How the Bears Ended Up in Hammond — and Who Actually Lost Them

For 102 years the Chicago Bears have been a Chicago institution. As of this week, they are planning to build their next stadium in another state.

On June 4, the Bears' board of directors — the first time the board has ever voted on a stadium site — voted to advance a new stadium in Hammond, Indiana. The team made it public the next day, in a joint statement from chairman George H. McCaskey and president Kevin Warren promising a "world-class stadium project" that would "transform the region, connecting northwest Indiana and the South Side of Chicago." Indiana's governor cheered "Welcome to Indiana!" Hammond's mayor said he could be under construction by summer.

So how did the Bears — a franchise that owns 326 acres in the Illinois suburbs, holds a Soldier Field lease through 2033, and has the deepest fan base in the state — end up planning to leave it? And who, exactly, lost them?

This is the honest accounting. It does not flatter anyone, and the verdict is not the one most Bears fans want to hear.

The six-year road to a border crossing

Strip away the noise and the timeline is brutal in its clarity.

• September 2021: The Bears agree to buy the shuttered Arlington International Racecourse from Churchill Downs.
• February 15, 2023: The sale closes — $197.2 million for 326 acres — while the team pointedly notes that buying the land "does not guarantee" a stadium.
• May 2023: Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi values the site at roughly $197 million — pegged to the purchase price. The property-tax fight with three school districts (Township District 211, CCSD 15, and District 214) begins.
• April 23–24, 2024: The Bears abandon Arlington Heights in public view and unveil a $4.75 billion lakefront dome alongside Mayor Brandon Johnson — and ask taxpayers for about $2.4 billion. Governor JB Pritzker calls it a "non-starter" within a week.
• December 2024: The Arlington tax war finally settles — value set at $124.7 million, the Bears to pay about $3.6 million a year until construction starts. The land problem is solved.
• May–September 2025: The lakefront dome is put "on ice." The Bears pivot back to Arlington Heights and name it the planned site.
• February 26, 2026: Indiana signs Senate Enrolled Act 27, creating the Northwest Indiana Stadium Authority and authorizing up to $1 billion in public money to build the Bears a stadium in Hammond. Illinois has offered nothing comparable.
• April 22, 2026: The Illinois House passes a "megaprojects" property-tax-certainty bill 78–32. The Bears say they "welcome the progress" — then ask for more amendments.
• May 31, 2026, 3:39 a.m.: A last-ditch Senate bill letting Cook County municipalities create stadium authorities passes 37–17. Forty-five minutes later, the Illinois House adjourns the spring session without calling it. The bill dies.
• June 4, 2026: The board votes for Hammond.

Read that sequence twice. The land got bought before the politics got solved. The team walked away from the suburbs to chase a lakefront fantasy, walked back, then walked across the state line. Indiana passed a real law with real money in three months. Illinois passed nothing in three years. That is the whole story in one paragraph — and everyone whose job it was to prevent it has spent this week pointing at someone else.

So let's name names. Who is to blame?

The reader asked the right four questions: Is it Pritzker? Warren? McCaskey? The Illinois state government — and if so, who specifically? Here is the evidence on each, in order of culpability, and we are not going to hedge.

1. The Bears' front office — Kevin Warren. The largest single share.

This is the uncomfortable part, because Warren is our guy. But the man hired to get a stadium built is the one figure that both political parties and the governor's office independently blame, and the record is why.

Start with the pattern: Arlington Heights → lakefront dome → Arlington Heights → Indiana. Four positions in three years. Pritzker's own spokesman, Matt Hill, put it bluntly on June 5: the Bears "have spent the last six years, and especially the last few months, shifting their position on a stadium location. That has hindered their progress." When the governor's office and the opposition agree on the diagnosis, it's not spin.

Then there's the $2.4 billion lakefront ask in 2024 — a politically radioactive number that detonated the team's credibility in Springfield before the Arlington fight even got serious. You do not walk into a statehouse asking for the largest stadium subsidy in state history and then expect goodwill on the next ask.

But the single most damaging thing Warren's operation did was the backchannel. While the Bears were telling legislators their only options were Arlington Heights or Hammond, team management was quietly meeting with Chicago's Corporation Counsel about reviving a lakefront stadium — Crain's reported at least six calls and meetings in April 2026. When that leaked, it blew up the Senate. Speaker Welch said the lakefront news "really did upend what was happening in the Senate." State Sen. Bill Cunningham, who carried the final bill, was sharper: the backchannel "created a lot of confusion, a lot of cross messaging… That really undermined the narrative they were putting forward to legislators," giving Chicago Democrats every reason to ask why they'd vote to help the team leave the city.

And the Bears didn't even listen to their own people. Reporting from the Sun-Times and others is that the team hired Springfield-savvy lobbyists — and Warren ignored them. As Rep. Kam Buckner, who sponsored the megaprojects bill, put it: the Bears "bought the wedding dress before they went on the first date." They spent $197 million on land — Buckner says about $100 million more than it was worth — before securing a single vote.

Verdict on Warren: He is the most culpable individual in this saga. Not because he wanted a stadium, but because his strategy — the pivots, the toxic subsidy ask, the two-faced backchannel, the disregard for his own advisers — burned the trust he needed at the exact moment he needed it.

2. Mayor Brandon Johnson. The accelerant.

The reader didn't list Johnson, but the evidence demands he be on it. Johnson's posture was Chicago-or-nothing: he wanted the lakefront dome and made clear he wasn't going to lift a finger for Arlington Heights. "Why would I advocate for something that wouldn't benefit the people of Chicago?" he said in May 2026. That stance did two destructive things: it poisoned Chicago's own Senate Democrats against the suburban bill, and it kept the lakefront mirage alive long enough for the Bears to chase it into a ditch. Sports Illustrated went all the way and called Johnson "the chief culprit." That's arguable — but his fingerprints are unmistakably on the murder weapon.

3. The Illinois state government — and yes, we can be specific.

The reader asked which body. Here is the answer.

The proximate killer is the Illinois House of Representatives, under Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch. On the final night, the House had a Senate-passed bill physically in hand — Cunningham's stadium-authority bill, passed 37–17 — and chose not to call it for a vote, then adjourned. Welch's defense was "the votes weren't there" and "we need to take the time to get it right," and he ruled out a special session. Whatever the reasons, the mechanics are not in dispute: the chamber that could have kept the Bears in Illinois gaveled out and went home.

But the rot is bicameral and structural, not one man's. A serious stadium bill should never have come down to a 3:39 a.m. vote during a $55 billion budget overtime. The House, the Senate, and the governor's office were not coordinated. And a bloc of Chicago Senate Democrats never wanted the property-tax (PILOT) vehicle at all — Senate President Don Harmon admitted "there was no appetite at all to provide public dollars to a $10 billion sports franchise." Cunningham's own post-mortem named the paralysis: "Johnson went hard against it… Toni [Preckwinkle] was mute… Don Harmon was mute."

Verdict on Springfield: The Illinois House let the final bill die, and the Democratic leadership's failure to coordinate across chambers turned a winnable deal into a 3 a.m. fire drill. Real blame — but blame for process failure and disengagement, downstream of the team's self-inflicted wounds.

4. The McCaskey ownership. The deep, structural cause.

George McCaskey chairs the board that voted for Hammond, and the family's longer record is the soil all of this grew in: decades of stadium dysfunction, the maligned 2003 Soldier Field renovation that cost the building its National Historic Landmark status and left the Bears in the NFL's smallest stadium. The recurring pattern — and Field of Schemes has documented it — is an ownership that chases whichever government writes the biggest check while resisting putting in its own capital. A new stadium would roughly double a franchise already valued north of $6 billion.

To be fair to the evidence: there is no on-record quote of an official saying George McCaskey personally botched the 2026 endgame. Ownership's blame here is structural and historical, not a smoking gun in the final act. But you don't get to a board vote for Indiana without 40 years of ownership treating a stadium as someone else's problem to finance.

5. Governor Pritzker. The least culpable — and don't let the jersey fool you.

Bears fans want to blame Pritzker because he's the governor and the team is leaving on his watch. The evidence doesn't support it. His position was consistent for two straight years: he killed the $2.4B lakefront subsidy as a "non-starter" in 2024, said "nothing has changed" in late 2024, and in June 2026 said he "wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to give it to a billionaire-owned family." Crucially, he distinguished a cash construction subsidy (which he always opposed) from property-tax certainty (the PILOT bill he was willing to tolerate). That's not a flip-flop. The legitimate knock on Pritzker is late, hands-off leadership — he let his legislature flail instead of forcing a deal — but a leadership critique is not the same as being the reason the Bears left. On the merits of protecting taxpayers, he was arguably vindicated.

Could this have been avoided? Easily.

Here's the maddening part: there was never anything physically stopping the Bears from building. As Cunningham said, "There's nothing stopping the Bears from breaking ground in Arlington Heights tomorrow." They own the land. The tax fight was settled in December 2024. The only reason this became a four-alarm crisis is that the team demanded a large tax break — and then sabotaged its own ask.

Avoid the lakefront detour and you save 18 months of credibility. Secure legislative tax certainty before spending $197 million on land, instead of after. Don't run a secret lakefront backchannel while publicly telling legislators it's Arlington-or-Indiana. Listen to the lobbyists you paid for. Any one of those choices, reversed, likely keeps the Bears in Illinois. The franchise didn't get out-competed by Indiana so much as it beat itself — and Indiana, to its credit, simply showed up with a finished offer while Illinois argued.

Is it a done deal? No. And that matters.

Do not confuse a board vote with a moving van. Every credible outlet — ESPN, the Sun-Times, Capitol News Illinois — reports the same caveats:

• The vote advances Hammond but is explicitly not final, and sources confirm it "did not eliminate Arlington Heights."
• No specific Hammond site is locked. Wolf Lake's Lost Marsh golf course is the presumptive location, but it sits on a former landfill near a refinery and a Superfund-adjacent parcel — an environmental question that hasn't been resolved.
• The NFL has been "kept apprised," but a relocation across state lines is the kind of move that typically requires an owners' vote — and there's no evidence that stage has begun.
• The moment the announcement dropped, Warren personally called Illinois lawmakers to say he "looks forward to continuing discussions." That is not the behavior of a man who has closed the door. That is leverage.

And the clock is not against the Bears. The Soldier Field lease runs through 2033, a Hammond stadium wouldn't open before roughly 2031, the team still owns the Arlington land, and Welch has promised summer talks with the fall veto session as the realistic next vehicle. Cunningham noted the Hammond statement was "not fundamentally different" from the team's February posturing.

The path forward

If Illinois wants to keep the Bears, the move is not complicated, and the window is real:

1. Pass the megaprojects/PILOT bill this summer or in the fall veto session — the property-tax certainty the Bears actually need on land they already own. The House already passed a version 78–32. Finish it.
2. Get the three leaders in one room. The failure was coordination, not votes. Pritzker, Welch, and Harmon agreeing on one vehicle ends this in a week.
3. The Bears have to choose to be honest. No more backchannels, no more pivots. If Warren wants Arlington Heights, he has to stop using it as a bargaining chip and commit.

The bitter truth is that the Bears can break ground in Arlington Heights almost immediately if the politics get unstuck — which means this was never really about Hammond. It was about a franchise and a state that couldn't get out of their own way long enough to do the obvious thing on land the team already paid for.

Hammond didn't win the Bears. Chicago lost them — and it had a lot of help from the Bears themselves.