Owned

 The chant began drifting out of the shadows in Soldier Field the other night, as the Chicago Bears and Seattle Seahawks put on an exhibition of American football that only vaguely resembled the preferred model. The final score was 6-3, and it was every bit as dreary as that number suggests.

And so here came the chant, as the Bears horse-assed around to their 10th straight defeat.

Sell the team! Sell the team!

This was aimed at the McCaskey family, who married into the Halas family, who birthed the Bears back when football players wore leather hats and the Model T was the car for Everyman. Now they preside over the ruins of George Halas' Monsters of the Midway, who, as the Old Man noted in "A Christmas Story," are more like the Chipmunks of the Midway.

Sell the team! Sell the team!

After yet another lost year for the Chipmunks, I think the chanters are onto something.

Bad owners are the root cause of a lot of misery in Sportsball World, and, as a long-suffering devotee of the Pittsburgh Pirates, I can speak with some authority about that. A bad coach/front office only sentences you to temporary disappointment, disgust and finally disengagement. A bad owner makes it a legacy.

And sometimes, it doesn't even take a bad owner. Sometimes you get owned because your owner is not only bad, but a thorough-going jackass.

Which brings us to Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the Sacramento Kings of the NBA, who this week abruptly fired head coach Mike Brown mere months after extending his deal. The extension happened because Brown, in his first season in Sacramento, coached the Kings to the playoffs for the first time in 17 years. That earned him not only his second NBA Coach of the Year honor -- and by a unanimous vote, no less -- but the IBCA Coach of the Year.

In June, the Kings extended Brown, whose .549 winning percentage was the fourth-best in Kings history. But then Sacramento stumbled out of the gate, going 13-18 and losing five straight at home. And Brown, who wrung 107 wins in two-plus seasons, was gone.

Now how he found out?

Kings management called him on the phone while he was on his way to the airport for a flight to Los Angeles. Called him. On. The phone.

This was dirtbag stuff even for an owner, and it earned him scorching condemnation from other coaches around the NBA. Nuggets coach Mike Malone, who was himself fired mid-season by Ranadive ten years ago, was especially scornful.

"No class and no balls," he said, adding that the firing didn't surprise him because of "who he works for."

He's got a point. In the decade since Ranadive eighty-sixed Malone (who, by the way, went on to win an NBA title in Denver with Nikola Jokic), the Kings have burned through six other coaches on his watch. That's seven coaches in 10 years if you're keeping score at home, and it suggests the problem in Sacramento isn't about who's running the show from the bench.

In other words, maybe someone should start up a "Sell the team!" chant at the next Kings home game. 'Tis a thought.