On Iowa Daily Briefing 5.14.12 -- Let's speculate about an NFL preseason game at Kinnick

Minnesota's legislature passed a bill last week to help build a new $975 million stadium for the Vikings. The stadium should open by 2016 at the latest.

The structure will have a roof, but it's undetermined if it's retractable or fixed. The Vikings will spend $477 million, the state kicks in $348 million and Minneapolis contributes $150 million. The new stadium will overlap a portion of the current Metrodome.

The Vikings will play at least one and up to four seasons at the Gophers' TCF Bank Stadium. The agreement calls for the Vikings to pay $250,000 a game and up to $3 million per season. Because TCF Bank Stadium seats just 50,000, the Vikings will bring in temporary seating and install heating coils under the turf for those December games.

Many of you might ask what this has to do with Iowa. Well, aside from a sizable amount of Iowa fans who also follow the Vikings and four current members of the roster once played for the Hawkeyes (Chad Greenway, Allen Reisner, Christian Ballard, Tyler Nielsen), maybe the stadium situation could help Iowa's Kinnick Stadium (70,585 seats) snag a preseason game.

This is pure speculation, but it's not entirely foreign for the state to stage a preseason game. In fact, as unlikely as it seems, Cedar Rapids played host to a preseason game back in 1961.

On Sept. 2, 1961, the Vikings and Chicago Bears played at Cedar Rapids' Kingston Stadium (seriously) before 12,500 people. The Bears won 30-7. It was the Vikings' fourth preseason game in their inaugural season.

Iowa Athletics Director Gary Barta has experience accommodating the NFL. When Barta worked at the University of Washington in the 1990s, the Seattle Seahawks had to play two seasons at Husky Stadium. Barta, a Minnesota native, also was a Vikings' season-ticket holder when the team played at Metropolitan Stadium. Of course that's just anecdotal information.

NFL preseason games are lightly attended and generate little buzz. If the Vikings are given a home preseason game against, say, the St. Louis Rams, and play it Kinnick Stadium (Avenue of the Saints Bowl?), you could generate a decent crowd midway between the metro areas. If a preseason game is scheduled in early August 2014 or 2015 before Iowa students are on campus, maybe it brings a crowd to Iowa City, fills a few hotels and restaurants and gets some decent publicity for the region.

All of this is speculative. But once in a while it's fun to think about something like this.

Bears Vikings 1D 1961

ON THE LINKS

-- Rob Gronkowski had 90 receptions for the New England Patriots last season. Aaron Hernandez had 79.

They are both tight ends.

Brad Herman caught eight passes for Iowa in 2011. He is trying to make the Patriots' roster as their third tight end and as an undrafted free agent.

“I can develop in all areas - that's the important thing,” Herman said. “Compared to these guys, I'm nothing. I'm just trying to learn from them, get better, and get to the level that the coaches want me at, and what I need to be at to play to my best abilities. ...

“You're at the same level as they are,” he continued. “They are just men, like you, at the end of the day just trying to have a job. That's how you have to treat it. You can't be star struck.”

-- Michael Rosenberg of the Detroit Free Press has an interesting column entitled "Risks won't deter the NFL dreams of rookies like Lions' Riley Reiff"

Excerpts:

He might achieve fame and glory in his chosen profession. And the uncomfortable truth is that 30 years from now, he might not remember it. He might end up, like other great NFL players, with knees that don't work, arms he can't lift and, worst of all, a brain that won't function properly. If the NFL, doctors, equipment makers and scientists don't solve the concussion crisis, then Reiff, or others in his draft class, will end up in the worst kind of headlines. ...

"I just hope I'm alive when I'm 55," Reiff told me this weekend. "I don't look that far ahead. I love playing. If I'm stumbling around or something, I'll take it with pride, because I worked hard and it was fun."

-- If the Big 12 should happen to call Florida State, FSU Board of Trustees chairman Andy Haggard said the school should listen.

“We have to listen to how much more money may be out there," Haggard said. "There are other issues that need to be considered. My only point is to listen to anybody who wants to talk – especially in these economic times.”

-- Alabama football coach Nick Saban feels the suggestion from Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany that the upcoming four-team national playoff in BCS football is, well, absurd.

"The people want to see the best teams play," Saban said. "They don't want a bunch of conference champions to end up playing in the championship game."

Oh by the way, Bama didn't even play in the SEC Championship last season before it won the BCS title game.

-- Adam C., Biggers of Yahoo Sports believes in Mark Dantonio.

The headline kind of says it all for Biggers' essay: Mark Dantonio Will Do for Michigan State Spartans Football What Tom Izzo Has Done for Spartans Basketball

-- Phil Mushnick of the New York Post says that if NCAA President Mark Emmert is delusional if he's serious about being an academic-reformist. Mushnick wrote:

In just the case of football, “student-athletes” lost the first semester to football. Now, while the rest of the student body preps for and takes second semester finals, the schools' football players had better show up trained and ready to compete in April and May for starting positions early next semester!

Round and round it goes. If we logically were to conclude that recruited Division I football and basketball players are among the minimal academic qualifiers for full scholarships, the mere notion that these enrollees are pursuing - or even able to pursue - legit college educations defies the most rationalized applications of practicality and just plain common sense.

-- And here's how to get into trouble in Kentucky: Publish a cartoon that ridicules John Calipari: