I’m Done Giving Kevin Warren the Benefit of the Doubt

I wanted to like Kevin Warren. When the Bears hired him away from the Big Ten in 2023, I bought the pitch — a heavyweight business mind, someone who could finally drag this organization’s operations into the modern era while Ryan Poles and Ben Johnson built a winner on the field. For a long while, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

That’s over now.

Thursday’s press conference at Halas Hall was supposed to be a chance for Warren and chairman George McCaskey to finally give Bears fans something concrete on the stadium situation. Instead, we got a masterclass in saying a lot of words that add up to nothing. The headline, such as it was: the Bears are still “doing due diligence” on not one but two sites near Wolf Lake in Hammond, Indiana, and might just mash them together into one. No timeline. No decision. Just more diligence, on top of the diligence, on top of the diligence from June, when the board “voted to advance” the Hammond project in a press release with zero follow-up questions allowed.

Three-plus years into this job, and we’re still at the “sole focus” stage. Not a groundbreaking. Not a financing agreement. A focus.

And look, I get that stadium deals are complicated. Tax certainty, infrastructure commitments, environmental review — none of that happens overnight, and I’m not naive enough to think it should. But that’s exactly why Warren’s press conference should not have been the news of the day. It’s the second week of August. Ben Johnson is entering year two after a season that ended one gut-punch overtime loss short of the NFC Championship game. Caleb Williams is a year into learning an offense that finally looks like it fits him. The Bears open the preseason Saturday against Cleveland. This is supposed to be the story.

Instead, Warren is standing at a podium not saying much of anything about a project that’s now been kicked from Arlington Heights — where the team already sank $197 million into 326 acres and unveiled shiny renderings — over to Indiana, where “minimal” is literally the word McCaskey used to describe the current state of conversations with Illinois lawmakers. Minimal. After years of this being framed as an Illinois problem, the guy in charge of fixing it is telling us he’s barely talking to the people who’d need to be part of the fix.

Meanwhile, the business side of this organization has ballooned. Warren didn’t just take the job — he built out an entire administrative apparatus underneath him, brought in his own people, restructured how the front office operates. That’s his prerogative as CEO. But when the visible output of three years and a growing executive payroll is “we’re examining a second site,” fans are entitled to ask what, exactly, all that infrastructure is producing.

And he’s not shy about the parts of the job that come with a microphone and a winning team standing behind him. Warren is front and center for every ribbon-cutting, every walk-off flex about the “world-class” future of this franchise, every photo op with Johnson and Poles. That’s the fun part of the job. The hard part — sitting across the table from state legislators, building the kind of trust that actually gets shovels in the ground — is the part where the updates stay vague, quarter after quarter.

This is what bugs me most: it’s stealing the fun. Bears fans should be allowed to just be excited right now. A coach who dragged this offense out of the dark ages, a quarterback who looks like he’s finally playing fast instead of thinking his way through every snap, a defense with real pieces, a preseason opener two days away. That’s a good problem to have after years of not having it. Instead, every training camp update gets swallowed by another stadium press conference that says nothing new, and fans are left arguing about Wolf Lake site plans instead of the two-deep at receiver. Warren’s job is supposed to make the football stuff easier to enjoy, not compete with it for attention every single week.

So here’s my ask: take off the orange tie, get out of the locker room photo ops, and get down to Springfield. If McCaskey is going to stand up there and admit conversations with Illinois lawmakers have been “minimal,” that’s on Warren. Arlington Heights isn’t dead — the Bears still own all 326 acres of it — and even if Hammond stays the lead option, you don’t get real leverage in a negotiation like this by barely showing up to the other table. Go sit across from the people in Springfield who can actually move a tax certainty deal, and stay there until there’s something real to announce. Do that work quietly, out of the spotlight, and let the wins on the field carry the headlines for once.

Then there’s McCaskey, doing what McCaskey does best: stating the obvious like it’s a revelation. Asked Thursday whether the team would ever be renamed if it ends up playing in Indiana, he delivered the line right on cue — “we will be the Chicago Bears whether we’re in Arlington Heights or Hammond.” Great. Nobody was worried about the name. Nobody needed that reassurance. It’s a soundbite engineered to generate a headline that isn’t about the fact that this 107-year-old Chicago institution might be playing home games across state lines with no finish line in sight. And the media ran it as the top line anyway, because it’s easy and it’s clean and it doesn’t require anyone to press Warren on why “sole focus” still isn’t a “signed deal.”

I don’t need Kevin Warren to have all the answers today. Real estate and public financing on this scale take time, and I’d rather the Bears get a stadium deal right than get it fast. But I do need him to act like the stakes match the job. Spend less time as the face of the football operation’s success and more time doing the unglamorous, unphotographed work of actually closing this thing out — wherever it ends up. Because right now, an exciting second season under Ben Johnson is fighting for oxygen against a stadium saga that’s been “close” for years and is somehow no closer than it was in 2023.