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The last time the city of Chicago had two professional football teams was in 1959, when both the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals called the Wind City home. Now, with both the Cincinnati Bengals' and the Bears' stadium situation in flux, NFL insider Mike Florio suggests that now may be the time to try it again.
“With the Bears getting nowhere when it comes to finagling taxpayer funding for a new stadium, the solution could come from having a second team play there,” Florio writes on PFF.com. “Instantly, the inventory of games would double, from 10 to 20. It would become much easier for the Bears (and possibly the other team, unless it’s just a tenant) to pay for the building with minimal public assistance.”
So, where would the second Chicago team come from?
“Enter the Bengals,” Florio says. “They’re less than three months away from the final countdown to the expiration of their lease at Paycor Stadium. During the league meetings this week, executive V.P. Katie Blackburn said the quiet thing out loud — after 2025, the Bengals can go wherever they want to go.”
This is a fascinating situation to ponder.
The last time an NFL team relocated was in 2017 when the Chargers franchise moved from San Diego to Los Angeles. Prior to that, the Rams moved to LA from St. Louis in 2016, and the Baltimore Ravens moved from Cleveland in 1996.
The Chicagoland area is already home to two Major League Baseball teams, so there would seem to be enough fans to support two NFL franchises, and two (notoriously penny-pinching) ownership groups of the Bears and Bengals going in on a Chicago stadium also makes sense.
All that said, even Florio admits that “The chances of this actually happening are low.” But he also cautions that as cities become less and less willing to cough up billions of dollars to build football stadiums for billionaires, “it might take brash creativity to solve the current stadium situations” for the Bears and Bengals.
