Why does it matter if I attend or not? My point is that the stadium will fill up whether I go or not. The Bears have never depended upon Palos Hills or Des Plaines to sellout Soldier Field. And I doubt very seriously if they are going to start depending in them now.

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You can be loyal and not attend games.

But it seems strange to no longer support the Bears if they move to a wrong zip code if you aren't going to games in their current zip code.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

how would it be worse to drive out to arlington? you can probably get there faster than you can get from the north side to the stadium now, during peak traffic. everyone piling into downtown, or everyone going to a spot thats more central to where more people actually live. plus again, right now theyre near a bunch of people that cant afford to go to the games. in arlington, i would bet most season ticket holders already live in that area.

the one thing that makes be believe they will stay downtown is the ariel shots. sounds dumb, but that matters. where they are at now will always be more nostalgic than anywhere else they could go.

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

It doesn’t matter if you go to any games. It’s a question.

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I would agree if they moved out of state, but it's the same county, I don't think they lose any support. The Bears have one of of the biggest fanbases in the NFL but should be the biggest and isn't because of McCaskey mismanagement for 40 years. George would never move the team out of state and everyone knows it so they essentially have no leverage with a new stadium anywhere.

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The hardcore tailgaters get there so early there's no traffic, but spot on everywhere else.

You said you live near Arlington right? Same here, I'm very impressed by the school districts not caving. Someone had to realize how much this would change the area and I'm glad they held their ground so far.

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Everyone knows George would never move the team so the classic leverage play that is always used for stadiums is unavailable to him, so he has Kevin Warren talking about needing a stadium downtown to save children from the violence of the streets.

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Over the years there have been a ton of teams that have attempted that same move thinking their fans would go with them and it has been a flop. I can remember when Foxboro would be empty. And that was the case even when New England wasn't really terrible. The Bears have the most loyal fanbase in the NFL. If they leave for Arlington Heights there will be a number of loyal fans that will view it as an act of betrayal.

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Who cares? And if you're asking then obviously it matters to you.

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MY POINT NEVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH ME THOUGH.

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I’m asking because I thought you misunderstood the question, not because it matters.

You made a point that if suburbanites stopped selling out soldier field, Chicagoans would pick up the slack due to their pride in a few area codes. You were then asked if you go to games and you brought up leaving the city to go see your beloved Bears.

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ITS NOT ABOUT ME THOUGH!!!! ANYMORE THAN IT IS ABOUT OUT OF STATE BRICK EITHER.

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I think your point on the actual city of Chicago residents applies to all things, not just the Bears. For the most part, the suburbs don't even exist to city residents. I don't know Bears fans are the absolute #1 most loyal, but they are certainly in the top 3. Raiders, Steelers, Eagles, Bills....all pretty loyal.

I think you're over-estimating the % of game attendees that are city residents. Any loss of fandom because of leaving city will be negligible. I can also attest to season ticket holders, as my Mom was a season ticket holder for years, as were my Aunt and Uncle. I've been to more Bears games than I can count in my lifetime and I assure you...when the Vikings, Lions, and Packers come to Soldier Field you see tons of their fans in seats. Bad Bears teams and season ticket holders sell a lot of their games off. It's been that way for years.

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Probably but I think the amount of people dropping their fandom over a move to AH is minuscule

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You mean to tell me that the "average Lifelong Chicagoan" doesn't know where the vaunted , now defunct Hinsdale Oasis happened to be? The nerve of him!

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I have gone on a number of those trips over the years and I can safely say that no city takes over other cities the way Chicagoans and Bear fans takes over at those games. And I have never seen fans from other cities takeover Chicago the way Bears fans takeover other cities either

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Swung on and Belted

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well done LTG

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

The Patriots play where they play because the minimum-capacity provision of the NFL/AFL merger kicked them out of Fenway or Harvard or wherever they were squatting by the end (the same mechanism that kicked the Bears out of Wrigley and off to Soldier Field) and with ownership being perpetually broke and incompetent, someone pity-gifted them some shit land halfway to Providence off US-1 for the sake of keeping the team, where they built the cheapest stadium possible that no one liked to go to because it was just one exit off a four-lane highway in the middle of nowhere and you'd sit there forever trying to get in and out. By the '90s they were poking around Boston proper again and even kicked the tires on Hartford before they got another sweetheart deal to basically stay put, which they did, and then built a strip mall around it. They're not there because the exurbs are superior to the city for their legions of SUV-piloting Massholes, it's just the legacy of when they were run by an even dumber family than the McCaskeys.

The 49ers' move to Santa Clara was met with a lot of resistance from people who didn't want the team to go to the suburbs, especially the South Bay 40 miles south, which is a pain to get to for most people in the Bay Area what with its strange geography and all. It's the opposite of Candlestick where it's unusually hot all the time. I think the prevailing opinion is that Candlestick was a dump but at least it wasn't in Santa Clara. It has never seemed like an arrangement that the fanbase was particularly happy with.

The Meadowlands is a weird case where it's only five miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies but until NJ Transit built a rail spur for the new stadium, you could only get there by car, which is obviously a problem for New York City, and even with the train I think you have to go out to Hoboken or Secaucus first and back out again. The Giants tried to move to Manhattan around the turn of the millennium but Madison Square Garden's lobbying power was too strong and by September '01 there were bigger fish to fry, so they resigned themselves to staying in their parking lot.

I think Dallas is a suburban success story, but the biggest one is the Raiders, whose Los Angeles fans faithfully drive and fly to the easternmost suburb of L.A. to watch their team.

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You would stop supporting the Bears if they had a zip code you deemed unacceptable.

Do you actually speak for all Chicagoans?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

All of them are wildly successful in their suburban areas.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

The Hinsdale Oasis is still open, its just operating differently.

The vaunted NBA Conference finals are going on yet here we are talking even more off season out of town football...and not even the players. Now we're talking about stadiums

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the last 6 sox fans can stay where they are. it will only be a net positive for the bears.

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the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

If the Bears win (givien the last 30 years that is not likely), no one will care where the stadium is.

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The concept that people will stop being Bears fans if they move out of the 606 is laughable. Let's start easy... what are the demographics of the current stadium attendees? 90%+ 606 residents? Nobody from the suburbs goes to games? Does anyone know? Or are we just assuming things based on our own personal biases?
History shows that when the team is good, people will go. That's likely the most important factor in attendance. Field a good team and it doesn't matter if they're in Champaign. People will come Ray.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

I don't think people will stop being Bears fans. I just think Arlington Heights is a terrible place to put a stadium with a copy of Deer Park built around it.

Sentimentally, I would like to see all our sports teams in the city. A football stadium would be a wonderful use of the big empty plot of land south of Roosevelt, and relatively easy to get to for people from all directions.

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History shows that demand is actually pretty inelastic, inasmuch as the Bears always sell out despite only making the playoffs 7 times in 32 seasons. (For comparison, the 2009-2016 Packers made the playoffs 8 times in 8 seasons.) Bears fans eat a lot of shit, as most NFL fans do. But with bad football in a depressing stadium with an inconvenient location (and make no mistake, it would be), do the Bears start putting up late-era St. Louis Rams attendance, or '80s Patriots going-bankrupt-promoting-the-Jackson-5 attendance? We may be past that era of the NFL for good, but I don't know, maybe.

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No one also will care when they lose either if they move to Arlington Heights. If they move to Arlington Heights the phrase "Die Hard Bears Fans" moves out with it.

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This guy gets it.

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Soon you'll be proclaiming the end of civilization if the Bears move to AH.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!