Moonlighting as a reporter while attending his team’s walk-through practice at TCF Bank Stadium, Vikings tight end Visanthe Shiancoe has declared that the field has “cleared up pretty good.”
Shiancoe offered one caveat: "[T]here are random patches of hard and slippery field.”
Groundskeepers told Shiancoe that the field will be heated for 30 hours straight in advance of Sunday night’s game, which was moved outdoors after the Vikings indoor stadium became a partially outdoor stadium. Players from both teams had complained about the possibility that the field, which has no built-in heating system, would be frozen.
The Bears and Vikings play on Monday night in the first NFL gam played in Minnesota but not in the Metrodome since December 20, 1981.