Vikings seek a single reaction to their U.S. Bank Stadium gameday show: ‘You can’t miss this’

The control room overlooking the southeast corner of U.S. Bank Stadium is mostly quiet on Friday afternoon, save for the whir of server fans down the hall, as Jesse Marquette and Arthur Kuh begin their checks of the Vikings Entertainment Network’s gameday production elements. The youth football game on the stadium field means the Vikings’ on-field checks will have to wait until Saturday; as Marquette presses a button that triggers a preview video for the Vikings-Packers game, the soundtrack (a remix of Kesha’s 2011 hit “Blow”) is audible at a volume still quiet enough to talk over.

Forty-eight hours later, the room will be the nerve center of the NFL’s most elaborate stadium production, with Marquette (the Vikings’ senior manager of production operations) at the controls of the video boards in U.S. Bank Stadium’s end zones and the ribbon boards that line the facing of the stadium’s second and third decks. Allan Wertheimer, the Vikings’ senior director of production, operations and game presentation, will oversee a production team of 67 (counting 30-some people on headsets and computers in the control room, as well as camera, lighting and sound operators); senior manager of game and event entertainment Lauren Pinter will lead a group of 40 on the field.

When Marquette triggers the video again Sunday, it will play over the video boards in the middle of the Vikings’ cheerleaders dance routine, leading into three cellists playing an ominous version of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” with dry ice swirling around their feet. Then, New York-based voice-over artist Debbie Irwin (whom the Vikings found after a Google search for voice artists who sounded like Cate Blanchett) narrates a video that plays on Norse mythology and casts the Vikings’ opponent as fate that “must be conquered,” cueing fans to boo vociferously at a clip of the opposing quarterback walking toward the field.

The climax of the 15-minute “Showtime” production is of course, the Vikings themselves, emerging from a 30-foot tunnel shaped like a Viking ship with a dragon on its bow. NFL rules on pyrotechnics have prohibited the Vikings from launching fire out of the dragon’s mouth for five years; the Vikings’ control room now has a console that drops fake snow from the stadium’s ceiling, as players run through a trail of dry ice and six stone columns ejecting lighted smoke toward the ceiling.

“If we’re [telling fans to be in their seats by 11:45 for a noon game], we have to give them unbelievable entertainment from 11:45 so that now they have trained themselves like, ‘You can’t miss this,’ ” said Bryan Harper, Vikings vice president of content and production, who is in charge of VEN. “ ‘You can’t miss the snow in the building. You can’t miss the ‘Skol’ chant. You can’t miss player introductions. You can’t miss the Showtime story that’s being told,’ all that stuff. So that was kind of the way that we approached it.”

The Vikings’ gameday production is a spectacle without parallel in the NFL, showered with annual industry honors and praised in fan surveys as the best in the league. It exists first for entertainment, but it’s also become something of an amplifier for home-field advantage, whipping fans into a frenzy before the start of games in a building where the Vikings have lost just once this year.

Opponents have committed 19 false-start penalties at U.S. Bank Stadium this season, the most of any stadium in the NFL. Three of them came in an absurd sequence against the Texans on Sept. 22, when three different Houston players were flagged for false starts on three consecutive plays, as noise levels at U.S. Bank Stadium topped 120 decibels. The stadium is tied with Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium as the site of the most presnap penalties by opponents this season (32).

According to the NFL’s Voice of the Fan survey, U.S. Bank Stadium is ranked first in the league in overall experience, game entertainment and team/fan rituals and video board content. Fans rank the Vikings’ “Showtime” production as the NFL’s second-best in terms of pregame on-field entertainment, and put U.S. Bank Stadium third in terms of crowd energy.

Team data shows more than 80% of fans are in their seats 15 minutes before kickoff. The Vikings have encouraged fans to arrive early, partially for entertainment purposes, since U.S. Bank Stadium opened in 2016, but the team’s elaborate pregame productions are also geared toward getting fans to be loud right away.

Justin Jefferson, who knows a thing or two about showmanship, sees the benefits of the extravaganza.

“It gets the juices flowing for the fans, you know?” said Jefferson, who paused in the tunnel before he was the last player introduced against the Bears on Dec. 16 so the team’s video crew could get a 360-degree shot of him before running onto the field. “I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a show — giving the fans a show. So the lights, the music, all of that stuff plays a part for those fans to be screaming as loud as we want them to be. As long as we’re giving something for them to cheer about, we’re making those plays, we’re getting those turnovers, they’re always going to be into the game the way we want them to be.”

Harper, in his 21st season with the Vikings, oversees a department that’s grown from six to 46 people, including 35 full-time employees. The Vikings produce all of their pregame show in-house from their sprawling studios on the second floor of the TCO Performance Center.

By the time U.S. Bank Stadium opened in 2016, he had 12 years of notes from conversations with industry professionals and fan feedback about what they wanted from a gameday experience. The Vikings’ owners approved an expanded department that pulled in people like Marquette and Kuh (who’d worked for the Twins and Wild) and Pinter, who’d worked at Florida and Texas after finishing a graduate degree.

“Something we’re really proud of is, everything that we’re now producing in stadium, we’re producing in-house,” said Kuh, a senior manager of game and event creative. “You’re not finding that [with most teams].”

The Golden Matrix Awards, which recognize video productions across the sports and entertainment industries, has named the Vikings the best overall production in football after six of the team’s first eight seasons at U.S. Bank Stadium. The Clio Awards, which recognize creative excellence in advertising, design and communication, named the Vikings its 2024 sports team of the year, giving the team’s in-game production unit perhaps its most prestigious honor.

Alan Roach, a Slayton, Minn., native who is the public address announcer for the Super Bowl and the NFL’s international games, became the Vikings’ PA announcer for the first season at U.S. Bank Stadium after meeting Harper at the Vikings’ first game in London. He still lives in Denver (where he remains the PA announcer for two teams) but flies to Minnesota for each home game to lend his booming voice to a production that he said is like few he’s seen in more than 30 years in sports.

“They try to make it a big event, and they succeed on every level,” Roach said. “As far as my voice fitting in with that, to be honest, anyone’s voice could be in there, and it’s not going to make the event any smaller. It’s everything else that goes on in that stadium.”

The Vikings use 14 cameras on game day (many broadcast crews have 12), and consult game management coordinator Ryan Cordell on the best replay angles to show on U.S. Bank Stadium’s video boards, which were set at a low angle so coaches could view replays without having to crane their necks upward.

The team typically rolls out a new pregame production once every two years; the Vikings did a new one in 2023, to honor the memory of coach Bud Grant. When they started this winter on their third different show in as many years, some in the football department suggested they return to something that “would make me want to run through a wall.”

They went big with their early discussions, throwing out names like Anthony Hopkins and Josh Brolin and even Blanchett herself to narrate the intro video. They found Irwin, who’d done voice-over work for medical companies and documentaries but never something like what the Vikings had in mind. They cobbled together a script after reading Norse poems for inspiration, and laid Irwin’s narration over the vocals of a young woman from a Scandinavian village they’d found to re-interpret Robert Plant’s melody.

Irwin brought her family to a Vikings game for the first time Dec. 8. They were stunned to see the end result.

“That was emotional for me,” Wertheimer said. “You knew why they were there. They were waiting for that, and then they heard her voice. Her kids are right there with her. That was everything to them.”

For Irwin, it became a memory. For Vikings fans, it fueled the frenzied reception they gave Kirk Cousins when he returned to U.S. Bank Stadium.

“We do ask a lot of our fans on gameday,” Wertheimer said. “I don’t care what you do in life; it’s exhausting to be screaming at the top of your lungs [every game]. But that is our job, no matter what, we have to entertain our fans. No matter if we have one win, two wins, 12 wins, 13, whatever it is, that’s our goal.”