Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren stands on the sidelines during a game last season.
AP
JOE BUCK IS PAID a lot of money to know a whole lot of things about the National Football League.
But apparently bucks to Buck don’t pay for comprehensive expertise on new stadium matters.
The aging prodigy showed he can toss marshmallows with the softest of ’em during the telecast of the Bears-Texans Hall of Fame game from Canton last Thursday night.
The contest was delayed and eventually ended by a storm late in the third quarter. That left ESPN/ABC with time to fill.
SO THE FIRST GUESTS in the booth with Buck and Troy Aikman were Bears president Kevin Warren and GM Ryan Poles.
Poles is the bright young football mind who is pushing the on-field McMonsters forward.
Warren is the stadium staller currently selling himself as some sort of a big-project swami at Halas Hall.
Buck went first with Warren and the results were not good.
FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND THAT Bears media in Lake Forest appear petrified to address:
Warren was once an executive with the Vikings. From 2015-19, he was COO.
Minnesota’s quest for a new football stadium began around 2000 under owner Red McCombs. He got so frustrated with the fiscal rigidness of state politics that he sold the team in 2005. The new group hired Warren as a legal functionary.
The only individual in the Vikings organization who was a constant in pushing the new stadium forward was a skilled lobbyist named Lester Bagley. He remains with the team as exec VP / legal affairs.
BAGLEY CAUGHT A HUGE BREAK when Mark Dayton — of the Target department store dynasty — became governor of Minnesota. In tandem, the duo blue-oxed the initiative to the finish line.
Warren primarily attended most important ribbon cuttings and shovel turnings, sometimes even donning a properly theatrical hard hat.
Still, last week, that didn’t prevent Buck from prompting him in front of a national TV audience with:
“And they bring you in, the Bears do wisely, because the job that you did and the Wilf family did in Minnesota, that stadium is wonderful. And you’ve been up against this before, so you have the experience of getting a stadium done.”
“KW,” IF NOTHING ELSE, knows spotlighted slam dunks when they’re handed to him. So he replied:
“100 percent. U.S. Bank Stadium is still a phenomenal stadium. We’ve been here before. A lot of credit goes to the McCaskey family. They’ve given Ryan and I the support, Coach (Matt) Eberflus, to do what we need to get done. So we’re excited about where we are, we’re focused and we’re going to keep working hard.”
In one cunning swoop, Warren overlooked his limited role in the fulfillment of U.S. Bank Stadium and tied himself in with the forward progress of Poles — and by extension Eberflus — in Bears’ roster building.
THE MCCASKEY AND RYAN FAMILIES continue to waste time, profits and corporate energies while slow dancing around breaking ground on the 326 acres they own at Arlington Park.
Warren’s Folly — the dead-Jeanie-in-a-bottle try to circumvent a storehouse of political and civic complexities on the Chicago lakefront — remains in a bizarre limbo, where it will one day cease to exist.
But don’t expect Joe Buck to know all of that.
His marshmallow Jet Puffs are far easier to toss out during football delays.
STREET-BEATIN’:
As if their historic losing streak wasn’t enough, Jerry Reinsdorf‘s White Sox are sharing “a dank corridor” with premium ticket holders at Oakland Coliseum as their three-game series plays out Wednesday (2:30 p.m., NBCSCH). Announced attendance Monday night was 4,971. Scalpers report tickets for the two-game set vs. the Cubs at Guaranteed Rot this weekend are the most expensive of the blighted season. …
HBO Sports caught a huge break with the massive word-of-mouth that proceeded the start of the five-week run of the Bears on “Hard Knocks” Tuesday night. The outfit once had a crisp media-relations apparatus during the long run of Ray Stallone as its chief (1995-2020). Stallone made his bones in Chicago as DePaul’s director of sports info during the crest of the Ray Meyer–Joey Meyer run. …
Bunker Bill Carstanjen and Churchill Downs Inc. drew all of six starters for Saturday’s “Arlington Million” at Colonial Downs in Virginia (zzzzz). Rain is forecast and that could further decimate the decayed turf haunting. And, when are Carstanjen and his trained chip gobblers going to do anything to memorialize the racing legacy of Dick Duchossois? …
George Demos is fighting the good fight with the assistance of close chum Dave Corzine plus staff at Mayo Clinic. Long a college basketball referee, the supremely colorful Demos remains one of the most prolific scorers in the history of the Chicago Public League. (He also used to ref scrimmages behind the hermetically sealed curtains of the Michael Jordan-era Berto Center.) …
And hard-nosed classicist Taylor Bell, on the overflow of 39 competitions in the Paris Olympics: “The games should consist of three sports and that’s it — gymnastics, swimming and track and field.”
Jim O’Donnell’s Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Thursday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.