When the New York Giants moved into a temporary stadium four decades ago, they figured there would be distractions. One, though, they surely didn’t expect.

The Giants left soon-to-be-remodeled Yankee Stadium early in the 1973 season for an odyssey that wouldn’t end until they moved into spanking new Giants Stadium in 1976. They played their last five home games and all of 1974 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Conn., then shared Shea Stadium with the New York Jets in 1975.

“There wasn’t much security at the Yale Bowl,” said Bob Tucker, then a Giants tight end before playing for the Vikings from 1977-80. “You would be standing on the sideline, and you would have fans standing next to you. They would just come out of the stands and walk across the track that was there for track meets. It was kind of comical.”

NFL security has come a long way in the past 40 years. Still, there figure to be some distractions when the Vikings begin a two-year run in a temporary stadium.

With the Vikings having left the since-demolished Metrodome after last season, and unable to move into a new indoor stadium until 2016, they will play the next two seasons at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium.

That tour starts Friday with the preseason opener against the Oakland Raiders.

“I wish our (new) stadium could like magically appear,” said Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. “But, unfortunately, that won’t happen.”

Peterson vows to make the best of the situation, and Vikings coach Mike Zimmer has gone so far as to say he believes it will be an “advantage” for his team playing at the Bank.

History, however, suggests otherwise.

Since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, seven teams have spent at least a full season at a temporary facility while waiting for a stadium to be built or remodeled. Throw out the Carolina Panthers, an expansion team when they played at Clemson University in 1995, and none of those teams improved on the previous season.

And after going 5-10-1 in 2013, the Vikings aim to improve.

Take out the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans, who played in temporary stadiums in the late 1990s after relocating, and the four remaining teams won an average of 5.8 fewer games in their first season of being displaced.

In addition to the Giants, those teams were the Seattle Seahawks, displaced in 2000-01; the Chicago Bears, who had to move out of Soldier Field for a 2002 remodeling job; and the 2005 New Orleans Saints, who had to leave behind a Superdome damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

That’s not a large sample size, and the Vikings can’t sink much lower after last season. Still, former Seahawks quarterback Brock Huard said it’s “not a coincidence” that no team has improved its record in the first year of being displaced.

Seattle’s situation has been the most similar to the one the Vikings face, moving from an indoor stadium (the Kingdome) for two years to play in the same city outdoors at a college facility (the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium) before moving into a new stadium.

“(Being displaced is) like the difference of owning your own home as opposed to renting an apartment,” said Huard, who played for the Seahawks from 1999-2001 and is now a Seattle radio talk-show host. “You can put in new carpeting. You can paint it. But it’s still somebody else’s place. There’s nothing quite like your own place.”

THINK ‘HOOSIERS’

Huard actually played in college at Washington but said that “novelty quickly wore off.” The Seahawks saw their record fall from 9-7 to 6-10 in their first season at Husky Stadium.

Huard said a decision by Mike Holmgren, who took over as Seattle’s coach in 1999, to rebuild the team played a role. But so did losing a true home-field advantage while adjusting to a new facility.

“It’s really a challenge,” Huard said. “How much do you want to talk about it? How much do you want to make it a rallying cry? I think what you have to do for those two years is try to embrace it like it’s your home.”

Huard likes how Zimmer is handling matters so far. Zimmer is trying to turn the two years without a regular home into a positive.

“It’s kind of like that movie ‘Hoosiers’ a little bit,” said Zimmer, referring to a scene in which a rural high school basketball coach played by Gene Hackman measures the height of the basket in a big-city arena before a playoff game.

“Ten feet,” Hackman tells his wide-eyed team. “I think you’ll find it’s the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.”

Same thing, Zimmer said.

“The field is 100 yards long. I know it’s not the stadium that we’ve been playing in, or the stadium that we will be playing in,” he said. “I look at it as an advantage for us; we’re not the only team that has to go into a different stadium and play.”

Zimmer has been doing plenty of homework. While he didn’t give names, he said he has spoken to several coaches of teams that played in temporary stadiums.

The late Alex Webster was the first coach since the NFL-AFL merger who faced that challenge–and he didn’t last long. After an 8-6 season at Yankee Stadium in 1972, Webster’s Giants dropped to 2-11-1 in 1973 and he was replaced by Bill Arnsparger.

The wandering Giants played in four stadiums in four years, a sojourn equaled in the late 1990s by the Oilers/Titans. After going 8-8 at the Houston Astrodome in 1996, the Oilers moved to Tennessee and played in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis and Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville before moving into their permanent home in 1999 and being renamed the Titans.

The Bears went 13-3 at Soldier Field in 2001 before falling all the way to 4-12 in one season at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Ill. The Saints, 8-8 in 2004 at the Superdome, went 3-13 in while playing the next season out of San Antonio and Baton Rouge, La..

“When you’re a creature of habit, it can make a difference,” said Jim Miller, the Bears’ quarterback from 1998-2002.

Miller said flying from Chicago to Champaign, Ill., for home games made the Bears feel as if they played a full season of road games. He said the team’s lodging situation made matters difficult because players stayed in a former dorm at the University of Illinois that had one elevator “as slow as a sloth.” That led players to often tire themselves out by walking up seven flights of stairs to their rooms.

Because the Vikings won’t be leaving Minneapolis, they won’t have the added burden of extra travel. Still, Miller, now an analyst for SiriusXM NFL Radio, sees pivotal adjustments they will have to make.

“They’re going to have to get used to how the wind flows through that stadium,” he said. “When I played at Soldier Field, I knew that if I threw an 18-yard comeback, I would throw it about three to four yards out of bounds because I knew that the wind would bring it back in bounds to the receiver.

“If I were the Vikings, I would try to practice there as much as possible, especially the kicker and the punter and the long snapper. I would try to get over there a minimum of once a week during the season, like on a Thursday or a Friday.”

OUT OF THEIR ELEMENT?

The Vikings already are thinking that way. While it hasn’t been determined yet how often punter Jeff Locke, kicker Blair Walsh and long snapper Cullen Loeffler will go to TCF Bank Stadium during the season, they did work out there four times last spring in an effort to study wind patterns.

“I would say later in the year, as the weather starts turning, we’ll start going over there more, just kind of to see how the flight of the ball is affected,” Locke said. “I don’t think it’s really a disadvantage. We’re going to have the most experience there.”

Naturally, Minnesota players are confident they’ll be able to make the necessary adjustments to the stadium, which has a capacity of 52,000–12,000 less than the Metrodome. Perhaps the biggest adjustment will come late in the season, when the weather turns cold; the Vikings play four of their final six games at home.

TCF Bank Stadium has FieldTurf, the same artificial surface that was used in the Metrodome. To prevent a repeat of a Dec. 20, 2010, a night game against Bears played in a snow storm on an icy field, the Vikings paid to install an underground heating system. That game–the Vikings’ only game at the Bank until Friday’s preseason opener–was moved there because the Metrodome roof had collapsed in a snow storm.

Before they played 32 years at the Metrodome, of course, the Vikings built a reputation on their bold indifference to the elements in 21 seasons at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. The two coldest regular-season games in NFL history were held there in 1972:

Against the Bears on Dec. 3, it was minus-2 degrees with a wind-chill factor of minus-26; on Dec. 10 against Green Bay, it warmed up to zero, with a minus-18 wind-chill factor, making it the second-coldest NFL game.

“The other team has got to do the same thing,” said Minnesota defensive end Brian Robison, shrugging off any concern about late-season games at TCF. “It’s going to be cold, it’s going to be freezing, it’s going to be snowy and all that stuff. But bottom line, it’s going to come down to what team is mentally and physically tougher than the other team.”

Linebacker Chad Greenway went so far as to say it’s “going to be fun for us to play outdoors.” Greenway said even the fans might find additional enjoyment.

“Maybe it will make tailgating better, so they will be louder and having fun,” he said.

History says teams don’t have a lot of fun in their first year of being displaced. But Greenway said there’s no way the Vikings will see their record drop in their first year at TCF Bank Stadium.

“Wanna bet?” he asked.

Follow Chris Tomasson at twitter.com/christomasson.