Category: Dallas Cowboys

Late last week, word broke that the Dallas Cowboys were going to be moving their practice facilities to the Dallas suburb of Frisco, pending a vote of the Frisco city council. With everything else that was going on (hasn’t anyone told the nation’s city councils that they’re supposed to be on vacation now?), it barely registered on my radar — I figured the most notable thing was how the Cowboys’ old facility collapsed in a storm four years ago and paralyzed an assistant coach.

But I forgot: This is Texas. The financial numbers for the Frisco facility were released yesterday, and holy crap:

The city of Frisco, Frisco ISD, the Frisco Economic Development Corporation and the Frisco Community Development Corporation will pay a combined $115 million for the facilities to be built at Warren Parkway and the Dallas North Tollway in Frisco.

The agreement, which has been in the works for months, outlines the development of the indoor stadium, its use and maintenance, and the development of the team’s corporate headquarters. Those will be built on 25 of the 91 acres owned by the Frisco Community Development Corporation. The remaining 66 acres will be sold to the Blue Star companies for private development. The terms of that mixed use development are also included in the deal.

The agreement also details the formation of a tax increment reinvestment zone that will be formed on that 66 acres to generate money to finance for a separate parking structure for that private development.

That’s right, $115 million … for a practice facility. Plus free land. The TIF money, at least, looks like it’s part of the $115 million, not on top of it, but still, yeesh.

The Dallas Morning News, ever credulous, states that the practice facility is “expected” to be “a boon to the local economy as it anchors a new mixed-use development called Frisco Station.” I’ve often said that pro football stadiums are the worst possible development anchors, because they’re only active ten days a year, but a pro football practice facility might actually be even worse.

At least Frisco high-school football teams will get a nice place to play for their parents’ tax money — local high schools will get “priority” on Thursday and Friday evenings, according to the agreement. But still … holy crap.

Cowboys Stadium is getting renamed AT&T Stadium, in a long-awaited naming rights deal for the Dallas Cowboys stadium opened in 2009. AT&T will pay … well, no one really knows exactly how much, though the Fort Worth Star-Telegram notes that AT&T was already paying $6-12 million as an “anchor sponsor” (read: have ads all over the place) at the stadium, and so is likely tacking on about another $6 million to actually put its name on the building.

Forbes says this adds about $100 million to the value of the Cowboys franchise, which is about right for the present value of an extra $6 million worth of annual revenue. (Unlike ticket sales, naming-rights money doesn’t have to be shared with the NFL.) That should let Cowboys owner Jerry Jones inch up the billionaires’ list. The city of Arlington, meanwhile, which actually owns the stadium, is expected to get a $500,000 annual cut, based on the Cowboys’ lease that gives the city 5% or half a million a year, whichever is less. Which is more than many cities get from naming rights — for some reason, sports team owners have been able to establish that it’s standard practice for tenants to own the names of the buildings they rent — but still not likely to do much to help pay off Arlington’s $25 million a year in stadium construction debt. Not to worry, though — there are plenty of local folks paying sales tax who can keep on making up the difference.

This week’s award for the worst stenography journalism goes to the Dallas Morning News, for its report on how an NFL lockout would affect the local economy:

The NFL Players Association contends that its members and team owners shouldn’t be the only ones worried about a possible lockout next year if they can’t settle on a labor contract.

The NFLPA sent letters to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert reminding them that cancellation of the 2011 football season could cost $160 million in “lost jobs and revenue” for the region.

In addition, a group called Don’t Mess With Success — described as a “diverse coalition of football fans, small businesses, community leaders and other associations” — sent a letter to Arlington City Manager Jim Holgersson warning about a $140 million economic hit to the region from canceling the season.

Number of economists consulted for comment for the story: zero. Accordingly, the article never discusses the possibility that in the case of an NFL lockout, sports fans in Dallas might, you know, find something else in Dallas to spend their money on. This is the well-known “substitution effect” — possibly best exemplified by the fact that when baseball went on strike in 1994, movie rentals and comedy clubs saw their business skyrocket. But finding that out would require a five-minute Google search, which is a lot to ask of newspaper writers.

The Dallas Morning News has a long editorial (or maybe a column? hard to say, as online it’s unsigned) today asking why the Cowboys built their stadium in Arlington instead of Dallas. (This prompted by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones recounting how he spurned Dallas after Mayor Laura Miller patted him on the knee.) Among the questions posed:

Was the loss of Cowboys Stadium a failure of leadership or was a Fair Park location a fantasy that had no chance of becoming reality, particularly with Jones shopping for the best deal available? …

Where was the council? Where were the opposition leaders who gleefully blocked Miller on other issues?

Of course, who really knows if a stadium could have been built in Dallas? Fair Park was too small for what towers over Arlington.

All fine questions, but missing is one big one: Would Dallas have been better off if it had built a stadium instead of Arlington? After all, Arlington had to kick in $325 million and displace local businesses to make way for the Cowboys’ new digs; Dallas residents, meanwhile, still get to go to the games, but are spared the expense. Arlington presumably gets some added tax revenues as a result of the stadium, but it’s still a worthwhile question: Did Dallas win by losing? If so, maybe that knee-pat, if it really happened, wasn’t so inexplicable after all.

You can’t be much more wishy-washy than calling a new stadium “a godsend for some and a nightmare for others,” but the Dallas Morning News has tried, evenly balancing positive and negative quotes from store owners in the vicinity of the Cowboys‘ new stadium. Sample couplet:

[Olenjack’s Grille] general manager Adam Jones said his restaurant has “embraced the stadium since Day One.” He said Sundays and Mondays were traditionally slow, but now he sometimes doubles his business. The stadium is about three-quarters of a mile away. … “It’s been fantastic for us,” Jones said.

The stadium’s impact has been particularly surprising to [Mi Tierra Latin Fusion] restaurateur Damaris Torres. At a mile and a half from the stadium, she thought she might get a few extra customers to drop in for Cuban sandwiches and guava turnovers. Instead, diners have stayed away, many of them worried about potential traffic jams, she said. That has driven down business an average of 40 percent when the Cowboys play at home.

It’d be nice to see the News make some attempt at coming up with conclusions from its survey: Is the stadium helping more businesses than it’s hurting? Are there particular geographic areas, or types of businesses, that benefit more than others? But that’s probably too much to expect from today’s time-pressed journalists.

The Dallas Cowboys officially have the world’s largest video board, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. The question now is, as I’ve noted before, whether this ups the ante for other NFL teams’ stadium demands. Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune wonders today whether Cowboys Stadium could be “the first stadium of the next round” of stadium extortion in the NFL.

“Every time a new stadium or arena opens it has something new that everyone else wants,” notes some guy with a website to Callaghan. Sports economist Rod Fort counters that not every market could really support a 100,000-person capacity stadium or the world’s largest video board; but then, keep in mind that Fort is also the one who once quipped to me: “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”

ESPN.com’s Matt Mosley raves about the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, or at least its grandiosity, citing in particular its humongous scoreboard, the fact that players enter the field by running through a sports bar, and the glass-enclosed exterior. “It was [Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’] vision to build the greatest stadium in the world,” writes Mosley, “and he just might have pulled it off.”

We can argue whether being bigger necessarily equates with better — it’s especially noteworthy that Jones apparently decided to build the stadium’s signature oversized scoreboard after going to a Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace and being so distracted by the giant video screen that he couldn’t keep his eyes on the actual performance — but for NFL fans the key phrase here is in the photo caption, which describes Cowboys Stadium as “the new standard by which other stadiums are judged.” “State-of-the-art” clauses are already popular among NFL teams, and Cowboys Stadium only ups the ante for what other franchise owners can demand as standard. (And even for teams without lease clauses, you know their owners are salivating over Cowboys Stadium’s new goodies.) At least Jones skimped on the holographic replay system.

This, in part, is the answer to the often-asked question (often-asked to me, anyway): “Won’t the new-stadium craze die off once every team has one?” The problem with “new” is that it’s a moving target — this decade’s state-of-the-art is next decade’s outmoded, as new stadiums keep (sorry) moving the goalposts. Twenty-one NFL stadiums have opened in the past 20 years, but eight of those are already more than a decade old. If Cowboys Stadium leads to a new round of NFL stadium demands — or stadium upgrade demands — it will end up costing taxpayers and football fans far more than the $350 million in public funds that went into the stadium proper.