The Hammond Bluff Worked. The Bears Are Close to Staying in Illinois.

The bluff is over. For months the Bears told anyone who would listen that their sole focus was a new stadium in Hammond, Indiana. On Thursday the act collapsed. Greg Hinz of Crain's Chicago Business reports the Bears are close to a deal that would keep them in Illinois, with a vote in the state legislature possible as soon as November.

Here is the shape of it, per Crain's. The new law would allow any municipality, including Chicago, to form an authority that would own and operate the stadium. The team would pay no property taxes. Taxpayers would be responsible only for new roads and other infrastructure around the site. And the venue would most likely be built in Arlington Heights, the suburb that has been holding the land through this entire saga. Not Chicago proper. But Illinois, and Illinois was always the point of the fight.

The most telling part of the report is who got it moving. Recent progress has been fueled by the involvement of minority owner Pat Ryan. Commissioner Roger Goodell has gotten involved too. And the two men who spent the summer selling Indiana, majority owner George McCaskey and president and CEO Kevin Warren, have taken a backseat. Warren is the one who said in August that Hammond was the team's "sole focus." The man who made Indiana the headline is not the man driving the Illinois deal. Read into that whatever you want. It is not hard to read.

None of this should surprise anybody who was paying attention. Indiana was leverage from day one. The Bears never wanted to spend the next century explaining why one of the NFL's founding franchises plays its home games in Hammond. They wanted Springfield to feel the threat, believe the threat and price the threat. Springfield just did. It matches the energy coming out of Halas Hall all week. This is the same front office that just sent two first-round draft picks to Tennessee for Jeffery Simmons. Aggressive at the trade deadline. Aggressive at the statehouse. Same message both times: the future gets handled now.

There will be a loud argument about Arlington Heights not being Chicago, and some of it will even be sincere. Let it happen. A suburb inside Illinois beats a stadium across the state line every day of the week, and everybody who spent the summer mad about Hammond knows it. The team stays home. The rest is geography.

Now the honest part. Close is not done. The deal needs a law, the law needs a vote and a November vote still has to survive everything Springfield can throw at it. The new law quietly keeps Chicago itself in play too, since any municipality can form one of these authorities. Nothing is signed, nobody has cut a ribbon and no rendering is worth printing yet.

But the direction is set, and it points home. The biggest indication yet says the Bears are not leaving Illinois after all. The Hammond facade lasted exactly as long as it was useful, and not one day longer.