Bears to honor matriarch Virginia McCaskey with tribute patch

The Bears’ 2025 uniforms will honor late matriarch Virginia McCaskey in two different ways this season.

The first is a special tribute evoking the way the Bears mourned the loss of her father, founder George S. Halas, upon his death in 1983. The second tribute is, by design, nothing special at all.

Bears chairman George McCaskey told the Sun-Times that, starting with next week’s preseason opener, the Bears will wear a football-shaped patch with Virginia McCaskey's initials inside for every game this year. The patch will be placed on player's jerseys above their hearts. The football is orange with navy stitches and a white outline. The navy “M” is outlined in white and larger than the other two letters — V to the player’s right, and H, for Halas, to the left.

After George S. Halas died on Oct. 31, 1983, the Bears wore a similar patch for the rest of the season. The letter H was outlined on top of an orange football, flanked by the letters G and S. It wasn’t until the offseason that the Bears replaced the patch with the permanent “GSH” memorial on their left jersey sleeve. It remains to this day.

Virginia McCaskey inherited the Bears when her father died in 1983. The Bears briefly considered other tributes after she died Feb. 6 at age 102 but “this was always the one,” George McCaskey told the Sun-Times.

“We thought it’d be appropriate to have a patch that mirrored her dad’s after he passed away,” he said. “It came out great. We like the look of it.”

The second way the Bears will honor Virginia McCaskey is by not wearing a single throwback or alternate jersey this season. The Bears will wear their standard navy jerseys, white pants and navy helmets at home and white jerseys, navy pants and a navy helmets on the road. Gone for this season are the team’s orange jersey and helmet combination, as well as their striped 1936 throwbacks.

“She said to me many times, ‘If it were up to me, we’d have the same uniform at home and the same uniform away,’” McCaskey said. “I’m thinking, ‘Well, it is up to you, Mom.’ It’s a tribute to her than she understood and deferred to us in those choices. So we thought this would be a nice way to pay tribute to her.”

It will be a “low-key tribute to Mom,” McCaskey said.

“That was important to the family — that we do something that’s appropriate,” McCaskey said. “We knew that the last thing she would want was any recognition or tribute, so we thought it was appropriate but understated.”

Virginia McCaskey “liked what we won in,” her son said. She wasn’t into the minutiae of uniforms the way George was, though, and deferred to him and others when it came to the creation of alternate jerseys. When her son showed her mockups for the 1936 throwback uniforms that the team began wearing in 2019, she famously told him that the “socks don’t turn me on.” She was in high school in 1936, and joked that she was more interested in the players wearing that uniform than the uniform itself.

The Bears also will honor Pro Football Hall of Famer Steve McMichael, who died of ALS in April at 67, with a decal on the back of their helmets. The navy football has an orange outline, white laces and his No. 76 in the Bears’ font in white. The same logo will be stenciled onto the Soldier Field grass on game day.