Cowboys Stadium Goes Upscale: Big Spender

ARLINGTON, Texas (TheStreet) -- It only took a preseason punt's few seconds of hang time to bring NFL football and its surrounding "fan experience" to an inevitable collision.

When a ball booted by Tennessee Titans backup punter A.J. Trapasso clocked the $40 million, 11,520 square foot high-definition scoreboard hanging over the field of the Dallas Cowboys' new $1.15 billion stadium in Arlington, Texas, two weeks ago, it prompted both an NFL rule change and a look at how activity on the playing field is trumped by the amenities around it. While a similar scenario will reset the clock and force a replay of the down for the rest of the 2009 season, the Cowboys and owner Jerry Jones weren't forced to move the screen and seemed incredulous that a punter would kick above the 85-foot limit set by the NFL.

Final score: Cowboys Stadium 1, football 0.

A rendering of the new Cowboys Stadium.

For "America's Team," the biggest story of the offseason hasn't been if this is the year that Tony Romo wins a big game. The main narrative focuses on the pleasure palace Jones built for himself, with the help of $933 million in bond issues the city of Arlington will still be paying when Romo's collecting his pension. In the current economic climate, the new stadium -- much like Yankee Stadium and the Mets' Citi Field before it -- is a decadently quaint throwback.

"Building cycles and investment cycles don't perfectly match other cycles - whether it's the unemployment rate, cost of living or the stock market," says Charles Euchner, author of Playing the Field: Why Sports Teams Move and Why Cities Fight To Keep Them (The Johns Hopkins University Press 1994). "This is another one of those mismatches, but I bet you that in 1930 in the early stages of the Great Depression, there were palaces opening then too -- with people passing men with tin cups on the way in."