By George, which way will Bears chairman lean?
The biggest parlor game surrounding the Bears these days is guessing what’s in a name.
George McCaskey’s, that is.
Is the Bears’ rookie chairman more George or more McCaskey?
The difference is monumental when forecasting where the Bears are heading.
Nearly 50 years ago George Halas turned over the Bears’ operation to son George Jr., nicknamed “Mugs,” and eventually everything changed for the better.
Nearly 30 years ago the McCaskey family inherited the Bears, turned over the operation to Mike McCaskey, and soon everything changed for the worse.
The difference? Mugs Halas was smart enough to go outside and hire veteran NFL executive Jim Finks to bring the Bears into the 20th century.
Conversely, Mike McCaskey believed he could run the place, fired incumbent general manager Jerry Vainisi and set the club back a couple of decades.
The Bears are in trouble if George McCaskey believes the Bears don’t need fresh views from outside to bring the club into the 21st century.
Yes, folks, the Bears are in trouble if this generation’s George believes that all the organizational pieces are dressed for success, from ownership to president Ted Phillips to general manager Jerry Angelo to head coach Lovie Smith on down.
The Bears need somebody from outside to come inside and examine the way everything is done. That includes the scouting and medical staffs, public relations and marketing, locker rooms and boardrooms.
Many really good people currently occupy those areas and likely would survive; many who aren’t so good likely wouldn’t.
Finks came from Minnesota and brought with him a few of the Vikings’ best people.
Suddenly the Bears went from a mom-and-pop franchise wallowing in the old world to a professional franchise suited for the new world.
The fruits of the transformation took a decade to ripen into a Super Bowl championship, but only because teams couldn’t go from worst to first as rapidly under the NFL structure back then.
Change, if not championships, can happen more quickly in all sports today, and we have seen that right here in Chicago when ownership felt a sense of urgency.
Usually it starts at the top, like Rocky Wirtz inheriting the Blackhawks and most recently the Ricketts buying the Cubs.
Each recognized within a year or two that the franchise needed major upgrades to compete both in sports and the business of sports.
As you well know, Wirtz hired John McDonough to be president, and several longtime Hawks employees were dispatched. Soon the team became not only relevant again but champions as well.
Tom Ricketts has taken similar measures, hiring Theo Epstein to revamp all of the Cubs’ baseball operations.
The common denominator was that Wirtz and Ricketts were aggressively forward thinking in attempts to reinvent their franchises.
That’s also what Mugs Halas was before dying at age 54 in 1979. Even after that, when Papa Bear Halas didn’t like Finks’ choice of coach, he fired the mellow Neill Armstrong and hired the fiery Mike Ditka.
Impatience ruled in all these instances when it became clear the status quo wasn’t going to get the job done.
So, which will it be with George McCaskey? More George or more McCaskey? More of the way it is or more the way it can be?
What is in a name — his name — anyway?
mimrem@dailyherald.com