The McCaskey Family
I’m going to play the Bill Wirtz/Chicago Blackhawks angle and say that the Bears won’t win until the McCaskeys sell the team. At the end of the day, you’ve got non-football people making football decisions.
The McCaskeys have overseen the last two GM and coach hires while keeping sweaty Teddy Phillips as the team president. Phillips is a former accountant who has helped the family make a lot of money. Look at what Tom Ricketts did with the Cubs. He hired a baseball man, Theo Epstein, to run the club. Ricketts sits back and collects the money as the Cubs have thrived this season as Epstein’s plan has come to fruition.
Chicago Bears matriarch Virginia McCaskey is getting up there in age at 93. There’s been some speculation in the media that when she eventually passes, the remaining family won’t have the necessary cash to pay the inheritance tax on the $2 billion franchise. If the Bears were to ever hit the market, they’d command a pretty high price.
Is it fair to blame the McCaskey family for the Bears bungling? Maybe not, but it’s hard to argue with the results. The Bears have one Super Bowl win, one other Super Bowl appearance in the last 30+ years. They’ve only been to the playoffs once in the last decade!
At the end of the day, they’re in charge. They need to fire Phillips and hire a real football man to be team president. Let that person run every aspect of football operations – hirings, firing, the whole shooting match. I think we’d all like Virginia to see another Super Bowl before she heads off to the great gridiron in the sky.
What do you think? Who’s to blame for this mess?