57% last year. That means he’d have to improve by ten percentage points to reach the typical MVP level. More likely, he’ll want to get around 65% to be in the right neighborhood. That ties directly to passer rating. His 90.1 last season was hampered mostly by his poor completion percentage. Williams had only four games last season with a passer rating over 100.

Bowen is banking on entering the second season in Johnson’s offense to iron out several of those issues. It isn’t a bad gamble. Quarterbacks typically take a notable jump in productivity from their first season to their second season in a new offense. Williams himself proved that in college. He was highly productive as a freshman under Lincoln Riley in 2021. Then, in 2022, he exploded for 42 touchdowns and 5 interceptions, winning the Heisman Trophy. Early signs from spring practices suggest he’s light-years ahead of where he was at this time last season.

It is a major challenge, but not a crazy one.

The NFL never sleeps. Once again, a bombshell trade struck following the June 1st contract deadlines. Myles Garrett, the superstar pass rusher and future Hall of Famer, was traded by the Cleveland Browns to the Los Angeles Rams for pass rusher Jared Verse, a 1st round pick, a 2nd round pick, and a 3rd round pick. It was the second such trade the Rams have made this offseason, joining the one made for cornerback Trent McDuffie from the Kansas City Chiefs. It is beyond evident that Los Angeles is once again making all-in moves for this year, trying to duplicate the magic they had in 2021 that led to a Super Bowl championship.

Meanwhile, Chicago Bears fans are left wondering why their team hasn’t tried making any such moves. They’d just made the playoffs and almost knocked off that same Rams team in overtime of the divisional round. They have a young, ascending quarterback still on his rookie contract. It feels like the perfect time to get aggressive. Yet they operated with limited aggression for most of the past three months. Garrett felt like a perfect target given their poor pass rush.

If nothing else, this sequence confirms some clear and perhaps uncomfortable truths about general manager Ryan Poles.

The Myles Garrett trade confirms Poles has a strict ceiling.

Since taking over in 2022, the Bears’ general manager hasn’t been shy about making trades for veteran players. However, there is a caveat. He has consistently passed on any possibility of giving up a 1st round pick in any of those opportunities. The highest Poles has ever gone is a 2nd rounder, which occured in the Montez Sweat and Chase Claypool trades. Every time a player’s price tag reached the 1st round range, the Bears backed out.

This goes back to his time with the Chiefs. From 2009 to 2016, Kansas City never gave up a 1st-round pick for anyone. That finally changed in 2017 when they traded up for Patrick Mahomes. It wasn’t until 2019 that the streak truly broke when the Chiefs sent a package around a 1st rounder for pass rusher Frank Clark. Keep in mind, this was shortly after Brett Veach replaced John Dorsey as general manager. Dorsey, one of Poles’ biggest mentors, only traded a 1st round pick for a player once in seven years. That was the Odell Beckham trade in Cleveland in 2019, which didn’t pan out well.

In fairness, Poles did warn us.

Some of the first words out of his mouth four years ago was he was going to build through the draft. That meant free agency and trades were avenues he would use only selectively. This was because he believed that building a roster that way came at a cost. Sustaining a winner is incredibly difficult if the big free-agent signing or blockbuster trade acquisition doesn’t pan out. Hell, even if they do, it remains difficult. Julius Peppers was outstanding in his stint with the Bears. They still only had one winning season with him. The same was true of Khalil Mack.

However, there is one point that must be made. In both of those previous instances, the Bears didn’t have a quarterback. Jay Cutler was solid. Mitch Trubisky was okay. Neither were franchise guys. Poles has Caleb Williams, who just carried the Bears to their first division title in seven years. Seven 4th quarter comebacks. Beating the Packers in the playoffs. He’s not a finished product, but he is legit. Imagine what putting Myles Garrett on that defense could’ve done.

Poles, for better or worse, stuck to his principles.