It is the second consecutive season in which the Chicago Cubs have made the playoffs, and it appears that they will continue a successful run for many more years to some. The complete turnaround of the Chicago Cubs organization has been lauded as one of the most impressive overhauls in professional sports, which will receive the final stamp of approval with a World Series title.
When Tom Ricketts purchased the Cubs back in 2009, his office was a small boxed in room with no windows and sat adjacent from the team’s server room. The team would find out about trades throughout the league via a kid browsing the internet, and most staffers found themselves working from trailers in the parking lot. Wanted to send a quick note to someone in Iowa, or Tennessee, or Myrtle Beach? Why just draft a quick facsimile and send it over – but please remember the cover page. The team lacked international scouting, the team allowed their minor league system to go to crap, and the team allowed the house they played in to literally crumble.
This is what the Cubs were before Tom Ricketts purchased the team, and he has done everything in his power to change it. From remodeling Wrigley Field, gaining new revenue streams, and most importantly – hiring the best people. Those people sold Tom on a plan to completely rebuild the entire baseball organization, from technology infrastructure to their talent evaluators and taught the team to treat the minor league system as their most important asset. Possibly most important, those people sold Tom on being a poor Major League team – and being 100% transparent with the team’s fans in the process.
So it began, the Cubs became one of the league’s worse teams in a manner of a season. Everything that had been done was undone, and the big league team lost, and lost a lot. Losing 286 games in Theo Epstein’s first three seasons on the Northside, some fans wanted them gone.
To their credit, every time someone from the Cubs was asked about the team and where they were going, they would reply with the same mantra of this being a process. They were selling Cubs fans on hope and optimism for the future. While even the most devoted fan was finding it difficult to make it out to games, even when the team was offering phenomenal family discounts on hot dogs and refreshments.
After the 2014 Chicago Bears horrific season, the team had similarly bought onto the fact that they needed a complete overhaul and rebuild. Knowing that Ted Phillips just wasn’t able to fill the roles of general manager and head coach himself, he had just failed miserably when hiring Phil Emery and Marc Trestman, the Bears sought out the expertise of Ernie Accorsi for recommendations.
When the Bears turned the future of their franchise over to the 38 year old Ryan Pace, it signaled that there was going to be a major rebuild of the team’s roster. No one was safe, quarterback, running back, or lineman – and fans would need to sit through multiple bad seasons in order for Pace to right this ship.
The only problem with a rebuild in the NFL is, other organizations have showed that it can be done in a year or two – the Bears are looking at much longer.
Fans were given a false sense of just how bad and long the rebuild would be when the team hired John Fox. After all this is a coach with a track record of bringing teams to the playoffs by his second season – and not one that has built a resume on rebuilds. Then the Bears went out and spent a ton of money in free agency to improve the talent on the defensive side of the ball, increasing fan’s expectations of competing for a playoffs berth.
The pressure fans put on the Bears to win is 1000x that of what the Cubs put on the Northside. Example of which, after the team’s Week-1 loss to the Texans, fans had already begun calling for John Fox’s and Ryan Pace’s heads. This is a loss in just the second season of a rebuild, to a team that made the playoffs in the previous year. When the team dropped their Week-2 game to the Philadelphia Eagles, those calls got louder and grew in size as well.
While Phil Emery was let go after two seasons as general manager, his reign had different expectations than Pace’s tenure has. Emery was expected to put an offense together that would compete for a Super Bowl, Pace is charged with redefining an organization that has been left behind by their biggest rival – the Green Bay Packers.
Then the players themselves. While we have heard time-and-time again that football player’s careers last about three or four years, which isn’t exactly true, but a player isn’t going to want to waste a couple of years in what will be a short career in a rebuild. While flashing money at someone will always work, some will want out of the town the first opportunity they may have. While some of the current roster you wouldn’t mind leaving, there is still guys like Alshon Jeffery that will be allowed to test free agency and the draw to win in a city might be more attractive then the question marks on a rebuilding team.
Life in the NFL doesn’t give you the luxury of pausing until you can load up with enough players to magically become good again. If your fans aren’t pressuring you, the business of the NFL is. The unofficial mantra the NFL has on rebuilding is, look at all the teams that turn it around in just a season or two. Eventually that pressure will get to George McCaskey, and worse yet to Virginia.
Virginia is 93 years old, and has pushed the Bears to compete for a chance at winning, even if it meant giving up a future. Knowing that their franchise has performed so badly, while the Packers have succeeded tears at the McCaskey family. It is reasonably possible that the family interjects into the workings of the football team, and causes a complete u-turn in their path, which would be completely devastating. It is completely possible that fans, angry about paying premium prices for tickets, will eventually get the ear of the family.
You just will not see a complete overhaul in the NFL like you saw with the Chicago Cubs. The pressures from fans or the league or players just don’t allow for teams to complete elaborate rebuilds. It is unfortunate as the Bears franchise needs it, and their fans deserve it. Only thing is, the fans just won’t let it happen.
