Vikings centers are stout silos of gray matter

MANKATO -- The Vikings have a serious question at their center position, the kind of thing that creates debate, stirs emotions and can lead to hurt feelings.

Which one is the smartest?

"I'm going with Tim Mattran," Matt Birk said. "He has a master's degree. He's like seriously smart."

"Definitely Matt," John Sullivan said. "Matt is the smartest."

"I would like to say I am," Mattran said. "I've got the most degrees. That's a start. We haven't figured out how we're going to test that."

Forget about football for a moment and consider the sheer brainpower at that one position. One guy graduated from Harvard (Birk), one from Stanford (Mattran) and one from Notre Dame (Sullivan).

That's a highbrow trifecta of higher education, three guys who are probably the smartest in the room.

"Allegedly," Vikings coach Brad Childress deadpanned. "I would like to defer to the Cal rule. You have too many Cal guys and your team's all screwed up. But that is a rather eclectic group."

If center is indeed one of the most mentally challenging positions in football and requires as much brain as brawn, the Vikings are in good shape. Birk, the veteran starter and six-time Pro Bowl selection, is the ringleader, a battled-scarred sage who is mentoring a pair of rookies in training camp.

Birk earned a degree in economics from Harvard in 1998, but he's also part Columbo: dumb like a fox, smarter than most.

"I'm just a faker," he said. "Smoke and mirrors."

Mattran is another story. He scored a 31 on his ACT, was valedictorian at Chaska High with a 4.0 grade-point average, earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford in science, technology and society and received his master's in sociology with a focus on organizations, business and the economy.

So he's got that going for him.

"I have interest in a lot of things," he said.

Sullivan admits that school wasn't always his top priority. He earned a degree in marketing from Notre Dame and posted a 3.5 GPA his final semester, but he didn't shut down the library too many nights.

"I wasn't a great student," he said. "I definitely could have put more time into my studies. But I'm happy with my education."

The same holds true for the other two, which begs the obvious question: Which school is the best?

"I'm not going to touch that one," Sullivan said.

Birk obliged. In typical Birk style, of course.

"Stanford is like an Ivy League wannabe," he said. "Stanford can't decide. Pac-10, big-time athletics. But then they want to try and be a great academic institution. It's like an identity crisis. They don't know what they want to be."

Said Mattran: "I don't know about that. Harvard talks big sometimes. We're the best of both worlds."

Isn't Stanford known as the "Harvard of the West?"

"If we had opened first, Harvard would be the Stanford of the East," Mattran said.

Touché.

What about Notre Dame?

"Everyone hates Notre Dame," Birk said. "I'm Irish, and I don't like Notre Dame."

Good point. Mattran and Sullivan did enjoy one significant benefit from their college choices, though: scholarships. Ivy League schools don't offer athletic scholarships, which meant Birk racked up $50,000 in student loans. He said he helped offset costs by working 40 hours a week.

"I'm not trying to sound like it's uphill to school both ways, but I cleaned bathrooms on the dorm crew," he said. "Try going to some girl's dorm that you like and you've got a bucket with a toilet brush, a plunger and a scrubber. 'Hey, I'm here to clean your bathroom.' You think that goes over well?"

Doesn't take a degree from Harvard, Stanford or Notre Dame to figure that one out.