Honoring Bud Grant: Bud's late-arrival strategy nearly backfires

Thanks to NFL researcher Collin AKA JaguarGator9 on YouTube for his special research and producer Jonathan Harrison for his video editing on this project.

If you would like to read the video’s transcript, here it is:

When you think of when NFL teams usually arrive to the stadium for a game, you’re talking about a couple of hours beforehand. If you get to a game when the gates open, you’ll see players warming up, you’ll see the quarterbacks loosening their arms, you’ll see the specialists like the kickers and punters warming up their legs and testing how far they can kick the ball, and you’ll see people stretching.

However, let’s just say that Minnesota Vikings head coach Bud Grant did not feel that way. Not in the slightest bit. He believed that arriving early for games was completely pointless; there are even some stories about him hunting on Sunday morning, and then arriving to the stadium only 40 minutes before kickoff, which seems insane today, because most teams are done warming up at the 40-minute mark and are off the field, and here Bud Grant was, arriving just as the game was about to start.

The reason for Grant’s late-arriving philosophy was simple- if you arrive too early to the stadium, you have time to kill, and can lose your concentration. Get there right before the game, and you can be in game-mode and stay focused the whole way through. Plus, you don’t need all this time beforehand to dress and warm up; you can easily do that in an hour. Obviously, this strategy worked out incredibly well for Grant and his Vikings, seeing how successful they were, and seeing how they were one of the most formidable opponents in the NFC throughout the 1970s.

But there was one game where this strategy backfired on him in a big way, and I don’t mean in terms of the Vikings looking ill-prepared and not warmed up. Because what’s the risk you take when you plan on arriving right before an event is supposed to take place, whether it’s a party or a meeting or a football game? You risk the possibility of traffic and arriving late. And during a 1976 game against the Detroit Lions, the Vikings arrived late to their own contest.

Here's the situation going into the game. It’s week three and we’ve got a big NFC Central game on our hands at Poniac Metropolitan Stadium in Detroit between the Vikings and Lions. It’s been a pretty solid start to the season for Minnesota, as they sit at 1-0-1 with a point differential of +31, which was the third best in the NFC through two weeks, only behind the Dallas Cowboys and the St. Louis Cardinals. However, with the Chicago Bears leading the division early on with a 2-0 record, and Detroit also having one win, if the Vikings lost this game, then they risked falling off the early pace for the NFC Central title, and possibly winning the division for the fourth straight season.

And the bad news for the Vikings was that in 1975 they lost to the Lions 17-10, which was one of their two losses on the year. Despite that, Minnesota wasn’t changing anything up for this game in Pontiac; they were staying at the same hotel as last time, which was the Northfield Hilton, 10 miles away from the stadium. They were going to leave at the same time, 11:45, just 75 minutes before game time, and they were going to be set to arrive at the stadium at noon, in accordance with Grant’s philosophy on not arriving to the stadium too early.

At least, that was the plan. But even the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. Because you would think that the weather wouldn’t play a part in this game, since it was being played in a dome. However, if you’ve ever been on a road in your life, you know that if it’s raining outside, people don’t know how to drive, and the roads can become a mess. And sure enough, when the Vikings were driving to the stadium in the rain, guess what they encountered along the way. Accidents- lots and lots of accidents that created a giant traffic jam, made it impossible to move, and closed lanes on the highway.

What was supposed to be a 12:00 arrival at the stadium was nowhere close to that. 12:00 turned to 12:10, which turned to 12:20, which turned to 12:30. And at 12:45, the Vikings’ bus, with the game scheduled to kick off in just 15 minutes, was still stuck on the highway, five miles away from the stadium. The team was going to be late for their own game. Now, a lot of the Vikings’ players, in an effort to stay loose and not stress about something completely out of their control, were joking about the whole incident. Most notably, safety Paul Krause rolled down the window to a kid sitting in a Buick next to the bus, and asked him what time the game was. The boy was panicking, saying that it started at 1:00, and stressing out that he wasn’t going to make it there on time. Then, Krause yelled back, “we’ll never get their either. You wanna bet it won’t start that early?” Quarterback Fran Tarkenton jokingly ribbed general manager Mike Lynn, and said that the team got the information on how long it would take to get to the stadium from Russ Thomas, the general manager of the Lions; he also said that he was going to sue someone, because he needed 30 minutes to warm up his arm, and now, he was going to get hurt, and would lose 10 years off his playing career, which, seeing as he was already 36 years old, was either a joke, or an attempt to become the next George Blanda.

However, despite the joking around, the point still remained that the Vikings’ bus was still stuck on the highway, and wasn’t at the game. When the stadium was finally in sight three or four miles away, the Vikings took matters into their own hands. They weren’t just a football team at this point; they were an all-out traffic control team. Team official Steve Pinkham got out of the bus and directed the traffic, while general manager Mike Lynn ordered the bus driver to drive on the shoulders and create their own lane to get to the stadium.

The good news was that this strategy seemed to work, as the bus was finally able to move, and the team, after sitting on the highway for an hour, was finally able to get to the stadium. The bad news? It was 12:53, just seven minutes before the game was scheduled to kick off. A good chunk of the 77,292 fans were in their seats by this point eagerly waiting for the Lions to play their opponent, and yet, their opponent was just arriving at the venue.

And, as you can probably expect, this game did not start on time, although it was at the insistence of, amazingly enough, Detroit Lions head coach Rick Forzano. He easily could’ve had the game start at 1:00, with the Vikings kicking off just five minutes after getting off the bus, and hustling to get dressed and whatnot with no warmup time at all. But Forzano didn’t want that. He completely understood where the Vikings were coming from, and said to the officials, “make sure they warm up good, so nobody hurts himself. We’ll warm up at the same time.” With that, the Vikings got a quick, 10-minute warmup in there, and the game, which was supposed to start at 1:00, got delayed by 30 minutes, starting at 1:30, and starting with the Vikings assessed a 15-yard penalty on the opening kickoff, since NFL rules dictate that a team arriving late starts the game penalized 15 yards.

But despite the absolute chaos in terms of the Vikings getting to the stadium, somehow, this completely accidental strategy of theirs worked. Despite only arriving at the stadium five minutes before the game was originally scheduled to kick off, the Vikings actually won, taking it by a final score of 10-9. By no means was it a great performance offensively; the team only averaged 3.3 yards per carry, only amassed 52 net passing yards, and Tarkenton wasn’t kidding when he said he needed 30 minutes to warm up his arm, because on this day, he was just 7-for-16, completing 43% of his passes for 47 yards and a passer rating of just 51, as the Vikings had no plays the entire game go for 20+ yards. However, the defense came to play; they forced two turnovers, they held the Lions to barely over three yards per carry, had a goal line stand late in the game, and most impressively, they racked up seven sacks on quarterback Greg Landry. A fourth quarter touchdown run by Chuck Foreman made the difference in this one-point victory.

Grant said afterwards that, obviously, “we didn’t plan it this way. It just happened.” But as frustrating as it may have been to get to the venue and to start the game off with a 15-yard penalty, seeing how this game ended, I don’t think Grant and company were complaining by the end of the day. Because this game was a true lesson in the phrase that it’s not how you start, but rather, it’s how you finish.