What's Wrong With The NFL-Stadium Experience

By:  Bobby Shores

The NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell have been talking a lot lately about improving the stadium experience for the fan, and how to keep enticing fans to leave the comfort of their home with NFL Sunday Ticket, cheap concessions and HDTV they must make it worth our while. Well Commish, I hope you are reading this article because in today's edition of my "What's Wrong With The NFL" series I am going to address just that, the Stadium Experience. Before you indulge in my latest literay masterpiece, you should check out the first two parts of this series here and here.

First thing you should know (and you do know if you know me or read the site a lot) is that I am a "super" fan of football and particularly the NFL. I am obsessed, so much so that my TV is on NFL Network 90% of the time, I read everything on it, I only listen to football podcasts, I buy NFL jersey's from the sweatshops in China, I "scout" games for the fun of it, and even write for our website and get nothing out of it but enjoyment because it's NFL related. Even though I LOVE everything NFL, I literally HATE going to an NFL stadium for a game.

Why do I hate going to games so much? For starters, the home experience is so great, I can watch multiple games at once on 1 of 2 big screens in my house (65" & 57") in high definition. I can pause the game whenever I need to go to the bathroom, make a snack, or even grab a beer/drink. With the pause option also comes the ability to rewind, fast forward and slow down replays so that I can yell at how stupid the officials are. The main reason the at home experience is so great is the price, even if I decide to have a bunch of friends and family over it is still 10 times cheaper than going to the game.

The NFL has also hurt the stadium experience by making the TV version so good, not only are the pre-game shows better with the NFL Network's starting at like 6 AM, the amount of information that a good broadcast team can give you cannot be replaced. Not only are they providing analysis that even I learn from (and I know my football pretty good), they also are able to give you up-to-date information on injuries and what's happening on the sidelines that you cannot get going to a stadium.

So what are the problems experienced by going to the stadium? Well from my personal experience going to Cowboys games, the problems are probably worthy of an article each, but I am going to try to keep it short and sweet (yea it won't happen probably).

Time is one of my main complaints. When going to a game I have to leave about 4 hours before prior to kickoff that makes for 30 minutes of drive time to get close to the stadium and another 1.5+ hours fighting traffic around the stadium. You think it's hard getting to the stadium try leaving it. People greatly stagger the times they get there, but when the game is over everyone is leaving at once, and its 10x worse. Basically, even going to a noon kickoff, it is literally a full day experience and I am get home just in time to maybe see the end of the 3:00 games and get ready for Sunday Night Football. The whole experience is exhausting meaning that I am tired the next day for work.....

Once I find and pay $60-80 for a parking spot over 1 mile from the stadium it takes a solid 20 minutes for my family and I to walk to the gates and find the gate we are supposed to go in which is usually nowhere near where we are. Once we get to the gate we have to wait another 20-30+ minutes to get felt up (and they never find my knife I carry, so it's pretty pointless) and then have our tickets scanned. By this time we all have to use the restroom pretty bad and that's another 20+ minutes waiting in line to pee to use the restroom, then we finally make it to our seats.

Once we sit in the seats the first thing we have to do is go back and get some drinks and snacks, where again we waste 10-15 minutes waiting in line and then spend $8 for a 16-ounce beer, $5 for a bottle of water, $6.50 for a soft drink, $10 if I want popcorn, $8.50 for a hot dog, $14 for a margarita and well, you get the idea. One more thing, my favorite game day food is pizza and I usually get Bobby's Pizza here in Murphy, TX which is amazing and only $5 for a large pizza. If I want to recreate that at Cowboys Stadium, I pay $60 for a "personal pizza" which includes 4 small slices. My average bill for snacks at Cowboys stadium, with a family of 5, ends up being $100+; and the beer is warm and the food is very very very average!

Being a football junkie I MUST keep up with all my favorite football sites like ReclinerQB.com, ok just kidding, I keep up with ProFootballTalk, ESPN, ESPNDallas, Sports Illustrated, CollegeFootballTalk, etc and I use my apps for fantasy football and real time scores and stats. At home I can do all this by using my iPhone, iPad or even going to my main desktop or a laptop; when I am at the game I can only use my iPhone which is perfectly fine......if the networks were able to handle the capacity at the stadium. In Cowboys Stadium my AT&T iPhone which is the "official" phone carrier for the Dallas Cowboys get very spotty service, I usually can't open up the website or use any of my apps, and don't even try to text, make phone calls, or tweet because IF they go through it will typically be hours after.

So you figure once all the pains of actually getting to my seat and getting comfortable are over, I would be able to enjoy the game, right? Wrong? Not only can you barely hold a conversation or explain to your family what is going on because of the crowd noise and drunk people all around you. At Cowboys Stadium you just end up watching the gigantic big screen TV hanging over the middle of the field. Even when I am trying to force myself not to watch it, you can't help it and your head just drifts that way, especially when your seats are eye-level with the thing. If I wanted to watch a game on a high-definition TV I would stay at home, where I am sitting in a comfortable seat, its relatively quiet, and I can control the replays while not having to stare at the lame graphics trying to get you pumped up, but usually they are advertisements, just like at home I am watching commercials.....

The last complaint I have about the stadium experience is the price, I already touched on the $100+ I spend on concessions, and the $60-80 I spend on parking a mile away, plus my youngest daughter always has to have some sort of souvenir and the prices there are marked up 3-10x more than purchasing them online or really anywhere else. The worst part about attending the game is the money you have to shell out for a ticket. Not only are season tickets a pipe dream at best for the average fan with PSL's and all the fees that are tacked on, the price just to attend a single game has gone up 26% on average for the last 3 new stadiums, and reports are that it will double for San Francisco 49er fans at their new stadium. But for me to take my family of 5 to the game, and get decent seats, the price ranges from $200-500 PER ticket.

So with all of this, why would I go to a game? Even if the ticket price was reasonable (even free), I could be flown to the stadium eliminating the full day of travel, and get the average to below-average food for a price worthy of the food; I still prefer to watch the game at home because the home experience is just that much better. It was nice to go to the stadium a couple of times and say "yep, I've been there", but I will never make it a habit. What is a habit though is trying to catch Mavericks games, we take the DART train to 100 yards away from our seats, the concessions are much more reasonably priced (and taste better), and even when we go see a "late" game we are home in time to get a decent amount of sleep and aren't totally exhausted.

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