Oops
Watch your hang time. Jerral W. Jones' new Cowboys Stadium has a problem: the mammoth video screens hanging over midfield are too low. Already a punter in a preseason game, AJ Trapasso of the Titans has hit the board in a game. That a game could be decided by a punt conking off an object in the field of play is a big deal with the league and the league office fully intends to address this before the season opens.
You want to know the funny thing? Jerral W. Jones doesn't give a shit.
And he has a point, his argument does have a leg to stand on and that is that he flew the dual 72 foot by 162 foot video screens 90 feet above the playing field. League rules call for a minimum of 85 feet of clearance above the field.
Problem is though, that rule is obviously outdated, or intended for another purpose, such as cameras and lights flown toward the edges of the playing space. Having a permanent structure hanging over the meaty part of the field in an area where it will be in play is likely not a scenario envisioned by the 85 foot rule.
How do I know that? Because there is not another NFL stadium that has a center hung board of any kind. They are de rigeur for hockey and basketball arenas, the big black squares covered in screens, stats and advertising suspended over center ice. Every other NFL stadium has the video screens mounted above the end zones.
And while center hung scoreboards and video screens will no doubt become more common with the domed and hybrid dome stadiums that every team will eventually have, this is a unique problem.
Coaches are already devising plausible scenarios for screwing up games and not only when the ball hits the board; should teams be forced to punt where and how they do not want to in order to avoid the object in play? Should the board simply be in the field of play, like the referees, or the end zone nets in the Arena Football League? Boom one, carom off the board, play on?
The league competition committee is looking at the matter, Jerral W. Jones is already complaining that it would cost him two million dollars to raise the board to any other height (op. cit.), my guess is that he will slow walk the process, get the league to take a let's see what happens approach at the start of the season. The new stadium hosts U2 in October and the board is already scheduled for temporary raising to accommodate U2's awesome quadriped stage that will be set up at midfield (op. cit.).
I will bet a dollar after the show when the board comes back down it will be one hundred ten feet above the field.
Stadium FAIL.
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That two sided video screen weighs 1.2 million pounds, I know a little about rigging and how big heavy objects are flown over crowds and I know how seriously safety is taken in these situations. Still I might be a little nervous playing under a million pounds, it would take less than two and a half seconds to hit the ground were it to fall, not a lot of time to get out of the way.
The gigantic 72 foot by 160 foot dual screens hanging over the field at the new Cowboys Stadium: Tom Pennington / Getty Images from here. A photo gallery of this awesome new stadium is here.
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