+1 And I am not doing this as some kind of "protest" but rather it's just that I don't care to spend time watching the crappy product the McCaskey business is putting out now. I just have better (more rewarding) things to do with my time. I'm sure that those empty seats, and unwatched TV Bears games - are due to similar feelings by people. LOL, we don't have to "organize" anything here. It's more of just a matter of people won't buy into your business product if it is a bad product. Times have changed. The sports entertainment industry has changed. The McCaskeys will change or it will impact their business value. This isn't the 1990s anymore. Countless businesses are closed because they could not evolve as the market has evolved. The NFL is not immune to this anymore. Evolve or die.
Well once again my system lost my post so I'll summarize in one paragraph.
If we want change it means getting rid of Ted Phillips and McCaskey management and replacing them with people who can effectively operate a winning NFL franchise. The McCaskey's have had 35 years to learn how to do that and have failed. Do you honestly believe the next 35 will be any different? It has to come from the top down or we might as well forget it.
Well once again my system lost my post so I'll summarize in one paragraph.
If we want change it means getting rid of Ted Phillips and McCaskey management and replacing them with people who can effectively operate a winning NFL franchise. The McCaskey's have had 35 years to learn how to do that and have failed. Do you honestly believe the next 35 will be any different? It has to come from the top down or we might as well forget it.
You have a solid point. The NFL, with their revenue sharing model, protects individual teams to a certain extent. The TV contract, and the merchandise sale revenues, are all split equally. So even if the McCaskey's mismanage the business, the family receives the same revenue as the New England Patriots - at least from those two sources of income. The only way their business can suffer from mismanagement is through ticket sales. Even so, 40% of ticket sale revenue is ALSO shared league-wide.
The worst that could happen to the McCaskey family is that the remaining 60% of the ticket revenues, which is NOT shared with the league, could be affected.
I'm not sure how much of a big deal this would amount to in dollars each year. To put this into perspective, EVERY team in the NFL received a check for $244-million dollars last year, as their share in the NFL national revenues (the NFL as a whole had $7.8-billion dollars in national revenue). It's like the crap teams (Chicago, Cleveland, etc) are on social welfare checks subsidized by the good NFL franchises. But, as I said, 60% of the ticket sales are NOT shared, and if the Bears would ever falter significantly in ticket sales, then that could possibly hurt the bottom-line revenue to some extent. Enough to worry the Family? I don't know. Maybe not.
Just a follow-up on my previous post regarding revenues for the Chicago Bears. The league subsidizes much of the revenues for the 32 NFL teams. This included the TV contracts, merchandise sales and 40% of the ticket sales. It all goes into one pot of money and is split 32 ways. Every team received $244-million dollars last year, as their share in the NFL national revenues.
So what about the 60% of ticket sale revenue is NOT shared? Well, the Bears charge the 9th highest ticket price of all teams in the NFL. Their average face value ticket price is $234.38. They have a stadium that seats 61,500 fans per game. So (if I'm doing the math correctly) the annual revenue available to the family each year (the 60% they keep) can be as high as $69,188,976.00. So, if they lost 50% of their family ticket revenues in a season, it would be around $35 million dollars lost. Maybe that is chump change to the family, or maybe it's not. I honestly don't know. It would be ~11% loss of revenue potential for that year.
Dave I think the most correct statement made about GMcC and the McCaskeys is that they do want to win. They just don't know how. This goes to the 35 years of mismanagement and frustration we've all experienced.
Their only qualifications as owners was to have been GSH only remaining heirs. Mugs Halas and his family would have owned the team had he survived his father. But what gets me is how GMcC can stand there at a presser and insist that he, Ted Phillips and his family are the best equipped people to operate the Bears in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That IMHO, is blind ignorance and arrogance at it worst.
Dave I think the most correct statement made about GMcC and the McCaskeys is that they do want to win. They just don't know how. This goes to the 35 years of mismanagement and frustration we've all experienced.
Their only qualifications as owners was to have been GSH only remaining heirs. Mugs Halas and his family would have owned the team had he survived his father. But what gets me is how GMcC can stand there at a presser and insist that he, Ted Phillips and his family are the best equipped people to operate the Bears in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That IMHO, is blind ignorance and arrogance at it worst.
I think that is true. I'm sure it must be embarrassing, even in their social environment, to be the owners of a business that is bringing them public embarrassment year-after-year. That being said, I also think that the revenue is #1 for the family. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to be seen as owners of a first-class business. The two are not mutually exclusive. They would like to be known as winners - and also pocketing the bigtime cash dividends each year too. Both.
At some point you would think they might reconsider their business structure and move to a football exec (even if they keep Philips as the company bean counter). I understand they have not done that so far. But they could make that move at some point.
Dave I think the most correct statement made about GMcC and the McCaskeys is that they do want to win. They just don't know how. This goes to the 35 years of mismanagement and frustration we've all experienced.
Their only qualifications as owners was to have been GSH only remaining heirs. Mugs Halas and his family would have owned the team had he survived his father. But what gets me is how GMcC can stand there at a presser and insist that he, Ted Phillips and his family are the best equipped people to operate the Bears in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That IMHO, is blind ignorance and arrogance at it worst.
I think that is true. I'm sure it must be embarrassing, even in their social environment, to be the owners of a business that is bringing them public embarrassment year-after-year. That being said, I also think that the revenue is #1 for the family. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to be seen as owners of a first-class business. The two are not mutually exclusive. They would like to be known as winners - and also pocketing the bigtime cash dividends each year too. Both.
At some point you would think they might reconsider their business structure and move to a football exec (even if they keep Philips as the company bean counter). I understand they have not done that so far. But they could make that move at some point.
The golden goose of an NFL franchise won't last forever. Already the league is showing wear and looking for ways to increase per capita revenue while simultaneously losing fans by the droves. Younger generations are simply not caught up in NFL football as much as we are or are fathers and grandfathers.
My older daughters are into it because they live in Green Bay and the Packers win but should that change I'm sure their interest would wane. One other daughter follows the Broncos because she's always been a sports fan but she also loves college football and the youngest wouldn't care to watch a game if you bought her a seat on the 50 yard line.
What we're likely to see is far less free broadcasts and far more PPV. Do the McCaskeys believe all of us will pay hundreds of dollars a year to watch that crap? If they expect to keep the team in perpetuity they'd better think about changing their business structure and their business model or what's gone inexorably north may just as quickly go south.
Ted Phillips may be seen as their financial guru but tell me, who couldn't have made them money in environment of the past 20 years or so? He's also cost them a lot of money to with some horrible business decisions like the renovation of SF into stadium with the smallest capacity in the NFL. GB can seat half it's population in Lambeau Field while the Bears can only seat a little less than 56,000 in the second or third largest market in the US.
Put a pencil to losing the revenue from roughly 25,000 fans per game for 8 regular season games and 2 preseason games costs them. They have no stadium to spend money on so they keep enlarging Halas Hall and for what? They spent about $20 mil building it 20 years ago and have renovated it a couple of time since. How many more wins has that earned them yet they wouldn't cut ties with an obviously inferior HC last January because it would have cost them $9-$10 mil to pay him off and they would have been too embarrassed to fire him?
How embarrassed are they now? How embarrassed will they be if only half a stadium shows up on Christmas Eve? Embarrassed enough to step down like GSH did after he fired our other worst HC and hire someone who could help him rebuild his Beloved Bears? IMHO no. They will never do that but instead will find another excuse for failing this time and eventually this story will repeat as it always has. It is what it is until they decide to change it.