And we need to remember thar the old man basically forced Jim Finks out. Finks, the guy who built the only modern championship team in our history, left because Halas went around him and hired Ditka as the HC.
Yeah, that is a great point. Halas hurt the franchise hiring Ditka. Ditka inherited immense talent from the Finks era - and it is a travesty that he couldn't do better than the one SB that owed quite a bit to Buddy Ryan. Not Ditka. And when Ditka went to New Orleans he broke that franchise with mismanagement.
And after the 85 SB victory, Michael McCaskey became team president and proceeded to tear the team apart, starting with the firing of Jerry Vanisi who was almost as good a GM as Finks was. The cover for getting rid of Vanisi was he was part of the effort to bring in Doug Flutie as the Bears QB. I heard a lot of rumors at the time there was another issue, involving a lawsuit between the family of George Halas' ex-wife and the McCaskey family. I won't post anything about that until I can confirm it.
