Vikings will get their first look at a $5 billion home-away-from-home stadium

The first league victory by an NFL team from Minnesota occurred on Oct. 30, 1921, when the Minneapolis Marines of the then-American Professional Football Association beat the Columbus Panhandles 28-0 at Nicollet Park, a 4,000-seat venue built for the grand sum of $4,000 to house minor league baseball's Minneapolis Millers starting in 1896.

So, yeah, it's safe to say NFL stadiums have come a long way the past 100 years.

Sunday, the Vikings get their first look at SoFi Stadium when they play the Los Angeles Chargers. SoFi, opened a year ago in Inglewood, Calif., cost the prettiest penny in NFL history, weighing in at about $5 billion, a record by about $3 billion.

So, cheer up those of you who recently helped pay for new stadiums in Minneapolis ($1.1 billion); Arlington, Texas ($1.3 billion); East Rutherford, N.J. ($1.6 billion); Atlanta ($1.6 billion); and Las Vegas ($1.9 billion).

You got a bargain. This time.

From 1920, when the league was founded, until 1934, 44 teams, including 10 of the 12 founders, came and went in what was mainly a small-town mom-and-pop operation. There were no stadiums built for teams in cities like Muncie, Ind.; Evanston, Ill.; LaRue, Ohio; or anywhere else.

The Oorang Indians existed for 20 games in 1922-23. They were based in LaRue, Ohio, but never actually played a game there.

Baseball, of course, was America's sweetheart at the time. The NFL figured the best way to survive was to piggyback off MLB stadiums. And their nicknames, too, which is why there were NFL teams with names like the Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates, who later renamed themselves the Steelers.

"NFL teams liked to have people think they were affiliated with baseball teams, even though they weren't," Joe Horrigan, the former Pro Football Hall of Fame vice president of communications/exhibits, said a few years back. "And the baseball teams didn't seem to mind."

Even in the early 1960s, when the Cowboys (1960) and Vikings (1961) joined the league, new stadiums weren't part of the deal. Dallas first played in the Cotton Bowl while the Vikings played in Met Stadium, built for baseball.

The Metrodome came along in 1982 for the modest price of $55 million. It wasn't the best, but it was good enough to host a Super Bowl a decade later.

SoFi Stadium will play host to the Super Bowl this season. Its primary tenant, the 7-2 Rams, have gone all-in to construct a roster built to win it all this year, the future be darned.

The laid-back folks in L.A. supposedly have embraced the Rams. As for the Chargers, well, still not so much.

The Chargers did well selling season tickets because they lowered prices to about a 10th of the cost of the Rams tickets and personal seat licenses. But it appears buying low just makes it easier to sell high when the opposing team's fans come looking for a foreign stadium to invade.

The Chargers are 2-2 in the first season with fans allowed in the stadium. Each game, the visiting fans have made the home team feel unwelcome.

"It definitely felt in a lot of ways like a home game," Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said after a 20-17 victory on Sept. 19. (Of course, he could have said the same thing about parts of that win over the Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium, eh?)

The Raiders, who played in Los Angeles from 1982 to '94, came in for "Monday Night Football" on Oct. 4. The Chargers won but had to use a silent count on offense because of the crowd noise.

Raiders quarterback Derek Carr also said it felt like a home game, adding, "That's no disrespect; it's just a fact."

The Patriots won there on Oct. 31.

"It was crazy. Crazy," New England safety Adrian Phillips said of the pro-Patriots crowd reaction to his pick-six. "Catching that pick and then you hear screams like that, it was crazy."

Things like that are the price the Chargers paid for leaving the loyal fans of San Diego to piggyback on the Rams' mega stadium.

Two years ago, the Vikings benefitted from the Chargers' weak following. Their fans took over the tiny soccer stadium in Carson, Calif., that housed the Chargers from 2017 to '19 and helped the Vikings come away with seven takeaways in a 39-10 rout.

"I expect there will be a lot of Vikings fans there [Sunday]," Vikings coach Mike Zimmer said this week.

There certainly will be. And they will be arriving early to get a gander at what all $5 billion or so buys an NFL team.