Post by Deleted on Dec 27, 2016 13:23:24 GMT -6
Dec 27, 2016 1:42:20 GMT -6 @soulman said:
The McCaskeys own 80% of the Bears with Ryan and McKenna owning the other 20% but essentially Ginny holds all of the voting power so essentially the team management is a matriarchy. I think Ginny is a wonderful old gal but at a certain point you have to ask just how much power and authority belongs in the hands of a 92 year old no matter how sharp she may still be mentally.The other problem as I see and I hope that other would as well is that the Board of Directors is largely made up of the other McCaskey sons including Michael who over the years did as much damage as anyone and Teddy Bears who might just as well be a McCaskey himself. It's clear that Ryan and McKenna have very little say in matters if a vote is taken and do any of the sons stand up to Mom?
Show me just one football savvy person on that entire Board yet these are the people guiding the franchise and the reason for my oft stated position that they need to hire a top Exec as a Director of Football Operations finally admitting that they don't know enough to get it right themselves and really never have.
Now roll forward to the mid '00s and another SB appearance but that time a loss. Ted Phillips who was a Mike McCaskey protege advocated nearly the same thing claiming the Bears as a "family owned" team with no other sources of revenue unlike many other team owners could not "afford" to keep winning through spending for top talent. WFT?
?Many see the decline as being caused by Lovie getting too much power following that SB but even prior to that I see the hand of Teddy Bears in the way the Bears approached the draft and FA. JA, another Phillips hire, had a habit of wanting to trade down to avoid the price tags of top five picks. He did so in 2003 when he traded the #3 overall pick and we ended up with Haynes and Grossman. He did the same in the 2005 draft trying to trade out of the #4 overall pick but had no takers. We ended up with Benson and his contract hold out.
It wasn't until after Cliff Stein replaced Phillips doing the contract negotiations that we finally began to see less and less issues and players more successfully signed and/or extended but through it all the Bears have continued to show a reluctance to spend on top UFAs. While I still favor building through the draft it may be time to reconsider our approach to free agency a bit.
I don't have all the answers either but I do know that for the past 30 years this team has been operated at the top either by Mikey McCaskey or his protege Ted Phillips and all of the work done prior to that by men like GSH, Jim Finks, and Jerry Vainisi was eventually undone. GSH was a football man. In fact he may well have been "THE football man" of the 20th century and he wanted his team run by football men which is why he hired Finks and was grooming "Mugs" to take over from him prior to Mugs death.
Since Finks left after his dispute with GSH over hiring Ditka, GSH's death, and the firing of Jerry Vainisi this team has never had a top football man running it and until that changes I don't expect the results to change anymore than they did for the Cubs before the Ricketts hired a top MLB Exec to run the team. So while Pace can talk about success IMHO he'll be hard pressed to produce it as long as Teddy Bear and the McCaskeys are still pulling all the strings.