Dan Wiederer

I don't think it's the ideal wish of the entire organization to wind up in Hammond, Indiana.

But I think there came a point in time where the patience level forced them to get wandering eyes and to find a plan B that could be viable.

And so I think in that regards, it's not purely leverage, that it has to be a realistic solution for you unless you want to just abandon this project altogether.

finish out the lease at Soldier Field and then figure out what the heck you're going to do with a property in Arlington Heights that you paid almost $200 million for and has, you know, obviously quite a bit of land to deal with.

So, you know, I don't know which way this thing's going to twist and turn in the long run.

Hopefully that gives you some context on kind of where my viewpoint is on it.

But it's a saga that's just seemingly been never ending with not a lot of momentum.

The jig is up.

That's the first and the biggest misstep in this entire project was doing that without full-fledged clarity on what was going to occur there.

Yeah.

Look, I know George was, you know, candid and saying, look, like it was up for sale and we had to act.

Well, did you?

Because again, who was the competition for that?

And at that point, you're making a decision that it's Arlington Heights or bust, right?

Because you could have let someone else buy that property and there was no pressure in that moment.

It's not like they were coming up on the end of their lease at Soldier Field and they had to have a future stadium property in their hand and in their back pocket by the time the summer of 2021 ended.

And so,

When you made that move, I think internally they left a lot of boxes unchecked in terms of what needed to be done to bring that property to life in the way that it needs to come to life for a stadium and a multi-use district and everything else that comes with it.

I'll give you a small picture one first and then a big picture one.

And the small picture one is even folks that don't cover the Bears on a regular basis that listen to Ben talk realize just how much substance is in every single thing he says.