The Minnesota Vikings are a professional American football team based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Vikings joined the National Football League (NFL) as an expansion team in 1960, and first took the field for the 1961 season. They currently participate in the North Division of the National Football Conference (NFC); prior to that the Vikings were in the NFC Central Division, and before that they were in the NFL's Western Conference Central Division.

The Vikings play their home games at the Mall of America Field at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis as they have since 1982 (a bill was passed in May of 2012 to build a new stadium for the team, which is scheduled to open by the 2016 season). While the Vikings continue to play in the same building, the Metrodome has recently been renamed Mall of America Field. From the team's first season in 1961 to 1982, the team had called Metropolitan Stadium in suburban Bloomington home. The Vikings conducted summer training camp at Bemidji State University from 1961–65. In 1966, they moved their training camp to Minnesota State University in Mankato, where it remains to this day.

Minnesota (ⁱ/mɪnɨˈsoʊtə/) is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state on May 11, 1858. Known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes", the state's name comes from a Dakota word for "sky-tinted water". Those waters, together with forests, parks, and wilderness areas, offer residents and tourists a variety of outdoor recreational opportunities.

Minnesota is the 12th most extensive and the 21st most populous of the U.S. states. Nearly 60% of its residents live in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area (known as the "Twin Cities"), the center of transportation, business, industry and education and home to an internationally known arts community. The remainder of the state consists of western prairies now given over to intensive agriculture; deciduous forests in the southeast, now cleared, farmed and settled; and the less populated North Woods, used for mining, forestry, and recreation.

Jerome Monahan "Jerry" Burns (born January 24, 1927) is a former American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at the University of Iowa, from 1961 to 1965, compiling record of 16–27–2, and for the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL from 1986 to 1991, tallying a mark of 55–46.

Burns played quarterback at the University of Michigan from 1947 to 1950. Michigan won four consecutive Big Ten Conference titles when Burns was with the Wolverines. He graduated in February 1951 with a physical education degree.

Burns then began his coaching career. He served as the head baseball coach and assistant football coach with the University of Hawaii in 1951. Burns left Hawaii to coach at Whittier College in 1952, where he was the head basketball coach and an assistant football coach. At the beginning of 1953, he left Whittier and took a job as head football and head basketball coach at St. Mary's of Redford High School in Detroit, Michigan. Following the 1953 football season at St. Mary's, Burns was hired by fellow Michigan alumnus Forest Evashevski as an assistant coach at the University of Iowa.