The Chicago Bears coaching staff relies on the team’s enterprise network to study game film and draw up plays in Microsoft Visio. The video department relies on it to distribute footage to coaches immediately after practice. And across the organization, the team’s 300-plus employees rely on the network to support ticketing, business analytics and livestreamed press conferences.
But by 2024, the Bears’ network infrastructure was showing its age. Some equipment was more than a decade old, and when the network experienced a critical failure over a holiday weekend, IT staff had to work overtime to provision backup switches as a temporary solution.
Leaders knew the team needed a complete refresh: 90 new switches and 130 new wireless access points across three locations. But NFL teams operate nearly 24/7/365, meaning the Bears had to complete the project during a two-week window just before the start of the team’s July training camp.
“There was zero tolerance for downtime on this,” says Josh Naylor, the team’s director of IT. “We invite fans from across the Chicagoland area to come watch the players practice. Coaches show up before 6 a.m. and start working from their laptops, reviewing film, getting playbooks together and prepping for practice. We weren’t sure whether we were going to be able to get this done in time, or if we were going to have to punt to the end of the season.”
The Bears and CDW worked together to create a detailed strategy and build out a unified network across three locations. By carefully planning each step and deftly handling issues as they arose, the team put in place a robust infrastructure powered by Cisco technology in a short window of time, delivering new capabilities and a higher level of security for users.
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Tapping a Trusted Player
Network refreshes are intense for any organization. But the constraints of an NFL offseason make the timing nearly impossible. When the season ends in February, teams immediately begin evaluating players and preparing for the April draft, and rookie minicamps start in early May. The only lull comes in late June and early July, before the start of the full training camp.
“We condensed this project to a quarter of the time it normally takes for a project this size,” says Steve Miller, CDW’s executive account manager for the Bears. “They have this short window where things are the quietest, and that’s the window we had to work in. It took months and months of planning to get everything ready.”
CDW needed to coordinate installations across three Chicago-area locations: the Bears’ headquarters at Halas Hall in Lake Forest, Ill.; a downtown office at 123 Wacker Drive; and a small footprint at Soldier Field, where the Bears play their home games. Previous networking projects had left a mix of equipment in place, and the Bears wanted to avoid a phased approach that would result in another fragmented environment.
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“We’ve operated as a lean and scrappy IT shop for decades,” Naylor says. “When you’re running 200 miles an hour all the time to get things done, that inevitably creates technical debt.”
The Bears invested in Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series switches, as well as Cisco Wireless Wi-Fi 7 access points. For both the team and CDW, communication and trust were just as important as technical know-how. The Bears needed to be confident that CDW would do whatever it took to get the project done on time, and CDW needed to be confident that team officials would be responsive when issues popped up.
“I’ve worked with CDW in a couple of roles, and they’ve always had a stellar reputation,” Naylor says. “I've seen them really go to bat for us. They have a deep bench, and if something starts to go wrong, they know how to handle it.”
A Team Effort
After months of planning, the CDW team — eight employees and 12 third-party technicians — installed the networking equipment in early July, working until 9 p.m. each night to get the new gear installed and configured properly.
“The Bears were great to work with,” says Rituraj Phukan, the CDW senior project manager who led the effort. “They understood the challenge we were up against. They were available whenever we needed them, and their involvement and support made things easy for us.”
Although the CDW team spent weeks preconfiguring the equipment, issues still arose during deployment. “You’re really not going to see those landmines until you actually deploy the equipment and see how it behaves in the environment,” Naylor says. “There were some problems with how wireless authentication was handled on our network, because we were using a mix of vendors before. CDW made some changes that got everything working. We went from a week behind to a little bit ahead.”
Miller says the combined efforts of CDW, Cisco and the Bears were essential to the success of the project. “It was all hands on deck,” he says. “I never had a problem with anyone saying they couldn’t jump on a call and work through something. Everybody was extremely willing, because everyone knew the stakes.”
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All Speed, No Fumbles
The team met its deadline, and when coaches returned to their offices, they saw the benefits of the new network right away. “We immediately started noticing improvements,” Naylor says. “The environment is much more reliable and secure. We don’t have those uh-oh moments where a switch goes down and we have to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Along with the physical infrastructure, the Bears adopted Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), a network access control and security policy solution, as well as the Cisco ThousandEyes monitoring platform. “We now have traceability down to the port level,” Naylor notes. “In fact, we can even see the granular settings on Cisco Room Bars to determine what might be causing latency. That level of observability is the security blanket we were looking for. CDW really came through for us.”
Miller sees a connection between the grit of an NFL team nicknamed the “Monsters of the Midway” and an IT team that didn’t consider failure an option. “The Bears are hard-nosed,” he says. “They fight in the trenches and do whatever it takes. That’s what our technical team did. They really went above and beyond to make it happen.”
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