Vikings to Nowhere in Particular

The Vikings lost. Nothing new in that, but the venue was very different:

The proposed public subsidy package for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium was decisively rejected by a House panel late Monday night, leaving the team and stadium supporters visibly stunned.

With the Legislature planning to adjourn in two weeks, the nearly $1 billion stadium plan was left needing an extraordinary injection of support to stay alive at the state Capitol this spring.

The result was not particularly surprising. So how does the blame game work? Maybe not as well as the DFL would like:

Just one of the House panel's six DFLers voted for the project, even though Gov. Mark Dayton -- himself a DFLer -- had made the stadium a legislative priority. But DFLers quickly claimed that outstate Republicans on the panel were more easily able to back the stadium because it would be paid for with gambling revenues and city taxes in Minneapolis.

In other words, the game was to have the nasty Republicans from outstate impose the stadium while the local DFLers could then claim they were protecting the taxpayer. Nothing they could do, you see -- that Morrie from Moorhead was just too powerful for us beleaguered DFLers. Yep, plausible deniability, the kissing cousin of a Profile in Courage. By the way, the vote was 9-6 against, which means that the GOP vote, at least in this committee, was actually 5-4 in favor. No matter what Sid Hartman thinks, it's gonna be tough to pin this one on Kurt Zellers. Both support and opposition to this matter have been bipartisan.

Lester Bagley, the guy who has been on point for the Vikings throughout this debacle, was back in thinly veiled threat mode following the vote:

"It's a mistake to think the Vikings and the [National Football League] will continue with the status quo" of playing in the Metrodome without a new stadium, Vikings spokesman Lester Bagley told a large crowd of reporters after the 9-6 vote. Bagley stopped short of saying that the vote could lead the team to leave Minnesota.

I wrote a long post last night as all of the maneuvering was going on and I'm going to repeat the point I made earlier. The only way to ensure that the Vikings stay in Minnesota is to have a local ownership group buy out Zygi Wilf and his partners. I don't think you would see nearly as much opposition and "no stadium for billionaires" rhetoric if the local politicians were dealing with hometown billionaires. Minnesotans may be ambivalent at best about great wealth, but they do love their benefactors. And that's what they need now.

As for the current Vikings ownership, it's difficult to have much sympathy for them. They could have been playing in a new stadium already, but they chose to jettison the deal they had with Anoka County in 2006. Six years on, they have nothing. Which is what they deserve.