MVN - Most Valuable Network

Were We Wrong About Birk?

Whelp, we may need to do a double-take on the Birk drama — according to Matty B’s agent, the center’s absence from the Vikings’ voluntary offseason conditioning program has nothing to do with a contract dispute.

Normally, I’d call BS on a statement like this, but I’m willing to give Birk the benefit of the doubt on this one. I’m willing to believe that, because Birk followed the same routine last season of doing independent conditioning, we perhaps overreacted at the reports of his absence that surfaced earlier this week.

To be honest, the idea of Birk protesting his contract situation by skipping the voluntary workouts sounded funny to me. He’s always been a team-first guy, and it would be completely out of character for him to skip these workouts as a ploy to receive an extension.

Later in the article, Birk’s agent did refer to him as the “best center in the league” — and that’s a stretch, to put it lightly. But I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing Birk sign another deal with the Vikes…Ryan Cook seems to be waiting in the wings to replace Matt, but Cook certainly isn’t ready to take the starting center gig.

Birk still has a couple decent years left in him, and while he should expect to take a pay cut if he truly wants to remain in Minnesota, he’s still a definite strong point of this offensive line and is without question an above-average center (from what I’m hearing about his restaurant, though, the same might not be true of his entrepreneurship abilities).

Anyways, it doesn’t exactly seem like we’ll be seeing “Antoine Winfield: The Sequel” from Matty Birk this year, and that’s a damn good thing. Over the years, my tolerance level for offseason drama has decreased significantly… honestly, I’d love nothing more than a mundane next few months, easing into an equally mundane training camp.

*As much as I dislike stadium speculation, there was some noteworthy Vikings-related news from the Capital on Thursday: A Senate panel green-lighted a $2 million study to investigate how the Metrodome should be replaced. Many are interpreting this as a sign of momentum for a new Vikings stadium.

I think people are finally starting to realize the exact nature of the situation this franchise is in — that is, they’re realizing that all bets are off if we reach the year 2011 with no new stadium for the Vikings. Yes, we’ll still see plenty of folks arguing that funding a new stadium would simply be “welfare for the rich,” but I think most people finally understand the reality of building new stadiums…they understand that a new stadium will never happen unless the taxpayers pony up.

A stadium bill won’t be passed this year, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic that it will happen next year. The politicians can talk all they want about resisting public financing for stadiums, but when it comes down to it, they don’t want to be the people responsible for Minnesota losing its NFL team. We’re entering crunch time for this stadium, so things should start to get really interesting, really soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.