Rise up and stay away: Bears fans should boycott Sunday's game

One of the most famous stories in the New Testament is the parable of the talents, in which a master goes on a journey and entrusts money (talents) to three of his servants.

The servant who received five talents invests the money and doubles it. So does the servant who received two talents. The third servant takes the one talent he received and buries it. When the master returns, he’s furious at the servant’s lack of enterprise and throws him into the darkness outside.

I don’t know what the McCaskeys do with the landfill of money they have, but I know it doesn’t go toward football.

It couldn’t, not with the way the Bears played Sunday night in a 55-14 loss to the Packers, the way they played in a 51-23 loss to the Patriots the game before or the way they have played for what feels like forever during the McCaskey family’s ownership of the franchise.

People with money and smarts never would have allowed a team to get into the state the Bears are in right now, which both the football and medical communities refer to as “vegetative.’’

The only way to send a message to the McCaskey family is for Bears ticketholders not to show up Sunday at Soldier Field for the Vikings game. Would a boycott change anything? Would it make the McCaskeys understand that their general manager doesn’t know how to build a team and that their head coach is as passive as a turtle? No, it wouldn’t.

But it sure would feel good.

It’s the only way for fans to fight back. It’s the one thing the McCaskeys seem to understand, if only vaguely. Again, I have no idea what the family does with the millions and millions of dollars it has amassed over the years. None of the family members seems to live ostentatiously. I’d almost feel better if one of them were driving around town in a Maserati. At least the Biblical talent that founder George Halas had entrusted in them would have been used for something tangible.

Fans should respond Sunday with three and a half hours of nonattendance.

The problem with a boycott, of course, is that it doesn’t get at the root of the problem, which is that no one at Halas Hall seems to know how to hire the right people. That starts with the McCaskeys, who bring in people with the same bewildered looks on their faces as they have. Coach Marc Trestman said Monday that, despite Sunday’s embarrassing display, there would be no staff changes. Of course not.

So I’d like chairman George McCaskey to arrive at Soldier Field on Sunday and experience emptiness. I’d like him to feel a cold wind whipping, unblocked, across his face, to understand how far this franchise has fallen and to see what that descent has meant to fans. The fans who have tolerated bad football and ticket-price increases much too often.

But that’s up to the people who have stood by this franchise through too much thin and not enough thick. The disgust is there. Is the will? It’s not easy turning away from something so important to so many people. But remember, Cubs fans stopped selling out Wrigley Field, and change came, slowly.

Those fans are giving the Cubs the benefit of the doubt now because the team has spent big money on president of baseball operations Theo Epstein and new manager Joe Maddon. No one knows if it will pay off, but at least there’s hope. The Bears haven’t given their fans any hope, not even the false kind. They gave their fans general manager Phil Emery and Trestman, both low-budget hires.

That’s the reason you fans should speak with your absence Sunday. The McCaskeys already have your money. It’s just sitting there, doing nothing, like the Bears’ defense against Aaron Rodgers. One of my Facebook friends dreamed of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban buying the Bears from the McCaskeys. Sorry, but they have the franchise in a death grip. You couldn’t pry their cold fingers from it with a blowtorch.

But maybe you can guilt them into cleaning house after the season and, as I suggested last week, hiring a football guru to run the organization. If that doesn’t happen, you can show your disgust by not going to the games next season. The only thing these people understand is cash, or at least the collecting of it. They certainly don’t understand winning.

Bury them.