Sports

Bears Fans Angry about a Move May Want to Consider The Past

By Jerry Beach Lindys Sports
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The Chicago Bears announcing their intentions Friday afternoon to "…advance our stadium development project in Hammond, Indiana" elicited a predictable amount of handwringing, much of it understandable. Sending the Monsters of the Midway across state lines to a city with fewer than 80,000 residents? What in the Ditka is going on here?

But historic franchises have bolted for the out-of-state burbs before, and the NFL keeps kicking. The Kansas City Chiefs are going to leave Arrowhead Stadium for a dome in Kansas that is expected to open in 2031.

And this fall marks 50 years since the New York Giants moved to New Jersey, and everyone still thinks of them as a New York team and thinks of the Devils as New Jersey's only professional sports team. Everyone would get used to the Chicago Bears playing in Indiana and no one will acknowledge Indiana has more professional football teams than Illinois.

All that said, the angst over the Bears exiting Illinois may soon look foolish, even if there doesn't seem to be any chance they remain in Chicago.

The Illinois suburb of Arlington Heights is also a candidate to house the Bears' new building.

Incumbent governor JB Pritzker, who is seeking re-election this fall, surely doesn't want to see the opposition craft hourly campaign ads painting him as the guy who allowed the Bears to go to Indiana.

Election years or not, history is littered with seemingly sure relocations - often to much further away locales - in which one or both sides blinked at the last second, and the team remained in its familiar home area.

A decade from now, the idea of the Indiana-based Bears may be a historic novelty just like these six relocations that never happened.

The New England Patriots move to Hartford, 1998-99

I'm a Connecticut native, so this is the tale I've been thinking about for the last few days.

Robert Kraft saved the Patriots from heading to St. Louis when he bought the team in 1994, but Foxboro Stadium, with its metallic bleachers, needed replacing in a way unlike few stadiums in history.

After attempts to build a new facility in downtown Boston and in Foxborough failed, Connecticut - fresh off losing the Hartford Whalers to those carpetbaggers from Carolina (Connecticut guy!) - swooped in and offered to spend up to $1 billion to construct a stadium in Hartford.

In November 1998, Kraft agreed to give Hartford exclusive negotiating rights. Then-quarterback Drew Bledsoe opened one press conference by asking where he should live in Connecticut. And the Patriots would still be in New England, so the name would be just as accurate as if they were anywhere in Massachusetts.

But the proposed stadium was slated to be built at the Hartford Steam Plant, which, according to an SI.com story from 2018, "…provided heating and cooling for about 85% of the buildings in downtown Hartford."

Moving the plant was a nine-figure expense and the land itself was also contaminated with coal tar, which would have added many millions to the construction costs and at least two years to the timeline. Keep this in mind for the Indiana Bears, because per USA Today, the land around the proposed stadium is an environmental disaster.

With Massachusetts and NFL officials renewing their efforts to keep the Patriots in the Bay State, Kraft backed out of the deal with Hartford in April 1999 and inked a deal to build Gillette Stadium in Foxborough.

Things have worked out pretty well since then for the Patriots, who have appeared in 10 Super Bowls and won six titles since.

Nearly 30 years later, Connecticut, the capital of women's basketball, is getting screwed out of a WNBA franchise. And my Dad, a Hartford native and lifelong Connecticut resident, still hasn't forgiven Kraft.

The Seattle Seahawks Move to Los Angeles, 1996

If not for a couple flaps of a butterfly's wings, it would have been the Los Angeles Seahawks knocking off the New England (but based in Hartford) Patriots in Super Bowl 60 four months ago.

Prior to the Super Bowl, we discussed the brief pocket of time in which the Seahawks almost bolted down the coast because - and again, we are not kidding here - then-owner Ken Behring was worried how the Kingdome would handle an earthquake. So he wanted to move to CALIFORNIA.

More NFL:

Behring pulled a page from Robert Irsay's book and moved the Seahawks' equipment and offices to Anaheim-area facilities. But this was back when the NFL was run by people who realized the league could survive just fine without a franchise in Los Angeles and that it was bad business to just relocate a franchise out of its perfectly fine home city.

(It also probably helps that this was months after Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore)

Behring's big plan perished when he was the target of several lawsuits by King County and after the league threatened to fine him $500,000 per day until the Seahawks went back to the Pacific Northwest.

Washington state voted to fund a new stadium for the Seahawks in 1997, after which late Microsoft magnate Paul Allen bought the team for $200 million. Allen's estate has placed the team on the market and is hoping to fetch $9 billion.

Solid little return on the investment.

The San Francisco Giants move to Tampa Bay, 1992

This was so close to happening, there were T-shirts printed celebrating the arrival of baseball in the St. Petersburg area, which built the Tropicana Dome in hopes of luring a team.

Giants owner Bob Lurie, who watched Bay Area voters turn down four proposals to fund a stadium that would replace Candlestick Park, agreed to sell the team to Vince Naimoli for $111 million on Aug. 7, 1992. But this was back when the American League and National League were separate business entities and when relocation for a franchise had to be approved by three-quarters of its fellow owners.

And after NL owners voted against the move by a 9-4 vote in November 1992, Lurie sold the Giants to Peter Magowan for $100 million.

Magowan immediately signed Barry Bonds to a six-year deal worth $43.75 million - imagine a player being worth almost half as much as a franchise today - to set into motion a chain of events that yielded the construction of AT&T Park, Bonds breaking the single-season and all-time home run records and the Giants winning three World Series.

Hard to imagine the Tampa Bay Giants having that kind of success, or playing in the NL East, for that matter.

Naimoli eventually got the expansion Devil Rays, who began play in 1998 and have been one of the league's most successful teams since 2008, four years after Naimoli sold the club to Stu Sternberg, who sold the now-Rays to Patrick Zalupski last fall.

And now Tampa has more Major League Baseball teams than the Bay Area, which lost the Oakland Athletics when all 30 owners voted in 2023 to approve their move to Las Vegas even though there's no stadium yet in Vegas.

We'd say this makes us pine for a time when MLB was run by people who at least begrudgingly possessed an appreciation for the game's history and weren't singularly consumed with squeezing out every last cent regardless of the collateral damage to the game itself, but, well, there was also the whole New York Giants moving to San Francisco thing in 1957.

Sacramento Kings move to Seattle, 2013

The ever-transient Kings - who were founded in Rochester, bounced to Cincinnati in 1957, split time between Kansas City and Omaha from 1972 through 1978 and moved exclusively to Kansas City in 1975 before exiting for Sacramento in 1985 - almost moved again multiple times under the Maloof family.

After flirting with Anaheim and Virginia Beach, the Maloofs agreed to sell the team to Seattle-based investor Chris Hansen (not that one) for $525 million. But NBA owners, who approved the relocation of five franchises - including the SuperSonics from Seattle to Oklahoma City, where they became the Thunder - during David Stern's 30-year run as commissioner, voted 22-8 against the deal in favor of the Kings remaining in Sacramento.

The club was steered to a group formed by Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson - the former Phoenix Suns star - and headed by Vivek Ranadive, who bought the Kings for $535 million.

Alas, the Kings have made the playoffs just once since then - and they fired Mike Brown less than a season-and-a-half later. Brown, you may have heard by now, is two wins away from immortality with the New York Knicks. At least Seattle is probably going to get an expansion team, whose owners are going to pony up at least $7 billion for the honor. Yowzas.

St. Louis Blues move to Saskatoon, 1983

Gary Bettman has to be bummed he didn't get the chance to do this - oversee a vote squashing the move of an American franchise to a remote Canadian outpost.

The Ralston Purina company, which owned the Blues, wanted to dump the franchise and found an eager buyer in Saskatoon businessman Bill Hunter, who agreed to purchase the team for $11.5 million and secured a loan to build an arena. But even though Hunter was the only potential owner left upon outbidding a group formed by St. Louis mayor Vincent Schoemehl, the NHL's board of governors overwhelmingly voted against the deal.

The vote nearly ended the Blues.

Ralston Purina forfeited the team's draft choices in 1983 and abandoned the team, which was 10 days away from folding in 1983 when Harry Ornest bought the club for $12 million.

The Blues have made the playoffs 33 times since and won their lone Stanley Cup in 2019.

Saskatoon never came close again to landing an NHL franchise, and those involved with the relocation bid acknowledged the Blues probably would have left the city sooner than later once salaries started rising and the gap grew bigger between the American dollar and the Canadian dollar. (And once Bettman moved into power too, of course)

Related: Do You Remember when the Patriots Were in the Stupor Bowl?

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This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 12:05 PM.