Kevin Warren Is A Big Doofus

You've seen this movie before. It premiered on Madison St. in 2007.

There is only a limited amount of kudos that has to be sent Kevin Warren's way. He did the simple thing, which had led to the Bears being good again. That's not nothing, and it's the sum of what most Bears fans want. Give us a team worth watching, and we're happy. It's actually 80 percent of the battle for any sports team, and yet so few manage it.

Hiring Ben Johnson was the simple thing. Opening up the McCaskey piggy bank to make sure "he never left the building" is simple. But doing simple evades so many executives, it is worth complimenting Warren on, to a point. He at least didn't outthink himself, didn't let anyone else do so, and secured what everyone agreed was the best candidate available. So it has proven.

Does that mean Warren has some throbbing football brain? No, it does not. You knew that Ben Johnson was the best candidate. I knew it, and we're all football stupid. Simply going to ESPN.com once over the previous two seasons would have told anyone that Johnson was the "it" guy. But again, Warren got the guy he needed to get.

As with other execs we've seen in this town, Warren thought doing the simple thing that worked a treat for a host of reasons he had nothing to do with filled his head with visions of his own geniusness. Which led to yesterday's belching out of a "threat" to move the Bears anywhere from Fox Lake to Hammond. Whoever will take them and provide the tax benefits the Bears would like that would save them, relatively, the change lost in the couch cushions.

It's a familiar tale. Remember the Hawks? That was two different people, which Warren has efficiently rolled into one for our benefit. Rocky Wirtz and John McDonough came in and did a series of simple things that just about anyone could have figured out, if they hadn't been poisoned by the years of Bill Wirtz management that made these things seem as if they came from an advanced society on Rigel-7. They put the home games on TV, they actually attempted fan relations, they signed players, they upgraded the experience for both fans and players. This is all simple.

At the same time, the team got good because of players that were acquired before Rocky assumed the throne and installed McD as the very-seen hand wielding power from very in front of the curtain. But that didn't mean McDonough didn't force himself into every shot or picture to remind everyone of what he'd done.

You're seeing Warren forcing himself into the shot behind Ben Johnson for every victory speech in the locker room, aren't you?

Warren has to attach himself to Johnson as much as he can, because everything else he was hired to do, he has completely borked. Unless there was a line in the job description about consistently celebrating oneself, at which Warren is unmatched. Odds there's a camera crew following him around right now: no higher than 9-5. But his main charge, to get a new stadium, he has taken a Rob Deer-like golden sombrero.

It couldn't be easier to see what thought passed through the vacuous space between Warren's ears this week. The Bears are hot, people are more excited about them than they've been in nearly a decade, and the mere idea of them leaving the state will drive fans into a frenzy to the point that they'll actually instruct their reps to take up the stadium tax bill. Because it was important to Warren, he assumes it'll be important to everyone.

It started in Arlington Heights. But the Bears didn't get the sweetheart deal that Warren assuredly told them he would get, like the one he got in Minneapolis. Then it was a completely transparent galavant around Chicagoland that no one took seriously. What was on that list? Naperville? Joliet? Can you remember them all? Then it was back to the city, with a proposal that was pretty much laughed out of every floor of City Hall and around town as soon as it was unveiled. When that, predictably, went nowhere, it was back to Arlington Heights. The Bears have toured around the entire Chicagoland area in the past two years, which anyone who has experienced traffic around here would tell you sounds just about right.

But it isn't important to everyone. Fans are just worried about what happens on the field Saturday. They're also aware of whatever budget crisis the assemblies in Chicago and Springfield had to wriggle out of this week. Nothing's changed there.

I don't know the details, but there were always whispers that the deal the Vikings got for their new dome was done by a lot of people not named Kevin Warren. Think we're starting to see why that's out there. Perhaps the Bears erred in bringing in an outsider who didn't know how to play the intricate and byzantine game of Chicago and Illinois politics. Perhaps they erred in just hiring a dipshit so far up his own ass he needs that camera crew that he orders to follow him around at all times just so someone can show him where to go.

I'm sure there's some external pressure from the NFL. George McCaskey's fellow owners, and Roger Goodell, don't want any owner having to foot the bill themselves, because then the next one might have to, as well. Seeing as how sports owners want a new building every 20 years now instead of every 50 or 70 (Washington, Denver, Cleveland), this will keep coming up. They have to keep their phony baloney scheme.

Are the Bears going to Indiana? No, they're not. No one in their right mind is going to let them move to a locale at least 90 minutes from any major airport. I have no doubts that Indiana is corrupt enough to jigger up some tax breaks to fuck over their Northwest population, who have been through enough already, if not the whole state. But the Bears won't be coming, or at least I highly doubt it. This is a song we all heard 30 years ago, too. The Bears stayed on the Lake, where they'll probably be when we all die.

What's clear is that Warren has no new ideas, no creative ideas, and really no idea how to play the game. Perhaps we should have known when he ditched out of the Big 10 before he'd actually finished the TV deal, the one that's consistently getting clubbed by the SEC's deal with ESPN. Every move he makes only poisons the water around a new Bears stadium even more.

Warren did one thing. To him, that was an accomplishment large enough to blur all the obstacles that were in front of him before. And they're still there. But it's hard to see them with one's head in one's rectum.