As the Bears search for someone to replace the retiring president/CEO Ted Phillips, chairman George McCaskey knows what he’s seeking.
“Ted 2.0,” he said.
Phillips himself, though, knows that the Bears didn’t win enough during his tenure as president, which dates to 1999. Three playoff wins, to be exact.
“I don’t have regrets — I don’t operate that way,” Phillips said Friday, sitting next to McCaskey in a small conference room Friday at Halas Hall. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely. We haven’t been able to find a consistently winning team.”
Or a quarterback. Phillips — the same man who said after the 2020 season that the team had yet to get the position right but insisted that “everything else is there” — knows it.
Phillips says now that his infamous quote, uttered when he and McCaskey told angry Bears fans that coach Matt Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace were being retained, was simply the president trying to say both men “brought a lot of good things” to the Bears. A year later, they were fired.
“Some of the mistakes that were made were high-profile mistakes,” he said. “Those are tough to come back from. The Achilles’ heel — the one thing I’d change: Get the quarterback right, please. That’s what I’d change.”
Since winning the Super Bowl in the 1985 season, the Bears have had 45 different starting quarterbacks — most recently, Justin Fields.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “Hopefully we got that right now.”
The Bears have had “moments of success that have been really fun to be around,” Phillips said, but were never a consistent winner in his 40 years as a member of the organization.
“Whether or not the [front-office] structure would have made a difference, I’m not convinced that it would,” he said. “I think you need a football decision-maker, which we’ve always had.”
That hasn’t been Phillips, though the businessman has been tasked with helping to hire general managers — who in turn hire coaches — over the years.
“Everyone says I’m not a football guy,” he said. “It makes me chuckle a little bit. I’m not a coach, I’m not an evaluator. I’ve been in the business 40 years and I think I’ve learned a little bit. I’ve never made the decisions of who should coach and who should play.”
Next, he’ll help hire his replacement. Phillips, 65, announced his retirement last week, effective Feb. 28. McCaskey, Phillips and Tanesha Wade, the Bears’ senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion, will work alongside search firm Nolan Partners.
The Bears will not change their front-office structure, McCaskey said. That means there won’t be a “football czar” brought in to oversee football operations — just a president hired to run the business. McCaskey wouldn’t rule out a president with a football background, though. General manager Ryan Poles, who reports to McCaskey now, could report to the president in the future.
McCaskey listed personality traits he’s looking for in a president — “Leadership, vision, humility, consensus-building,” he said — but few other details. The new president doesn’t need to have experience building a stadium, McCaskey said, even as the Bears explore moving to Arlington Heights. One factor in Phillips’ retirement was his realization he wouldn’t be with the Bears to see the stadium project, which could last a decade, reach its conclusion.
The Bears have never hired a president that didn’t already work in their own building, but McCaskey said the team is “open to all possibilities,” both inside and outside Halas Hall.
The Bears could consider internal candidates Cliff Stein, Scott Hagel and Karen Murphy, who are all senior vice presidents. Former Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips, now the ACC commissioner, and agent Trace Armstrong, a former Bears player, would be compelling outside candidates.
Ted Phillips won’t go away any time soon. After unwinding — “I’m giving myself the gift of time,” he said — he figures to consult for McCaskey and the Bears.
“It’s hard to say no,” he said, “when you’ve been somewhere for 40 years.”
