Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) did not endear himself to Bears fans during a recent interview in which he discussed Soldier Field’s shortcomings.
Mere days before the Bears’ board of directors voted to move forward with their stadium development project in Hammond, Indiana, Johnson appeared for an interview on Chicago’s 104.3 The Score.
Johnson discussed the Bears’ potential relocation and even the potential of a future publicly owned stadium. However, what drew the ire of listeners was Johnson revealing that he left last season’s Bears-Packers game because of poor ingress and egress routes, and the fact that the hometown team was losing.
“Let me tell you how bad it is — Bears vs. Packers, I’m at the game, we’re losing,” Johnson said. “I decide to leave to beat the traffic. Before I get out of the footprint, the Bears had come back to win.”
As Yahoo! Sports reports, “Based on his description, he’s referring to either the Week 16 game when the Bears came back in overtime to beat the Packers 22-16 after a 46-yard touchdown strike from quarterback Caleb Williams, who finished with a PFSN QB Impact score of 75.9 last season, to wide receiver D.J. Moore, or when they scored 25 points in the fourth quarter in the Wild Card Game to beat them 31-27.”
The mayor’s complaints about the Soldier Field layout and his retiring before the end of the game are unlikely to convince Bears fans that he did everything he could to prevent the Bears from moving to Indiana.