Final 4 throws some shade on Vikes’ stadium
MINNEAPOLIS — The losses last weekend by Duke, Gonzaga, North Carolina and Purdue pulled the curtains on their seasons, one painful game short of the Final Four.
Those teams that made it to Minneapolis? The guys from Michigan State, Texas Tech, Auburn and Virginia will be greeted, literally, by giant drapes inside the building where the 2019 champion will be determined.
Yes, the bigger and fancier the site, the more complicated the conversion. From the extra speakers to the special center-hung scoreboard to the temporary blinds at U.S. Bank Stadium, turning a football-sized venue into a basketball-friendly facility has become quite the project.
That’s fitting, of course, because the Final Four has become quite the event.
When the NCAA first began using an “in-the-round” seating configuration at Ford Field in Detroit in 2009, where the court is placed on the middle of the turf instead of in one of the corners and the entire bowl is used, the minimum capacity requirement for a Final Four was raised to 60,000 seats.
That whittled the candidate pool to the 10 climate-controlled NFL-level venues, which have been sprinkled into the rotation throughout the 1980s and 1990s until the last NBA-sized host was used at the Meadowlands in 1996.
Nestled into a compact downtown, filled with stateof-the-art amenities and fresh from holding the Super Bowl 14 months ago, U.S. Bank Stadium
fills the bill. The notquite-3-year-old facility’s defining feature, though, created an additional challenge for the host. The skyline-facing front of the building is essentially one big picture window.
Even on some of the coldest afternoons, like the 2-degree outside temperature at kickoff of the Super Bowl, enough sunlight can stream in to make a television viewer do a double-take and wonder for a second if the game is actually being played in Arizona or Florida.
To keep the glare off the TV cameras and out of the eyes of the freethrow shooters, a darkening plan is mandated for each bidding venue. There is no issue for many of them, but at U.S. Bank Stadium, this sleek, steep and shipshaped $1.1 billion home of the Minnesota Vikings, there is 460,000 square feet to cover.
The $4.6 million project, covered by the building’s capital improvement fund, was so big the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority split it between two manufacturers: theater-style curtains for the front and sailboat-like textile for the roof . Just one of the custommade ceiling darkening panels is 10 feet wide and up to 370 feet long. The setup took five to seven days for 20 to 25 workers, with a similar timeframe for teardown.
The cost of the blinds and the altering of the building’s identity have prompted some complaints from the public, but the blinds will be reused for concerts and conventions and are expected to last for the life of the stadium, MSFA chairman Michael Vekich said.