The Chicago Bears’ abysmal showing in San Francisco following the in-season firing of the team’s head coach underscored a larger reality in a city known for its obsessive sports fandom. It’s miserable being a Chicagoan these days if you root, root, root for the home team.
With overall No. 1 draft pick Caleb Williams calling the signals, the Bears entered the season with expectations of a winning record for just the second season in the last 12 and maybe even a playoff spot. They now carry a seven-game losing streak — a rare run of failure in a league whose mantra is “on any given Sunday” — and are at serious risk of losing the remaining four games on the schedule and taking an 11-game skid into the offseason.
Meanwhile, the Blackhawks just fired their coach less than halfway through a season in which they’ve failed to meet modest-at-best expectations. And the Bulls, while finally playing a more entertaining uptempo offense like the rest of the National Basketball Association, are widely expected to trade some or all of their star players in order to ensure their record is bad enough for a high draft pick.
It’s not baseball season, of course, but White Sox fans still are feeling the sting of breaking the record for most losses in a season.
We could go on. (No, Cubs, you’re not doing much better.)
Our only point here is that in a city struggling on so many fronts — political chaos, sky-high taxes, crime that remains unacceptably rampant — our pro sports teams are doing a lousy job at their most important task: giving us an escape from those depressing realities.
Not only are the teams terrible; a majority of Chicagoans still can’t even watch Bulls and Blackhawks games, with more than 30% of the teams’ seasons in the books. The new Chicago Sports Network — co-owned by the Wirtz family, which owns the Blackhawks, and the Reinsdorfs, owners of the Bulls and White Sox — has yet to strike a carriage deal with Xfinity, which has nearly 60% of the Chicago TV market. Network President Jason Coyle recently met with us and made the case for why he thinks Xfinity is being unreasonable.
Part of the dispute apparently stems from the network’s decision to make its content available for free to those with an old-fashioned TV antenna. That enables a lot of fans in low- and middle-class area households, particularly on Chicago’s South and West sides, to watch the games, which is a positive in our view.
But most fans, and we’re among them, don’t care much about who’s right and who’s wrong in this business disagreement. As bad as our teams are, we’d just like some escapist entertainment as the days grow short and the temperatures fall.
Even that simple pleasure is not to be had thus far in this winter of the Chicago sports fan’s discontent.
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