PFT’S Mike Florio: the Bears are Leveraging Indiana for a New Illinois Stadium

According to Mike Florio, the Chicago Bears are dangling a potential move to Indiana not because they actually intend to leave, but to manufacture leverage and pressure Illinois into writing a bigger check for a new stadium. The Indiana talks are a squeeze play aimed at Springfield.

"The Bears don't have the leverage to say we'll move to San Antonio. They're not leaving Chicago," Florio told Rich. So the team had to find a credible threat closer to home. Florio traced the timeline: the Bears struggled to get a deal done first in Chicago, then in Arlington Heights, on property they already own. Stuck, they looked across the state line.

"Possibly inspired by the Kansas City Chiefs going from Missouri to Kansas eventually, 'Hey, we can cross the border. Indiana's right over there. It's still in Chicagoland,'" Florio said. "Let's start talking to Indiana, and let's see if they'll give us what we want."

The tell, for Florio, is what the Bears did next. "The fact that they keep talking to Illinois after they've gotten what they want from Indiana shows that Indiana is leverage to possibly get a better deal in Illinois."

Rich pressed on the target. Was the Indiana deal essentially an audience of one, aimed at Illinois Governor Pritzker? Florio widened the frame. "More than the governor, you got to get the legislature on board as well." He noted Pritzker said he would call a special session if a bill could clear both the House and the Senate, and that there had been progress on a Senate bill that would have made Arlington Heights the best possible destination.

The deeper obstacle is public money. Florio pointed to Illinois reluctance to write a very big check at taxpayer expense, something Pritzker has said repeatedly. He cited the Chiefs as a cautionary tale: Kansas City only wanted to extend an existing sales tax in Jackson County, Missouri, coming off two straight Super Bowl wins, and it "failed miserably." That defeat pushed them to look at Kansas.

So is Indiana a bluff? Florio left that open. "The real question to me is whether Indiana is a bluff. If they can't get what they want from Illinois, will they eventually say, 'We'll just go to Indiana'? That's TBD."

For now, his read is firm. "Indiana is just kind of sitting there as the way to squeeze Illinois." And Illinois, he argued, has to take the threat seriously before it acts. Right now, he does not think it does.