Back Home in Indiana: Tuesday Open Thread

So the Bears are moving to Indiana? No, not really.

But maybe!

But not really.

Having spent my later formative years in the Chicago area, I still feel invested in the happenings of the sports teams if that area; more specifically, in the delicious suffering that they regularly inflict on their fans. The world is just better when the Cubs, Bears and Blackhawks suck badly (sorry Sox fan, even having a Pope doesn’t get you into the conversation).

I would enjoy a resurgence of the Bulls though. Fuck Jerry Reinsdorf with Benny the Bull’s uphostlered dong.

ANYWAY: the Bears are riding their optimistic preseason narrative to its logical extreme by threatening to move to an Undisclosed Location- specifically via the vote of the Bears’ board of directors to “pursue” a stadium option just across the border in Hammond, Indiana.

For those keeping score at home, this is the third (3rd) stadium site that the Bears have pursued in their latest round of the Grand Civic Grift. In addition to variations on a new stadium at or near their current home at Soldier Field, the Bears actually bought a stadium site (the former Arlington International Racecourse) in the relatively tony northwest suburb of Arlington Heights for nearly $200 million three years ago. They demolished the racecourse and now it’s just.. there.

It is the Arlington Heights property that makes me think the Hammond move is a bluff. While you could probably buy the entirety of Hammond for about $200 million, the likelihood of Arlington Heights giving the Bears the advantageous zoning and other perks they would need to sell it at a profit seems vanishingly small: the Other Woman never likes getting Other Womaned herself.*

*Non-gendered

Although Hammond is a nominal half hour south of Soldier Field, it is a solid 90 minutes from the Arlington Heights site. The great threat of the Arlington Heights site (versus Chicago proper) is its proximity the Land of Milk and Honey that is the North Shore. For the non-Chicagolanders, the North Shore is where all those ridiculously large homes in John Hughes movies (Ferris Bueller, Home Alone, etc.) are located, as well as Bears headquarters. In other words, roughly 85% of likely PSL buyers would live within half an hour of an Arlington Heights stadium.

Hammond, on the other hand, is roughly two hours (with foreseeable traffic) from this concentration of wealth. Nor is there any obvious opportunity for the sort of MegaMall/Entertainmoplex that is part and parcel of the modern “This Will Totally Boost The Regional Economy, We Swear This Time” stadium scam. I’m not saying the Bears would be stupid to follow through on this, but they already paid $200 million when the City of Chicago called their bluff on Arlington Heights. It would take a McCaskey Failson level of dumbassedness to…

Oh.