NFL Plans To Sell Standing Room Super Bowl Tickets Outside Stadium
Added on Jan 16, 2011 by Jack Thurman in
5 Comments
So are you desperate to score a ticket for Super Bowl XLV in Dallas? Make that ‘are you desperate’ yet can’t spare the $1,000 plus a ducat will cost you on the secondary market? Well, step right this way sir–your friends at the NFL and Dallas Cowboys have you covered.
In what is either a very novel way to allow more fans to experience the Super Bowl atmosphere and festivities, or a very desperate way to pad the Cowboys Stadium attendence numbers the NFL has announced that an undisclosed number of standing room only tickets would be made available. And not just *any* standing room only tickets, but standing room tickets that allow the lucky fan to stand *outside* the stadium and enjoy watching the game on big screen TV monitors.
Of course the NFL words it in a much nicer way–they refer to the outside the standing room tickets as ‘providing admission to the NFL Fan Plaza’ (eg: the area they set up to hawk programs, food and gimmicks) and a league spokesman was able to utter this line with a straight face:
“It’s to provide people with more opportunities to experience Super Bowl Sunday.”
At this juncture, the number of standing outside the stadium…er….fan plaza…seats that will be made available are still being determined, as are how they’ll be distributed.
There’s also been no determination made whether the folks standing *outside* the stadium will be counted in the official Super Bowl attendance. Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones has often mentioned wanting to break the Super Bowl attendance record of 103, 985 set at the Rose Bowl in 1980 and current projections have him coming in a few thousand short. Unless, they count the folks in the ‘Fan Plaza’ which seems an awful lot like counting hobos milling outside the stadium as ‘paid attendance’.
League spokesman Brian McCarthy essentially changed the subject when asked if these “Fan Plaza” seats would count toward the official attendance:
“We’re still building out auxiliary seating and setting up camera positions.”
So thanks to the kind folks at the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys, even if you can’t afford a ticket to watch the game you can still stand outside the stadium and breathe the same air as those who can.
5 Comments
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January 16, 5:39 am
Cowboys atadium has some SOR areas that allow them to approach 100k for the game. The idea of having SOR just outside the stadium and counting those as paid attendance, well I guess if they were foolish enough to pay..?
January 16, 5:51 am
My understanding based on the research I did for the article is that they used the standing room endzone seats in the past but there was some question of whether they complied with the fire code. According to what I read, they’re installing seating in those areas for the Super Bowl. The figure that popped up in several articles was that once the stadium configuration was finalized they’d be somewhere in the high 90k range.
And as far as counting the people outside the stadium–that’s an interesting issue but I’m leaning toward ‘yes’. Obviously you know that attendance in all sports is a very subjective number that can vary wildly due to semantics: eg.-paid attendance vs. people actually in the building and so forth. As you state if people buy tickets to mill around outside the stadium I guess they qualify as ‘paid attendance’ even though they’re not technically *in* the venue. In any case, after the year Jerry Jones has had I’m not going to begrudge him this
January 26, 8:25 am
How do you get the tickets to stand outside?
January 26, 10:04 am
Last I heard the Cowboys were going to start by offering them to season ticket holders. I think they’re kind of making this up as they go along.
January 26, 11:25 pm
Please let us know if you hear any more about the standing room only tickets…my crazy husband and son want them! Thanks for the article!