Jones explains 49ers fans filling stadium
OK, so the notion that San Francisco 49ers fans filling almost half of AT&T Stadium on Sunday isn't "B.S." after all, as Jerry Jones said while dismissing the subject in the wake of the Dallas Cowboys' season-opening loss.
After a couple of days to ponder the issue, Jones launched into a four-minute filibuster Tuesday when asked about it on 105.3 The Fan, sharing theories that ranged from the affluence of 49ers fans to the attractiveness of his $1.2 billion stadium to children rebelling against their fathers.
San Francisco 49ers fans were out in full force at AT&T Stadium on Sunday.
"I just didn’t dwell on it because I knew I could think about that later in the week," Jones said. "I can think about that today, but the game, I wanted my mind on the action that’s on the field and on the game.
"But there’s several things to point out. You know, we’re so used to seeing that blue color when we travel away. We see it all the time and there’s a lot of it. Some places we go -- in Arizona -- it feels like a home game, so we know that the kind of interest that let’s say a team maybe like a San Francisco -- not maybe, like San Francisco has. Several dynamics go in here. They have affluence. They can travel.
"A lot of times we look at the stands. You look back over in the party pass here. You’re only looking in the stands directly, you’re only looking at -- and don’t hold me to this -- 60 percent of our stands. There are people in the suites, you’ve got them in the party pass area, so you’re looking at that.
"Then let’s say you’ve got people sitting there, well, when we sell a suite or seats, we sell to about [11,000] or 12,000 people that write a check. Not 80,000 but [11,000] or 12,000. So the point is that you can have [5,000] or 6,000 people that decide for their particular group or family that they’re going to sell, and you can make a big difference in terms of people that are in there.
"Our stadium is very attractive. It’s attractive as far as people picking a game that they might want to come to Dallas to be with their team if they can afford the trip. We think that happens. It happened with Pittsburgh last time we played Pittsburgh. We won that game, but still, it happens like that. You do get a good following.
"The other thing that happened is that our tickets, that’s highest premium that we’ve had since we opened the stadium for a football game, was the premium on this ticket. We had 91,000 people there and a $90 ticket was going for $300, for example. So you do have, because we might have fans who would take the premium, watch the game on TV, it’d be a good way for them to average out on the year for their overall price of watching the Cowboys. I do see how it happened. The secondary market is so sophisticated today. You can just about manage in and out of that secondary market with your tickets as well as you can getting them through the mail.
"So all of that came into play and resulted in a great turnout. The other thing is that you have a factor. San Francisco has a lot of fans here, a lot of people from California have moved to Texas and moved to north Texas because of economic opportunity.
"And then you have what we’ve always known in the NFL. You’ll see a father and a son and you’ll see a son be a fan of the team that’s a rival to team of the father. That’s throughout the NFL. Happens all the time. We see it in New York. That’s why we see Cowboys fans up there against the Giants. So you’d have a lot of with San Francisco because of our great rivalries of the '90s, you’d have a lot of families that normally might have a Cowboys jersey on, but that boy or girl put a San Francisco jersey on."
