Vikings alumni share thoughts on team’s future

Looming issues the Vikings face not only include the prospect of whether there will be 2011 season with a new collective bargaining agreement yet to be reached between NFL owners and players, but also the stadium where the team will play its home games in subsequent years.

Though repair work has begun to fix the Metrodome roof in time for the start of preseason games in August, the stadium that both the Minnesota Twins and University of Minnesota football team vacated in recent years for new outdoor facilities isn’t now being talked about as a long-term solution to house the Vikings.

Tackle Frank Youso, defensive tackle Doug Sutherland and linebacker Matt Blair — who each played all or a portion of their Viking careers with home games outdoors in the former Metropolitan Stadium — stated their preference during Saturday’s carnival for another covered stadium.

“I hope they’re not crazy enough to build an outdoor stadium,” Youso said. “If they do, they’ll leave out a lot of people. Nowadays the way to go is with the domed stadiums, and nothing else.”

As for how to pay for a new stadium, Youso said he doesn’t favor a general tax on people who are already “taxed to death.”

“Let the people that benefit (from a professional football team) — like the hotels and the motels and the restaurants — let them pay a little higher tax,” he said.

Of the three opponents the Vikings face in the NFC’s North Division, where games late in the season can take place in the cold climate of the upper Midwest, two play their home games in outdoor stadiums — the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field and the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field. Both of those franchises elected to renovate those facilities over the past decade and continue playing outdoors.

Also during that time period, the Vikings’ other divisional foe, the Detroit Lions, moved out of one domed stadium, the Pontiac Silverdome, to its roofed facility, Ford Field, which provided a temporary home to Minnesota for one game last season after the Metrodome roof collapsed from accumulated snow.

Sutherland said it doesn’t make sense to have a multi-use complex in Minnesota without a rooftop, given that the NFL season now extends later into the winter.

“Below-zero (temperatures are) not good for the fans or the players,” he said. “I played in it, and it wasn’t any fun.”

In addition to building a new enclosed stadium, Sutherland said he favors a location that would provide plenty of room for fans to tailgate as opposed to the “sterile environment” that exists by having the Metrodome downtown in Minneapolis.

Given the latest in technology to build stadiums, Blair said he favors the concept of a retractable roof for the Vikings.

“They can open the roof and let it happen,” he said. "They can close the roof and keep it warm.

“The Vikings are going to stay here in Minnesota. They’re not going to go anywhere.”

Blair said building a new stadium with a roof would help create jobs.

“If you have that stadium here you’ll make money, you’ll have events here,” he said. “That stadium has to be able to be used the year around.”

Reliant Stadium, the retractable-roof facility where the AFC South’s Houston Texans play home games, hosted this year’s NCAA Division I men’s basketball “Final Four.”

Besides the advancements in stadium construction, another way the NFL has changed since the days Blair, Sutherland and Youso played for the Vikings is the significantly higher salaries players receive today. Determining how to share league revenues and what to do about pensions for retired players are among the issues that have been raised surrounding the collective bargaining negotiations.

Compared to what an available coaching position at International Falls was paying, Sutherland said he was offered only $500 more to play in the NFL after being drafted in 1970 during the 14th round by the New Orleans Saints.

“I was almost an International Falls resident,” he said. “... most players make more per play than I made in my first year.”

Sutherland, who favors better pensions for retired players, said he now receives more from Social Security than his NFL pension.

“If you have old injuries, there’s nothing taken care of,” he said.

Youso, whose playing career dates back to the 1958 season when he was with the New York Giants, agrees retired players should receive more pension money from the NFL.

“The owners — they have billions of dollars, I guess, from what I can understand, and they don’t want to share any of it with the players,” he said. “Look at us guys. We get very little. Our pensions are small, and they don’t seem to care.”

Youso said the effect to the country would be “devastating” financially in the event the first week of regular season games wouldn’t take place as scheduled on Sept. 11.

Blair said he believes a new agreement can be reached in time to prevent the 2011 season from being interrupted.

“If you took 80 percent (of league revenues), split it in half — 40 percent for the owners, 40 percent for the players — and put the other 20 percent into a retirement fund for the players, I think that should be the way it should be done,” he said.

Blair said the NFL risks turning off fans, as other professional sports have done, in the event there would be a stoppage in play.

“The NFL has something going for it that no other sports organization has,” he said. “It’s a big company now.”