Outdoor stadium aficionados, rejoice - if TCF Bank Stadium had been finished a year earlier, Minnesotans would be sitting outside for football today. And by mid-afternoon, the temperature might - repeat, MIGHT - make it above freezing. A note for next year: remember, folks, we got what we wanted here. We’re not allowed to complain, not even a little.

Let’s get this trip around the interwebs underway:

*Fire Joe Morgan  may have gone sadly dark, but others are picking up the slack. Here, we see Joe Posnanski taking apart Tom Boswell, an authentic FJM reproduction except for the lack of swears and the exclusion of the exasperated, sarcastic tone.

*Chris Dilks of Western College Hockey has a good early look at some of the early favorites for the 2009 Mr. Hockey award.

*Over at Twins Territory, the local baseball blogosphere is tackling the Twins offseason - starting with a look at the free agent market.

*Slate Magazine thinks that the Wolves - or any NBA team - won’t be helped by changing coaches. And that’s mostly because, apart from the odd Phil Jackson or Doc “Ubuntu” Rivers, most of them don’t have much of an impact anyway. (NOTE: Flip Saunders is mentioned as one of a very few truly effective coaches, and let’s face it: he can’t be worse than another day of watching the S.S. Randy Wittman careen into icebergs).

*Deadspin soccer blogger Michael Bertin wants to blow up the BCS - by completely reorganizing college football to make it more like European soccer. He does have some interesting ideas to bandy about … but he might as well suggest that they play the college football season in an anti-gravity chamber floating just off the surface of Jupiter, for all the chance this plan would have of getting implemented.

*And finally: the identity of Baby Mangino has been revealed! Of all the silly links in the history of the internet, I have to say: Baby Mangino is by far my favorite.

That’s it for another Saturday; enjoy the weekend, and salute the Metrodome, which loses a tenant for the first time around 9:30 p.m. tonight. Malign it all you want, but the Dome has been our home away from home for as long as I’ve been alive; in fact, if you consider the stadium’s useful life to have started when teams moved in, we’re almost the exact same age. I could go on for paragraphs listing everything that stadium has seen, but after today, we begin to pass into the Third Age of local stadiums.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.