Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, bought the team for approximately $140 million in 1989. He said, in an episode of the NFL Network’s A Football Life, that an entrepreneurial type of businessperson must be comfortable with ambiguity.
He was an oil billionaire who used a lot of leverage to purchase the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. If his money sat in account and did nothing that $140 million would be worth about $360 million in present time.
Instead, Jones’s Cowboys are valued in Forbes Magazine at $10.1 billion dollars. Purchasing an NFL team is high risk-high reward.
Jones was also a pioneer in partnering with brands like Nike and Pepsi to place signage in his stadium, drawing the ire of other traditional NFL team owners, but find a stadium these days not named after a corporation. They’re the exception, not the norm.
The 32 NFL franchises, after the league sets aside the dollars it needs to run its offices at breakeven, are recipients of equally distributed television revenue, and other sources of income from the Shield’s office. Anything they can do for themselves aside from those income streams puts money in the franchises’ pockets.
These savvy moves along with the universal appeal of the Dallas Cowboy brand placed the Cowboys in rarified air among the highest franchise valuations.
Owners who groused about Jones’ moves int eh early 90s, if they followed suit, should thank “Jerrah” for taking the leap of faith.
This is one of the reasons I like pro football much more than pro baseball. They buck tradition to progress toward opportunities to make money, and to make a top-notch television product for their fans. Most NFL games are winding up in just a few minutes past three hours.
Most NFL games, especially for fans in attendance are all-day affairs anyway, as are college contests, which – when nationally televised – can take nearly four hours.
If you want to arrive early for decent parking, pregame walking among tailgates and campus sites, and then schlep home the same day, an NFL Sunday or a NCAA Saturday means you’ll come home in the dark.
The trips my son and I took to Ohio State football game started with a three-hour drive to the area near the campus, another 15 minutes spent finding a parking spot followed by a 1-to-1 ½-mile walk to the campus and eatery area outside Ohio Stadium,
We were already 3 hours and 45 minutes into the day with about 60-90 minutes remaining until kickoff; a period we’d use to look at our favorite campus sites, and for me to tell my son what buildings I entered and what classes I took in those buildings.
If you’re wondering, I tried not to repeat stories about what I told him in any prior year. There is plenty of campus area to avoid tour reruns.
A nationally televised game’s final whistle puts us nine hours into the day while we follow the sea of humanity to our parking lot. The sea of humanity is tightly packed, and the half hour walk TO the stadium takes nearly double the time as the exiting crowd thins out the farther away your parking lot is from the stadium.
Ten hours in, it takes one hour to get out of the Columbus area, and finally moving on the highway for another three hours; a 14-hour adventure completed.
This morning we’re waking up following week two of the high school football season, a much more compact product.
The Warsaw Tigers made the longest trip of the weekend, with athletes boarding buses for a 2:55 p.m. launch yesterday to Warren County in the Indianapolis Metro area. The game, with their opponents likely mixing the run and pass as Michigan City did, lasted much less than three hours, but the ride home probably landed the Tigers and their fans in Indy home around 2:15 a.m.
This would be like setting out from the Times-Union coverage area to Ohio State with a noon departure, and finally getting home hopped up on caffeinated beverages to flight weariness at the wheel.
However you have already enjoyed your football, or you will enjoy football in a lengthy trip to a Big Ten campus, please do so safely and have fun.