  We offer a preliminary exploration of the two sides of the challenge provided
by the recent OPERA data on superluminal neutrinos. On one side we stress that
some aspects of this result are puzzling even from the perspective of the wild
quantum-gravity literature, where arguments in favor of the possibility of
superluminal propagation have been presented, but not considering the
possibility of such a sizeable effect for neutrinos of such low energies. We
feel this must encourage particularly severe scrutiny of the OPERA result. On
the other side, we notice that the OPERA result is reasonably consistent with
$\mu$-neutrino-speed data previously obtained at FERMILAB, reported in papers
of 2007 and 1979. And it is intriguing that these FERMILAB79 and FERMILAB07
results, when combined with the new OPERA result, in principle provide a window
on $\mu$-neutrino speeds at different energies broad enough to compare
alternative phenomenological models. We test the discriminating power of such
an approach by using as illustrative examples the case of special-relativistic
tachyons, the case of "Coleman-Glashow-type" momentum-independent violations of
the special-relativistic speed law, and the cases of linear and quadratic
energy dependence of the speed of ultrarelativistic muon neutrinos. Even just
using $\mu$-neutrino data in the range from $\sim$ 3 GeVs to $\sim$ 200 GeVs
the special-relativistic tachyon and the quadratic-dependence case are clearly
disfavoured. The linear-dependence case gives a marginally consistent picture
and the Coleman-Glashow scenario fits robustly the data. We also comment on
Supernova 1987a and its relevance for consideration of other neutrino species,
also in relation with some scenarios that appeared in the large-extra-dimension
literature.
