When the University of Minnesota first moved football games off campus in 1982, everybody – well, almost everybody – in the Twin Cities thought it was a brilliant idea. For six decades, the team had played in Memorial Stadium, a cavernous, standard football facility located in the middle of campus.

Parking was a pain in the butt. The seats were mostly bleachers. There were no elevators to take you up to your seat. The rows were long. But the place was built in 1923. What did you expect?

On top of that, the football team wasn’t very good … and hadn’t been for some time. (The Golden Gophers haven’t won a Big Ten football title since tying in 1967, the longest drought by far in the league.)

Apathy was rampant in a program that once dominated the state’s interest. (How dominant, you ask? When they played at Met Stadium, the Minnesota Twins used to adjust Saturday home games around the Gophers’ home schedule. They would play some Saturday games at 10:30 a.m. In part, this was because the radio station that carried both teams – could then broadcast both games. They still do so now … but only because they both share the same field.)

Moving to the Humphrey Metrodome with the ability to play games on Saturday night – something they couldn’t do in the old place because it didn’t have lights – in downtown Minneapolis seemed like a no-brainer. Even if the team didn’t get a lot better on the field, they would draw more fans to games. How could this not work?

26 years later, the school is readily admitting this was not a good idea. When the Gophers face Northern Illinois Saturday, it is the start of their last year downtown. In 2009, they will move into a stadium on campus that is a block from where the old stadium sat. Parking will still be a major pain. But the other problems people associated with the old stadium have been basically handled. There will be the luxury boxes for those who can afford it. There will be some outside décor that remind fans of the old stadium. Several of the lower deck seats will be a lot closer than in the Metrodome. The upper deck seats won’t be as high, either.

Oh, a lot of the prices will be high (personal seat licenses are new to the area) but this is Division I football, after all. People will adjust.

But what are we to learn from Minnesota’s story? Is it that college football just doesn’t work well inside? Or is it that the nature of the game is different than the NFL and it really does need to be on campus to be successful?

The fact is there was a period when college football at the Metrodome was a very hot ticket. It was a brief period – the two years when Lou Holtz coached the team in the 1980s – but the scalpers had a field day during that time.

Since then, tickers are usually easily available for games at the Metrodome. The only exceptions seem to be a traditional rival (like Iowa or Wisconsin) or a big name opponent (like Michigan or Ohio State) was in town. Long ago, Minnesota either gave up or couldn’t get bigname schools to come to town. When they first went to the Metrodome, the non-conference foes included UCLA, Nebraska and Oklahoma. This year, it’s Northern Illinois, Montana State and Florida Atlantic.

The experience, the feeling of playing in a hepped up environment, just wasn’t there in the generic stadium. The NFL Vikings managed to find a way around that problem. The college Gophers never figured out how to do so.

Joe Salem found this out the hard way. Salem was a local hero, a player on the school’s last Rose Bowl team (1961). He was a popular head coach when the team moved off campus. He quickly found out going downtown isn’t as big a lure as originally thought. One time, Salem watched a bus with 20 potential recruits emptied quickly into a Third Avenue building in downtown Minneapolis as winter winds swirled.

"Don't worry guys, we're playing in a dome," Salem said. "I think we got like one recruit out of the 20." Salem lasted just two years at the Metrodome, going 1-10 in his final season.

Colleges can exist in indoor stadiums. Syracuse has been playing in the Carrier Dome since 1981. The Orangemen has fallen off considerably in football, averaging 35,009 last year for seven home games for a team that went 2-10 overall. But their stadium, which is also used for basketball, is located on-campus. Students can still walk to games. Nobody is talking about moving games there.

True, UCLA does play its home games 27 miles away. But the Rose Bowl is the exception to the rule. In seasons when the Bruins are not as competitive as rival Southern California (which plays less than a mile off campus at the Coliseum), their attendance figures reflect it.

That’s show biz.

The irony of Minnesota’s situation is the stadium was built with football in mind. The seats were set up for football. When it was built, it was one of the few stadiums ever done with two press boxes – one designed specifically for baseball and another for football needs. Although the baseball Twins survived there, they are thrilled to be leaving for a new home in 2010 that will look like a ballpark.

When the college team is lousy, the campus can still come alive on game day. The bands can still march on campus and the frat houses can still be decorated. But when you are headed off-campus – even a couple of miles away – it doesn’t take much to deflate enthusiasm. The combination of a plastic stadium and a mediocre (at best) program is too much for anybody to overcome.

As with many cases, the answers to the earlier posed questions are a bit muddled. Had Holtz stayed in Minnesota … or had the team actually won a Big Ten title … the new stadium might never have been a topic of discussion. But most schools don’t win conference championships. In college football, the experience of the game -- and the on-campus locale -- means more than the result itself.

A check of the Gophers’ non-conference schedule confirms this. Future home opponents include Air Force, California, Washington State and Colorado. The school’s recent track record (1-11 last season) indicates they may not win many of those games. But folks will probably still enjoy them more if they run the board against this year’s non-conference slate.

(Dave Wright is a senior editor at August Publications.)