Kenny Chesney is good friends with several NFL players, but due to the contract deadlock, they are barred from going to the stadium shows:

Chesney, who has 10 NFL stadiums (including Green Bay’s Lambeau Field) on his 2011 itinerary, calls the lockout “interesting.”

At the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ home turf last week, “we had all baseball players there. We had a lot of Phillies, Red Sox and Yankees who were down there for spring training,” said Chesney, who opened his Goin’ Coastal Tour last weekend in Florida. “If you’re in the NFL, you’re in the (contract) lockout: You can’t go to your stadium, you can’t work out at your stadium, you can’t talk to your coaches. At West Palm (Beach), we had a ton of NFL players. I saw (guard Steve) Hutchinson from the Vikings. If we were to play the Dome (in Minneapolis), he couldn’t come to the show.”

Kenny goes on to talk in the interview about how great it feels to be back on the road:

“My body feels great,” said Chesney, a fitness buff who began working out in earnest Jan. 1. “More importantly, the heart and the mind and soul feel better. I could tell that me and the band had a hunger onstage. After Tampa and West Palm this weekend, I had a spring in my step that wasn’t there almost all of 2009 because I was just tired.”

Read the full interview here.