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.

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.

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.

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.

You can get in and out cheaper than that, but it comes with a catch. Terraces behind each end zone have been set aside as standing room for $29 a head. The Cowboys call those tickets “party passes,” because standees get to mill around, chug beer and do their own sack dances if that’s what they’re in the mood for–they’re the sports-world equivalent of free-range chickens. But knowing that the most affordable tickets don’t actually get you a seat does nothing to discourage the suspicion that even fewer than that 7% of all fans will be able to see games live and that pro football is headed the way of opera as an indulgence for people in the top tax brackets.

All the same, there must be quite a few of those people, because even in a sluggish economy, the new stadium is close to selling out. By mid-September, the Cowboys were reporting that 95% of their club and reserve seats have been sold to season-ticket holders. That’s all the more impressive when you remember that the Cowboys, who ruled the NFL in the early ’90s, barely rule Texas these days. Between 1972 and 1996 they won five Super Bowls, three of them in the years after Jones bought the team in 1989 and started fiddling energetically with the coaching staff and the roster. But 1996 was the last time the ‘Boys won a playoff game, and they finished last season with a lackluster 9-7 record. Yet in one respect they still rule–Forbes magazine estimates they’re the most valuable franchise in sports, worth $1.6 billion, given the willingness of Cowboys fans to pay up no matter what happens on the field.

The Cowboys have been a tremendous investment for Jones, 66, who bought the team for just $150 million. With revenues of $280 million in the 2008 season, they rank third in revenues in the NFL, after the Washington Redskins ($345 million) and the New England Patriots ($302 million). In June the Dallas Morning News estimated that if the Cowboys draw an average of 80,000 visitors to their eight regular-season home games this year, Jones could see those revenues climb to about $360 million. The paper estimated that about $60 million of that increase would come from those pricey club seats and suites.

I have seen the future, and it certainly works for Jerry Jones.

Made in Texas

Though Jones wanted his new stadium to be an icon, he stopped short of hiring name architects like Peter Eisenman, Norman Foster or Herzog & de Meuron, the guys who have added star power to stadium design over the past few years. Why butt heads with a big thinker when you’ve got some big thoughts of your own? “We really knew what this building was going to look like,” Jones says. “What I needed was a good listener.”

So he turned instead to Bryan Trubey of HKS Architects, a Dallas-based firm, and together they came up with an adroitly glamorous exercise in how to balance muscle and lightness. The muscle comes from the main structural supports of the stadium’s retractable roof, a pair of massive single-span steel arches, each a quarter-mile in length, that plant their big feet in concrete boxes just outside the exterior walls. The lightness comes from 180-ft.-high glass doors set between the arches on two sides of the stadium. Those let in an exceptional amount of natural sunlight for a climate-controlled environment and give anyone approaching the building a clear vista straight across the field and out the other side. After the infernal summer weather leaves town, a line of glass doors at each end zone can slide away to admit real air into the place.

Not many of the architectural features of the new stadium are groundbreaking in themselves. The best of them are smart adaptations, well deployed. In particular, the arches and glass walls call to mind the new Wembley Stadium in London, a Foster design that Jones liked enough to visit three times on idea-gathering travels he and his wife Gene made to stadiums, airports and even shopping malls. Over the past few years, Gene also headed a project that commissioned site-specific works for the stadium by artists like Franz Ackermann, Mel Bochner and Olafur Eliasson, museum-quality names whose work you don’t usually find in a building with a retractable roof. “I just thought it would be great to have art that’s not just football art,” she says. “To have something that’s very contemporary, like the building, very cutting-edge.”

Around much of its exterior, Cowboys Stadium is covered in sloping bands of fritted glass that reflect the shifting blue and silver-gray of the Texas skies. And as Jones is happy to remind you, “Those are the colors of the team!” Spend enough time with him, and you may end up convinced that the whole of creation was designed to color-coordinate with the Cowboys jerseys. But at the end of the day, the real Cowboys color is dollar green.