Inside the New Dallas Cowboys Stadium

Jerry Jones, Texas billionaire, hands-on owner of the Dallas Cowboys and prime mover behind his team's massive, glittery and very expensive new stadium, can tell you exactly the words he wants people to think when they first get a good look at it: the future.

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That sounds about right, because the future may well be what his stadium represents — and not just because it has lots of glass and exposed steel and none of the corny nostalgic touches that baseball parks go in for these days. Jones didn't want a stadium that would just look like the future. He wanted one that would shape it, or at least shape the future of football, a game that for most people is something seen only on television. Jones thinks more of those people should be coming out to games — preferably the ones his team is playing. He likes to point out that just 7% of National Football League fans have ever set foot in an NFL stadium, and he figures that the way to push that percentage higher is to make the stadium experience better than what you get at home. (See 10 things to watch this NFL season.)

The odd thing is, when you look around the new Cowboys Stadium, with its multitude of private clubs and bars and what you might call its presiding deity (a massive, 600-ton JumboTron hovering 90 ft. above the field), you can't help suspecting that a good part of his vision is to make the stadium experience even more like the home experience — centered on television, food and drink — but bigger. Much, much bigger. So at 3 million sq. ft., the Cowboys' new home in Arlington, Texas, is three times the size of Texas Stadium, where they used to play. At a cost of $1.2 billion, it's also the priciest stadium in the NFL — but only until next year, when the $1.6 billion Jets-Giants stadium opens in East Rutherford, N.J.

And then there's that high-def JumboTron — the world's largest — a mammoth, four-sided, Cleopatra's barge of video screens stretching 160 ft. in length. For many fans, especially the ones in the nosebleed seats, what they see on that screen will be their experience of the game. By comparison, the actual teams will be little dots scrambling on a field far below — except in the rare cases when the two worlds collide. In a much discussed incident during a preseason game at the stadium in August, A.J. Trapasso of the Tennessee Titans managed to bonk the JumboTron with a punt, which set off a fuss about whether it would have to be hauled higher. Jones has refused, and for now the NFL has ruled that if another punt hits the big TV, it's a do-over. (See pictures of other stadiums that scored.)

Jones thinks Trapasso hit the screen deliberately. If that's true, you have to wonder: Did he do it just to show the big TV that there are still some flesh-and-blood players in this game?

The Big Tickets
Something else about Jones' stadium is big: the prices. Like baseball parks and basketball-hockey arenas, football stadiums have for decades been evolving into places where an increasing amount of the real estate is devoted to premium-priced seating. In that department, Cowboys Stadium is the new frontier. About a third of the base seating capacity of 73,000 consists of suites — 325 of them — and high-priced "club seats" with access to various bar-lounges at escalating levels of luxury. Those seats require that you first buy a 30-year license, which costs between $16,000 and $150,000, depending on sight lines and your desired degree of excess. And that sum doesn't include the cost of season tickets that range from $59 to $340 per game for those seats. Team Marketing Report, a sports-business publisher, maintains a Fan Cost Index, which is the average cost for a family of four to purchase tickets, food and drink, programs, caps and parking. For the league as a whole, that number is $412.64 per game. For the Cowboys, it's a whopping $758.58, largely because the average ticket price, $159.65, is more than twice the league average.

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