Dan Wiederer

See you out there.

Thank you, everybody.

To that topic, I think they are still just in a holding pattern waiting to see what happens in the Illinois state legislature.

And again, that that session runs through the end of May.

You know, when you're in my role writing at The Athletic, you're asked after every one of these sessions, was there news today?

And my answer was, no, there wasn't news, but there's a few updates.

And that's some of what we'll walk you through here today is there's just a few updates, right, that you've got to get to.

One of the prominent updates I think you would agree is that they have vocalized a timeline now.

They have said late spring, early summer.

That corresponds with the end of that session in Springfield.

And so you would expect them to have clarity one way or the other within a matter of months.

On Tuesday afternoon, as the league meetings officially wrapped up here at the Biltmore, Roger Goodell stood up at a podium and said it would be in the Bears' best interest to get that thing moving in the right direction quickly.

And I got a lot of pushback on Twitter from people saying, like, well, does that have any impact on lawmakers in Illinois?

Probably not much, but it is a man with a presence, a forward-facing presence that can –

Provide a different voice to the urgency that the team is facing.

And so that's that's one part of this equation that I think was an update today.

The other part of it, I thought George McCaskey in nine words summed the entire current state of the project up very well when he said, we don't have a deal to consider right now, which was his way of saying, like, neither state.

has a finished product ready for the bears and until one state has a finished product there is no decision to be made right like eventually you get a finished product and you say okay now we've got to compare it against what potential is there with the other side and right now you've got in indiana you've got a site that needs further vetting in terms of environmental issues in terms of infrastructure issues in terms of how well it can be built out for some of that multi-use district stuff

You've got the legislation in place to help you acquire and finance a stadium in Illinois.

It's the opposite.