The 1970 Chicago Bears season was their 51st regular season completed in the National Football League. The team finished with a 6âÂÂ8 record, a significant improvement over the 1âÂÂ13 record of the previous season, the worst in franchise history.
After losing the coin flip for the number one pick in the 1970 NFL draft (which Pittsburgh used to select quarterback Terry Bradshaw), the Bears traded the second pick to the Green Bay Packers for linebacker Lee Roy Caffey, running back Elijah Pitts, and center Bob Hyland.
This was Chicago's final season at Wrigley Field. They moved into Soldier Field beginning the next season, and would play there until the 2002 season.
As an experiment, the Bears hosted their first home game of the season at Northwestern University's Dyche Stadium in Evanston. The Bears' Wrigley Field landlord, the Chicago Cubs, were in a pennant race and might play in the National League Championship Series and World Series, and that Wrigley Field would be unavailable (at least for installation of temporary seating in right and center field) until well into October. (The Cubs were in contention in the National League East until the final week of the season, thus rendering the anticipation moot.)
In addition, the NFL was pressuring the Bears to move out of Wrigley Field, because it had no lights (installed in 1988) and its seating capacity was under 50,000 (even with additional seating in right field for football games), stipulations of the AFLâÂÂNFL merger agreement. The Bears planned to move to Evanston for the 1971 season, but Evanston residents petitioned city officials to block the move, and the Big Ten Conference ultimately barred the Bears from using Dyche Stadium; the Bears moved to Chicago's Soldier Field.