Jerry Jones on how Texans fans at AT&T Stadium benefit the Cowboys AND the fans
Tony Romo called out the Cowboys fans after the Texans made AT&T Stadium look more like NRG Stadium this past Sunday.
"I was a little bit surprised by the number of Houston fans," Romo said following Dallas' 20-17 win over Houston. "Today we played on the road. We had to go to a silent count, and that was the first time I had to do that throughout the game at home."
"We need to do a better job as a team, as a fan base, to make sure how big of a difference playing at home is. I think going forward I'm going to press the issue. We just need to tighten up on selling our tickets."
It turns out, Texans fans taking over Dallas' home turf is good for both the Cowboys and Cowboy Nation, at least according to owner and GM Jerry Jones.
Speaking on his weekly radio show, Jones spent five minutes explaining why their have been so many opposing fans visiting Dallas this season. The highlights include:
- First, since the Cowboys fans are all over the U.S. and even in Mexico, not all season-ticket holders can make it to every game. Therefore, they sell their tickets on the 'secondary market.'
- Houston was a hot commodity ticket. Prices soared for a seat to attend Sunday's game, so Cowboys fans took advantage of the seller's market.
- Opposing fans represent around 20-25 percent of the fans at AT&T Stadium, about 20,000. And even if they are in the minority, that many will be loud.
- The noise level will actually help Cowboys when they travel on the road, especially this Sunday when they visit the Seahawks, because Dallas already has practice using hand signals.
Jerry Logic at its best! Below is his entire 700-word response, as transcribed by Jon Machota of the Dallas Morning News.
"Well, first of all, I understand it. We have in this area, roughly seven million people. But we have 20-something million people statewide. That's from the valley, that's all the way to West Texas, that's to East Texas. Twenty five years ago, 10 to 15 percent of our tickets at Texas Stadium came from Shreveport and East Texas. Now we get it from all over. We have 1,500 season-ticket holders from Monterrey, Mexico.
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"The point is we're all over. We have probably as many as 30 percent of our fans that are from afar, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and they don't make every game. As a matter of fact, our surveys show with our ticket holders, that we've got a large percentage of them, a third, that only make four or five games a year. You put that with the fact that we're the hottest ticket there is on the internet-type marketing of tickets, that's the secondary market. Really you have fans that are out there fishing, so to speak. They're testing the market.
"The other day, these tickets for the Houston game were going as high as 300 percent of face value. Three-hundred percent. A Party Pass for $29 was going for $100. That's standing only going for a hundred. So you do have a situation where, frankly, the interest in the stadium, the venue [is appealing to fans], which was a dream of mine. I wanted it to be like Madison Square Garden. But this one is located in the central part of the United States. There's no place in this country you can't get to it from about two and a half, three hours.
"By the way, I had heard someone say, 'They just have a corporate fan base.' Nothing is further from the truth, I'm talking about ticket-holder. Nothing is further from the truth. We have less brokers probably, less brokers than anybody in the United States with our tickets. We have corporately a small percentage of our tickets that are held by big corporations. You wouldn't see those tickets in the secondary market. They either use them or they don't. But you might see them given to a situation that might have an opposing fan there. But our tickets are only individuals. They're owned by small corporations. People incorporate a little restaurant, but there's principles in there.
"I'm pretty long-winded here, but I do want to get the record straight, our stadium is owned, the rights to those tickets are owned by fans. A large percentage of them don't go to but four games, five games a year. The rest of the time they take into a very active and attractive situation, and they go out into the market and they sell their tickets and get that money and in doing so, they really do reduce their overall cost of coming to the stadium considerably because you sell two or three games as a season ticket holder and you've just about recouped what you've spent to buy the ticket.
"By the way, that only represents maybe 20 percent, 25 percent. But when you got 91,000 people, you take 20 percent of that, that's 20,000 people. That's going to make some noise. That's going to make a lot of noise. Then you get a more active game, like we had with Houston, New Orleans, San Francisco, it's just a dynamic of, frankly, doing what we wanted to do. We built this stadium so that it would be so visible and so well-known across the United States. And you can get to this stadium in two and a half, three hours from any place in the United States, much less drive from within our own market. So that's the story. We got a lot of practice for Seattle. We'll need to know how to do hand signals at Seattle.
"I'm not making light of it, but it's what we've got. I know this, they got quiet when we were up 10 points in that fourth quarter."
