_{^{Written by GP}}
Cheap at Any Price: George McCaskey Will Borrow $2 Billion Before He Sells You a Single Share

There is a version of the Bears stadium saga where the McCaskeys are simply broke — a faded football dynasty, asset-rich and cash-poor, priced out of the modern NFL by billionaires who treat franchises like superyachts. It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong, and believing it lets George McCaskey off the hook for the actual decision he just made.

The family is not broke. At the league’s official $8.9 billion valuation, the McCaskeys’ roughly 77.5% stake is worth north of six billion dollars on paper. What they are is illiquid — and, more to the point, unwilling to do anything about it. Because the alternative to illiquidity is selling a piece of the team, and selling a piece of the team is the one thing this family will not do, even when every spreadsheet in America is begging them to.

So instead, they’re going to borrow.

The money was always right there

The NFL has spent the last few years loosening the very levers that exist for exactly this situation. Teams can now sell up to 10% to institutional investors and private-equity funds. At an $8.9 billion valuation, that single lever is worth roughly $890 million — nearly half a stadium — raised without a bank, without a bond, without owing anyone a payment.

That’s the small option. There’s no hard cap on selling to an existing partner, so long as the family keeps the 30% the league requires it to hold for control. The McCaskeys sit at 77.5%. That leaves them room to sell roughly 23 percentage points — about two billion dollars at today’s valuation — to Pat Ryan, or to anyone else with a checkbook, and still walk away with a clear majority of the team.

Two billion dollars. The exact cost of the stadium. Available without a dime of debt. Sitting in plain sight. And they will not touch it.

This was never about the money. It was about the grip.

Pat Ryan is the obvious buyer, which is precisely why he’s the unthinkable one. The Aon founder is an insurance billionaire whose personal fortune dwarfs the entire McCaskey clan’s liquid wealth several times over — the man wrote a nine-figure check to put his name on Northwestern’s new football stadium more or less for sport. He already owns 22.5% of the Bears. Selling him another slice would solve the cash problem in an afternoon.

It would also tilt the franchise’s center of gravity toward the guy with the deeper pockets — and that is the line the McCaskeys will not cross. Virginia McCaskey’s death in February 2025 scattered her stake and her votes across roughly eleven children, some of whom, by multiple accounts, would happily take liquidity. The family’s response to that fragility has not been to professionalize or to raise outside capital. It’s been to clutch tighter. George’s stated ambition, relayed from his brother Pat, is to own this team “until the second coming.” That’s not a business plan. That’s an heirloom being white-knuckled past the point of competence.

So the math gets inverted. A rational owner sells a non-controlling slice, funds the building, and keeps the team home.

The McCaskeys would rather load a century-old franchise with two billion in debt and exile it across a state line than let one more percentage point slip toward someone who might actually outvote them someday.

That’s the real definition of cheap. Not “won’t spend money.” Won’t part with control at any price — even when the price of keeping it is the soul of the franchise. They would rather build in a swamp and cross a state line. May I remind George that old man Halas got his start at the University of Illinois on Illinois money. What a prick.

Every other family in this town figured it out

This is the part that should sting. The Ricketts financed Wrigley’s reinvention and built a neighborhood around it. The Reinsdorf and Wirtz families got the United Center redevelopment moving on private capital. Justin Ishbia is building a White Sox stadium that doubles as transit infrastructure for the CTA. Joe Mansueto is paying for an entire Fire stadium himself. Himself!

Four Chicago ownership groups. Four ways to self-fund and stay. Every one of them found the nerve to put their own money — or someone else’s equity — into keeping their team where its fans are. Those are owners that should be celebrated while the McCaskey family should be spit on for their petty greed.

The fucking Bears, who looked at the exact same toolkit, decided that selling Pat Ryan a sliver of a team he already partly owns was a fate worse than debt, and started shopping for moving trucks to Indiana. WTG.

What this is really about

The choice in front of George McCaskey was never Illinois versus Indiana. The geography is the symptom. The choice was control versus competence — between a family that would rather rule a diminished, indebted, relocated franchise outright than co-own a thriving one that stayed home. They appear publicly with Ryan, but they despise him. They fear him. 

George picked control. He always picks control. And the bill for that vanity — two billion dollars of it — is going to come due on a franchise that George Halas built and his heirs are slowly, stubbornly, immovably running into the ground. Lori Lightfoot was a corrupt asswipe who looked like Betelgeuse, but she had one threat right: go get the Arizona Cardinals and put them in Soldier Field and leave the Bears to Indiana. The NFL would never allow it, but wow would it be the best fuck you to the Bears ever. The return of the Chicago Cardinals. 

The McCaskeys can afford the fucking Arlington stadium. What they cannot afford is letting go. And until that changes, no amount of Ben Johnson magic or Caleb Williams brilliance is going to save Bears fans from the one opponent the front office can’t scheme around: its own greedy, vain owners.

Still slow, and I returned from the beach tired AF. So, for the meanwhile, here’s a great concise doc on Sweetness til things pop. We could talk about him ad nauseum, but one thing that sticks out to me is his vision, determination and contact balance. Sweetness actually became everything Ashton Jeanty truthers hope he becomes. Maybe lacked the long speed of Bo, the agility of Barry Sanders, or the short area burst of AP, but boy, he combined tons of talent with pure will-power, hard work and 3AM grit.

“I was more quick than fast” – Payton
‘If I went to Steelers, I may not have learned to pass catch as well since they had WRs like Lynn Swan’ – Payton
“He benches 390.” – Announcer
“He was relentless. He ran with a fury.”
“Every time someone felt sick I told them Payton broke the single game rushing record [275 yds] with a 104 flu, so suit up.’
‘Walter believes he gained an extra 1K yds by staying in bounds’

“Never die easy. Die hard.” Sweetness

Think the Bears are taking a break, so much like John Wick lunching between gun battles, so shall we.

I’m trying to watch NEW films. It’s not easy. Much like music, our brains seem to freeze by age 30, and rarely do our tastes radically change. We’re basically aesthetic, and maybe intellectual, Amish.

However, one of the great things about being around youth, whether they be students, nephews, church-goers or randos, is they INSIST that [fill in the blank] is a MUST.

Of course, old folk roll eyes like a pavlovian impulse ‘nothing new under the sun…’ however, every once in a while – they’re right!

Such was the movie “Obsession”.

Now, as a classically trained aesthete, I REALLY know this is an ancient theme.

Be careful what you wish for.

Greek Tragedy is based on it.

_{^{“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust but forgot to ask that they be years of youth. ”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses}}
The basic premise is that human hubris often concludes what is BEST, but the universe often disagrees.

Or as the Rolling Stones twanged, “You don’t often get what you want, but if you try sometime, you get what you need.”

In film, “Monkey’s Paw” seems like a popular precedent to “Obsession”

“Obsession” absolutely falls in line, but much like Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Romeo and Juliet”, it’s modernized.

I won’t dive too deep into it because I don’t want to ruin it, but it’s more than the superficial “boy likes girl” meme.

It gave me some bad Ex-flashbacks, that’s for sure! however, for me, it can be a metaphor for the modern state of social media, tech, and romantic interaction which seems to be devolving to the point where this next generation barely dates, much less marries or procreates. I had a friend who used to go up to a group of women and ask ea to dance. One refused, he’d move down the line, ask the next unphased. The odd part? It WORKED. At least one would agree. He did the math. Didn’t give a fuck about rejection. Teens nowadays feel much safer swiping, playing Madden instead of actual football. Well swiping ain’t living.

Japan specifically is predicted to go extinct [without immigrant birth rates] in about 400 years if this trajectory continues. Though maybe their sex droids will become sentient by then.

But I digress…

“Obsession” is just a good flick to watch, and it still should be out at your local movie theater.

_{^{Written by GP}}
What the stadiums in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Buffalo actually built — and the cautionary tale Chicago keeps refusing to read
Every stadium subsidy is sold as a public works project and delivered as a church. The brochure promises jobs, corridors, a renaissance, a transformed region — the vocabulary of prosperity, deployed by men who have never had to wonder whether prosperity would arrive. What gets built instead is a place of worship: a great concrete sanctuary where a shrinking middle class gathers eight or nine Sundays a year to pay fealty to a god that bills them for the privilege. The collection plate is the tax base. The clergy are billionaires. And the one reliable miracle, performed without fail in every city that has tried this, is the transformation of public money into private net worth.

It is worth walking through the actual record — not the renderings, the record — because the three cities most often waved around as cautionary tales turn out to be cautionary about something more specific than “stadiums are expensive.” They are cautionary about who pays, who profits, and why the lesson never seems to take.

St. Louis: the gospel of the empty room
St. Louis put roughly $280 million of public money into the Edward Jones Dome in the mid-1990s, the down payment on a marriage to the Rams. For twenty-one years the city tithed faithfully. Then in 2016 Stan Kroenke decided Los Angeles was a better market, and he left — taking the team and leaving behind about $144 million in remaining debt and maintenance on a building with no tenant. The city paid roughly $6 million a year, the county another $6 million, the state $12 million, on an empty dome, until the bonds finally cleared in 2021. The faithful kept funding the cathedral after the god had moved to California.

Here is the part that should be carved over the entrance to every future stadium: the only money St. Louis ever clawed back, it had to sue for. A four-and-a-half-year lawsuit alleging the NFL had violated its own relocation rules and enriched itself at the expense of the community it abandoned ended in a $790 million settlement in late 2021 — of which roughly $275 million went to attorneys, leaving the city, county, and stadium authority to split a little over $500 million. No expansion team. No restored economy. A litigation windfall, extracted from billionaires only after courts started forcing them to open their books. That is the best-case outcome on offer: not prosperity, but damages.

And Kroenke? He moved the Rams into SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — a roughly $5 billion palace he built with his own money, no public bonds required. The lesson there is not subtle. These men can self-finance when the market is worth it; the subsidy is simply the price they make smaller cities pay for the audition. Kroenke is now worth somewhere around $12.8 billion, married into the Walmart fortune, richer than the entire enterprise he abandoned. St. Louis got the empty room and a lawyer’s invoice.

Cincinnati: the lease as a confession
If St. Louis is the gospel of the empty room, Hamilton County is the patron saint of getting fleeced while the lights are still on. Paul Brown Stadium — named, with a candor nobody seems to have noticed, after the owning family — opened in 2000 under a lease so lopsided the Wall Street Journal called it one of the worst deals a local government has ever struck. By 2016 the county had poured more than $920 million into the thing. At its peak, in 2010, the stadium debt was consuming better than sixteen percent of the county’s entire general fund — not its discretionary budget, its general fund, the money that pays for sheriffs and roads and schools — siphoned off to a football team. The lease even obligated taxpayers to buy the Bengals any amenity that a set number of other NFL stadiums happened to install, a clause that reads less like a contract than a ransom note with a renewal date.

What did Cincinnati get for being the most subsidized fanbase in football? A team that spent most of those years bad, and the privilege of watching its value compound. The Brown family franchise climbed from roughly half a billion dollars to around four billion. Mike Brown, who inherited the team his father co-founded in 1967 and is now in his late eighties, sits on a personal fortune of about $3.9 billion. Forbes assigns its billionaires a philanthropy score; Brown’s is the lowest on the scale, the mark of a man who has given away less than five percent of his pile. So the arithmetic of the most famous stadium boondoggle in America is this: a county hollowed out its general fund, a billionaire who built nothing and gave away nothing watched his inheritance quadruple, and the fans showed up anyway. That last part is not a footnote. That is the entire business model.

Buffalo: the tithe from people who can least afford it
Buffalo completes the picture, because Buffalo is poor. It is a shrinking Rust Belt city in a region that has been bleeding people and tax base for half a century — exactly the kind of place that can least afford to underwrite a billionaire’s real-estate appreciation. So naturally it committed $850 million in public funds to a new Bills stadium, at the time the largest public handout to an NFL franchise in history, roughly sixty percent of the $1.4 billion build. Erie County, unable to simply find the money, sold bonds — “Bills Bonds,” with the obligation landing squarely on the county — to cover its share.

The owner on the receiving end is Terry Pegula, who made his fortune fracking natural gas and selling the wells, bought the Bills for $1.4 billion in 2014, and has since watched the franchise’s value swell to nearly $6 billion. By 2026 Forbes put his net worth around $9.3 billion. In late 2024 he sold off a roughly twenty-percent slice of the team to a consortium of outside investors — which is to say he converted a chunk of his publicly subsidized asset into cash at the appreciated price. The public covered the majority of the building; the appreciation accrued entirely to him.

And the “life” this transforming investment will create for Buffalo? A grass field kept alive through the winter by subterranean heating and grow lights at a maintenance cost north of a million dollars a year. Smoke-breathing bison statues at the gates. Thirty-six-dollar beers. Spectacle, in other words — the sensory apparatus of the church — sold to a city where the median family would feel that beer. What it will not create, because nothing like it ever has, is the broad prosperity in the brochure. The empirical literature on stadium subsidies is about as settled as economics gets: study after study finds they fail to generate the jobs, the businesses, and the tax revenue promised at every ribbon-cutting. The money does not multiply through the community. It transfers, once, from many to one.

Whose church, whose collection plate
Stand back and the shape is unmistakable, and it is the shape of a feudal arrangement dressed in team colors. Across thirty-two NFL franchises, exactly one controlling owner is not white — Jacksonville’s Shad Khan, of Pakistani descent. The men who run the other thirty-one are, to a man, white, and to a man, billionaires. The labor that fills their stadiums is close to the inverse: roughly two-thirds of NFL players are men of color. And the public footing the construction bill is, increasingly, a middle class that is itself disappearing — asked to tithe toward a spectacle whose proceeds flow up to a tier of wealth its members will never touch.

This is the cult, precisely. Not the fandom — fandom is fine, fandom is one of the few communal joys left in an atomized country. The cult is the part where the fandom is monetized into obligation, where loving the team is converted by men in luxury boxes into a civic duty to fund their balance sheets, where questioning the deal gets you branded a traitor to your own city. Kroenke, Brown, Pegula: three white billionaires, two of whom inherited their way in, who took public money, delivered no measurable prosperity, and walked away richer. The faithful paid, prayed, and were told to be grateful for the sermon.

The cautionary tale that refuses to land
Here is the genuinely confounding thing, the thing this whole essay has been circling. All of this is known. St. Louis is documented. Cincinnati has been a national punchline for fifteen years. Buffalo’s record-breaking subsidy was front-page news. The economic consensus is not hidden in a journal nobody reads; it has been in the newspaper, repeatedly. And yet the subsidies do not shrink — they grow. New York gave the Bills $850 million; Nashville promptly topped it with $1.26 billion for the Titans, a national record, for a stadium that will hold fewer fans than the one it replaces. The cautionary tale fails as a cautionary tale, every single time, because the spectacle is engineered to override the arithmetic. You cannot fact-check a feeling, and the entire product is a feeling.

Which brings us, at last, to the Bears, who reportedly wanted something like $2.4 billion of somebody’s public money and have spent three years auditioning Chicago, Arlington Heights, and now Hammond for the role of mark. Indiana has raised its hand. It has waved up to a billion dollars in incentives and a governor eager to give a groundbreaking speech, and it will spend the next several years discovering, as St. Louis and Cincinnati and Buffalo discovered, that the renderings were the best part of the deal.

Chicago — and Illinois — nearly read the cautionary tale correctly. Faced with the demand for “tax certainty,” the legislature did the one thing none of these other governments managed: it declined to set itself on fire. That was not corruption and it was not incompetence. It was, for once, somebody refusing to pass the collection plate. The proper way for Chicago to proceed is exactly the way it has stumbled into proceeding — by recognizing that the only winning move in this game is not to play it, and by letting the next true believer learn the lesson on its own dime.

Let Indiana build the church. We’ve read this gospel. We know how it ends. And for the first time in this entire saga, the people holding the plate will be standing in another state.

Still slow. I come across interesting vids of football trends, macros and coaching points which illuminate the modern NFL.

This vid dives into whether the cliche ‘run the damn ball’ actually still works

Spoiler alert – running the ball still works, but not maybe as expected. The days of 200 rushing games are much more rare now [though it seems Swift/Monagai racked up a couple last season]. What’s more important is that once the threat IS established, it backs off the safeties. It perhaps makes DCs go less exotic and more basic – and the bootleg becomes a REAL danger.

Most big plays now are off PA and most come in 30-40 yd chunks. Gone are the days of the 5-7 step chuck it up to Randy Moss for 70 yds.

DCs are just too smart. Secondaries too fast. DEs like Garrett too dominant. Need to fool the Ds.

This also tracks with the 9ers just pouncing the Bears. They established the run. Got the LBs and Safeties biting on everything. Then Purdy hit guys wide open on PA. Rinse wash repeat. The D was running like a chicken with its head cut off.

Focusing on the run also enhances the value of the center. So it’s no wonder Linderbaum got PAID or why Bears attacked the C position so vigorously once Dalman retired. The O may literally run through it.