the dome part isn’t one of them. College football ends in November and we have maybe one really cold game a year.

Pro football has two more months of that. The coldest game I’ve ever been to was a January Bears game in old Soldier Field. It was flipping brutal.

Now, I’ve gone to very few Bear games ever, so it won’t affect me, but if I was a Bear season ticket holder I’d be fully on board with it.

is about a mile from our house. They could have let it get sold to the group who wanted to keep racing. Instead it will be vacant for years and possibly developed by idiots.

Who is going to get the revenue from the new stadium when the Bears are not playing? Do they split it? Do the Bears get it?

Will the Bears pay rent? Is the $2.3 billion contribution prepaid rent”

Who pays the cost overruns? It always costs more. 40 years of doing commercial real estate deals, including several big ones in the NW suburbs has taught me, it always costs more and it always takes longer.

The unions, the favored contractors and the politicians are all going to want some of the money. If inflation keeps up, it will be even worse. If they bring this in for less than $6 billion it will be a miracle. Maybe they have significant reserves for overruns, but I would be surprised.

they were asking for bar-b-que advice which I provided. I looked at them and said, "you guys have more gear in the car, right?" Nope. "guys, you need to hit a store and get gloves, stocking hats and coats...you can't go to this game with just a hoodie" I would like to think I saved a few digits that night.

I am a Cleveland to Indy transplant. Open air football stadiums in bad climates are just plain dumb. My Cleveland relatives went to a game after thanksgiving here, were like "wow this is so nice" "why do we not have a dome".

Southern climates and baseball I will give a pass as weather is generally good for those locations/times of year.

If you want to watch a game played in an artificial environment, go watch hockey. Or bowling. Domes are weak, insipid, boring, and fungible.

I was fortunate that my dad had Bills season tickets when I was growing up in the '90s. I went to 2-3 games a year and always had dibs on Miami. Apparel for cold late season games included long johns, snow pants, ski jacket, hat, gloves, boots, and warmers inside the boots and gloves. Plus a thermos full of hot chocolate. Everyone in the row was crammed in with all the bulky winter gear, so in a way we were keeping each other warm. On a good (but not great) play such as a first down, I'd hear the muffled thuds of 1,000s of gloved hands clapping. I went back for a couple games this past season and sat in my friend's club seats underneath heat lamps. I actually missed the elements.

My sister always got the short end of the stick. I remember when my dad took her to the rainy Colts game. They actually took down the shower curtain and brought it to the game. Either way, they got drenched. Like I said, I'll take the snow anytime.

I’m trying to think of the worst one I’ve attended at ND, there are many candidates. The West Virginia and Michigan home games in the 2000’s were bad as were 2 Stanford games in 2012 and 2014, but probably the worst was 2015 at Clemson, especially since those others were wins, at least.

Nothing like sitting through the remnants of Hurricane Ike, but at least ND won handily. The worst was a Bengals game in Cincinnati with temps in the low 30s. I wish I had foot warmers with me.

‘14 Stanford was by far the worst. It was just warm enough not to snow and rained hard the entire game. The other 2 were at least warm/warmish.

That ‘14 Stanford game is probably the overall coldest ND game I’ve attended (factoring in the elements). A close 2nd was the USC game at the Coliseum in 1994.

2014 Stanford was truly awful. It was nearly a wintry mix. I recall the 1991 and 1993 games at Purdue were miserable as well.

We stomped them, and their fans started leaving in the 2nd Quarter.

Pouring rain mid 30s temp
I made $10

I have never been so miserable at a sporting event in my life (12/26 game), and the Pats crushed the Bills that day.

Fortunately, I'm not having to chip in to help NYS pay for the new one.

It’s too much of the culture of the team and fans.

to host a Super Bowl, so there goes one major incentive for building a dome.

It’s an added hardship, shared by all there, and makes the games more interesting. Football and Soccer are famously the only major sports that will go on despite the weather. It’s a plus of the sport. It’s slowly being lost.

That said, it’s going to give the Packers even more of an advantage. No way Lambeau will ever get a roof, it’s too much of it’s identity to be the Frozen Tundra.

What does an extra $4B get the Bears?

There's earmarked 1.3 or 1.4 Billion in infrastructure changes. So thats just the roads, the mess that will be created on DLSD, and some phantom parking even further south.

Then there's demo of the last stadium renovation and most of the site, preservation of the hisotirc colonnade, and building of the multipurpose museum cmapus connection on top of the old site.

Then then,Lucas Oil is a trussed solid roof. This is a transparent ETFE (probably) roof with a far more advanced structural system. There's a lot of noise regarding the artificial playing surfaces across the NFL. I wouldn't build (and would certianly hope the Bears have considered) a stadium that couldn't long-term support a natural grass field. I imagine the previous bullet plays a siginifcant roll in the roofing choice here.

So...quickly in today's money, you rack up a big price tag. What a few billion dollars amongst friends?

I'm curious whether there's a notable difference in labor costs in Chicago v. Indianapolis. I'd guess that there is just from cost-of-living considerations. I don't know if these kinds of workers would tend to Unionized in one locale but not in another. But even so, I can't see that accounting for five times the cost.

Another thought is whether being trapped in a city with parkland surrounding it makes it a more expensive demo and cleanup with various EPA compliance that might not apply to a city block surrounded by parking lots.

There also may be more effort to build around the stadium, as they seem to want to keep the Soldier Field colonnade and incorporate that into the park. I'd guess those costs weren't part of Lucas Oil considerations. For instance, SoFi in LA cost $5.5 billion. I imagine that also included costs to incorporate the stadium into parkland. But they also probably spent a bunch of money on architectural design. The initial proposal for the Bears has more flare than Lucas Oil (which isn't to say it's any more attractive). They seem to lean into the space ship theme instead of a simple, symmetrical dome.

But still, that's eye-popping.