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Kalyn Kahler, ESPNOct 23, 2024, 06:00 AM ET
FRISCO, Texas — A tour guide presents a wall display of the Dallas Cowboys‘ proudest achievements to a group of 20-plus people crowded in front of him, many wearing a mix of Cowboys jerseys. At the other end of the hallway, less than a football field away, are the Cowboys’ position meeting rooms. A player opens a door and walks out.
“Before we get started, we have a few ground rules,” the tour guide says. “If a player or coach walks by, don’t yell, don’t talk to them. Don’t take pictures of any people. If they come up to you, that’s fine.
“It’s a work day here at the Dallas Cowboys.”
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It’s 10 a.m. on the Friday before the 3-2 Cowboys play the 4-1 Lions, a highly anticipated prove-it game against a tougher and healthier opponent. Quarterback Dak Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb have yet to find their groove, the run game is nonexistent and the defense is battling injuries at nearly every position. Players and coaches are in meetings ahead of their walk-through. This is the football staff’s office, a space the 31 other NFL clubs reserve for team employees during the season. The tour guide just reminded his group that this is a work day. So why are fans here?
For $40 a pop, fans can experience what the employee manning the tour information booth that day described as “a day in the life of a Cowboys player.” (It’s $70 for the Ultimate Fan Experience, which includes an Authentic Letter of Fandom from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a souvenir tote, a lapel pin and a dining and shopping coupon to use at The Star, $90 to add on a Q&A session with an AI Jerry hologram.)
“This is where the Cowboys players eat, train, work, practice,” the employee told an inquiring group of potential customers. “They’re here 99% of the time.”
Stadium tours are common across the NFL, but the upbeat tour guides at The Star are quick to point out that Dallas is the only team to offer the general public this access to its facility. The Packers’ tours of Lambeau Field intentionally steer clear of player areas in the stadium, which doubles as Green Bay’s facility. The Chargers invited fans to a free open house of their new facility, but it took place in July, before players reported for training camp.
And Dallas’ advertising is accurate. On the Thursday before the Lions game, Prescott walks about 3 feet away from the 10 a.m. tour group gathered in a hallway near the Cowboys’ locker room.
“I saw the back of his head and I was like, ‘Oh s—!'” says Michale Elkin, from Albemarle, North Carolina.
“It’s gold when those players go through our complex out there and see fans,” Jerry Jones told ESPN.
The Friday 10 a.m. group walks single-file down the hallway that houses the Cowboys’ locker room and weight room. “We normally don’t do this,” one of the tour guides tells the wide-eyed group (though the Saturday 1:20 p.m. group will also walk past the weight room). An 8-year-old boy named Will Maguire from Denver, who is on the tour with his parents, sister and grandparents during his fall break from third grade, audibly gasps when he sees Micah Parsons through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of the weight room. “It’s Micah!”
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Behind Will in the line, an adult fan similarly loses his mind. “There’s players in there! There’s players in there!” Kenny Gainous from Augusta, Georgia, repeats as he stares inside the glass to see Parsons and a few other players getting in some stretching and band work. A few hours later, Parsons is officially ruled out of the Lions game, healing from a high left ankle sprain.
The Cowboys say tours of The Star and AT&T Stadium combined sell about 500,000 tickets per year and generate nearly $10 million of annual revenue, which is considered football-related income and included in the league’s revenue share with players, who receive 48%.
The tours offer unique access to the inner workings of the team, which increases fan interest and revenue, but also subjects the players and coaches tasked with taking this team to the Super Bowl with what one player calls “random people” walking through and around their office daily. The Cowboys say the tours don’t go into the players’ spaces when they are using them, like the locker room and meeting rooms, and the bulk of the tours are scheduled when players are not practicing or in meetings. The team also scales back tours during the playoffs. But several former Cowboys told ESPN that the tours are one of the biggest distractions of working in Jerry’s world and contradictory to Jones’ stated goal of ending the 29-year Super Bowl drought.
Former Cowboys tight end Dalton Schultz created an entire news cycle last March when he told Pat McAfee the Cowboys’ facility was “like a zoo,” because fans tapped on the glass walls of the weight room to get the players’ attention while they were inside working out.
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Schultz was the first to say it out loud, but players around the league have long known about Dallas’ tours. Cowboys defensive end KJ Henry arrived in Dallas the first week of October this season, and he’d already been prepped by his Bengals teammate Justin Rogers, a former Cowboy.
“He talked about the tours all the time, just saying that’s the difference,” Henry says. “Like, people are always touring, always walking through the facility, so just be ready to see random people.”
On this particular Friday, there are seven 20-person tours available for individual ticket purchase, as well as additional group tours, like those for corporate outings, that aren’t listed on the Cowboys’ website. Tour groups cross paths in the building, and on Saturdays before home games, they’re scheduled every 20 minutes from 12:40 to 4:20. The Cowboys say most weekend tours, which are expanded from the weekday versions to accommodate 30 people, sell out.
The tour guide on this Friday explains each record displayed on the franchise’s “living wall.” The idea is that these numbers will be updated as the Cowboys continue winning.
36 PLAYOFF APPEARANCES. 8 NFC CHAMPIONSHIP WINS (MOST IN NFL). 20 CONSECUTIVE WINNING SEASONS (MOST IN NFL). 8 SUPER BOWL APPEARANCES. 5 SUPER BOWL WINS.
“That last number has some dust on it,” the guide says. “We need to change that.”
Gainous, the fan from Georgia, offers a booming affirmation. “That needs to change!”
Cowboys tours offer the opportunity for fans to take a casual stroll through what is usually an NFL team’s inner sanctum. Kalyn Kahler / ESPN
Jones will often talk with tour groups when he runs into them at The Star, so he knows fans such as Gainous are growing increasingly impatient after three straight 12-win regular seasons have ended in early and embarrassing playoff exits. He values transparency with the fan base, and he built The Star in 2016 with fans in mind as much as players and staff. But within that transparency lives a contradiction.
“We have 24/7 access to the facility, and it should be a place of solitude,” said a recent former player who requested anonymity to discuss the topic freely. “I come in for extra work at night, to use the hot and cold tub, and there’s fans walking through, poking out at you.”
“You’re walking by the tour guide, and they’re pulling [the fans] to the side, and you hear them say, ‘Oh that’s CeeDee Lamb, that’s CeeDee!'” says former Dallas safety Jayron Kearse, starter on the three straight 12-win teams. “Like Dalton said, it’s kind of like you’re in a zoo and kids are going to see a lion. That’s not a reason why we didn’t get over that hump. But I just don’t think that really equates to winning. That has nothing to do with us winning the game.”
Jones says he has never heard any complaints about the tours from a staff member or a player. “Not one time,” he says, “but the most important thing is it wouldn’t make any difference. Period. Because overall, they’re swimming against the stream.”
Kalyn Kahler / ESPN
IT’S SATURDAY AT 1:45 p.m., and inside The Star’s dining area, Parsons swings his giggling daughter back and forth in his arms. Not 15 feet away, a tour guide speaks to a group of 30-something fans, the majority of whom aren’t hearing a word he says about the Cowboys’ Walter Payton Man of The Year winners. They are fixated on Parsons and his toddler. The Cowboys bring in food trucks and invite family and friends of players and coaches to have lunch with them after practice on home game Saturdays.
The guide reminds those on the tour to put their phones away out of respect for Parsons, and then leads the group past the injured linebacker and his family and through the dining area. A dad in the group, Kenneth Perry from Washington, D.C., urges his lanky teenage son to keep calm around his favorite player. “Chill, chill,” Parry says as he grabs his son’s shoulder. “Chill.”
A few minutes later, the tour guide pauses his speech while the group is stopped at the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders exhibit. “Make way for this gentleman, please.” The fans back up, and Parsons slowly hobbles past them.
“Oh my god, he’s limping,” one woman whispers.
“That looks like it’s going to be a few more weeks until he can play again,” another says.
Parsons doesn’t acknowledge the fans, nor does he look bothered by the attention. But the recent former player who requested anonymity says the tours can be exhausting because the players always have to be on, even on a Saturday afternoon when their work before the game is done.
“We want to have our own space where we can talk, but it’s either media or fans all day,” the former player says. “You never get a break. It’d be one thing if they did the tours like one day a week, but it’s every day.”
Most NFL clubs work to limit distractions for players and staff. Paranoia motivates owners to keep the public and media out of the minutiae of football business. But Jones is built differently. “I have always thought that the way to promote the Cowboys and to add interest into what we were doing was to involve in every corner that’s possible, fan interest,” Jones says.
“It wouldn’t make any difference. Period. Because overall, they’re swimming against the stream.” Jerry Jones on player complaints about tours
He traces that philosophy back to his days as a guard at Arkansas, where he says the team often practiced in front of hundreds of fans sitting close by on a grassy knoll. “It made me feel like I was playing in a bowl game every day,” he says. “It made me want to just exceed what I normally would have because of all of that close-in scrutiny. I didn’t want to get my butt beat in a drill.”
He says he thinks the fan presence inside the facility inspires his players and staff, while also growing the interest in the team by fostering a closeness with fans. Jones sees the tours as a part of his legacy as owner, along with being the first team to have live cameras in the draft room starting in 1992, and pushing for increased broadcast access and more lucrative broadcast deals.
“We’ve drafted well over the years,” Jones says, “But more important, that initiated a lot of interest in a part of football, and now, the draft is more of a programming hit than the World Series, as far as people watching. So all along the way, all I’ve ever had is a complete ratification and endorsement of the more that I can involve fans, such as tours, the better it is.”
Cowboys players compare being a part of Dallas’ brand, with its sprawling facility and massive stadium, to the NFL’s version of Disney World and Hollywood. Jones likens it to Broadway. At the start of each season, the Cowboys communications team gives a presentation to players with detailed broadcast and social media audience numbers, to teach how much tighter the lens on them is because they play for the Cowboys. Jones does the same in his first meeting with players each year: “I [tell them], ‘When you come in, look around. You’ll see fans everywhere. … This will lift your level of expectation about your own play.’ If it doesn’t work for some players, then they’re either not successful or, let’s say, they move on down the line.”
Cowboys tour guides offer ground rules, but the opportunity to see players is arguably the tour’s biggest draw. Kalyn Kahler / ESPN
Players who do move on often arrive at a similar realization.
“I’m smiling … when I walk in the building here, I just know, like, I just have work,” said six-year Cowboys defensive end Dorance Armstrong of his new team, the Washington Commanders.
“This is more about football, just X’s and O’s,” running back Tony Pollard, who spent five seasons with the Cowboys, says about his new team, the Tennessee Titans. “I’m in a better place mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, just all around.”
“Over here [in Kansas City] … the point is the football and winning championships,” says cornerback Kelvin Joseph, who was with the Cowboys for two seasons before moving to the Chiefs this offseason (He is now a member of the Colts). “There [in Dallas], it was a lot of football and like, other stuff.”
“You got real facilities here,” says defensive end Dante Fowler Jr., who spent two years in Dallas and now plays for the Commanders. “You might not see tourists coming around, but it keeps the main thing the main thing.”
When asked what is different about Dallas’ team culture, Fowler, along with Kearse, were two of three Cowboys players from the 2023 roster who independently cited the tours as a defining feature.
“You’re on your way to eat lunch and you’re running into tours,” Kearse says. “You’re on your way to meetings, you’re running into tours. We’re here for football, it’s our job to come in and be able to focus whether we’re in the weight room, or our coach is teaching us something in the meeting room, where you have 30 to 35 people walking by, looking through the glass while you’re in meetings.”
Another recent former player who requested anonymity says his position group would shut the door to their room specifically to avoid tours. And the first recent former player who requested anonymity says he never felt as if he could speak freely, even in the locker room, because with the open entrance, fans could easily hear them in the hallway.
“I don’t know if that worked for Jerry in the ’90s, back when they were winning Super Bowls, but times have changed,” says the first anonymous former player. “You have these elite athletes and if you want their complete focus, you shouldn’t have tours. It is an added distraction.”
Kearse played for the Lions and Vikings before the Cowboys. He says Dallas is a great organization that changed his life for the better, but a normal work day there is unlike any he experienced elsewhere.
“We get all the top-of-the-line things throughout the day, the hot tub and the training room,” Kearse says. “But it’s just a whole bunch of other things that come along with it. It’s all about the brand, that star, which I think supersedes trying to win at the highest level.”
Joseph says he didn’t get distracted by the tours, because he was able to “block out the noise.”
“Jerry is gonna try to make his money all around the world,” Joseph says. But in the next sentence he reconsiders. “It can be a distraction because they do have people sitting there watching you working out, tapping on the glass and just looking at you standing.”
A source close to the Cowboys says Dallas’ player leadership council, a group of veteran players, has discussed the disturbance of the tours, but believed there was nothing they could do.
“It’s like you’re in a zoo and kids are going to see a lion. That’s not a reason why we didn’t get over that hump. But I just don’t think that really equates to winning.” Jayron Kearse on Cowboys tours
That’s because Jones certainly doesn’t seem willing to entertain the possibility that the interest he has cultivated in the Cowboys and the access he has allowed have created distractions that affect the players’ on-field performance.
“The bottom line is that ever since we’ve been involved and been doing it, for the last 20 years, we’re the sixth-winningest team in the NFL (182-131, .581 in the regular season),” Jones says. “Since 2016 [the year The Star opened], we’re the fourth-winningest team in the NFL (85-52, .620 in the regular season).”
But the Cowboys last reached an NFC title game in the 1995 season, the same year as their last Super Bowl win, one of five teams that have failed to reach a conference title game since then. The Bengals won as many playoff games in the 2021-22 seasons (five) as the Cowboys did from 1996 to 2023.
“We were doing the same thing back then,” Jones says. “The last time we won a Super Bowl, we were having cameras in those draft rooms. We were having thousands of people at practice.”
Jones says the old Cowboys facility, Valley Ranch, had a ticket window for tours, something he’d inherited from Tex Schramm, who’d previously run the team as president and general manager.
Jones doesn’t put much stock in the opinions of the former players who question the tours. “That’s like firing your accountant, or getting a divorce,” he says. “You always hear it from the disgruntled people that aren’t there anymore.”
And actually, Jones doesn’t think the tours are big enough.
“I’d love to see cameras in the tour going to 20 million people while the people were making the tours and hearing the same thing,” Jones says. “And then while they’re coming down the hall, I’d love to see a coach talking to a player as he walked away from a meeting, talking about a player walking right through.”
For now, there are no television cameras following the tours, so fans must attend in person if they want to look directly into the scouting office, which has floor-to-ceiling windows for walls. Some guides will say that the scouts are mostly out on the road and not behind the tall cubicle walls that obscure the desks from view, but about 10 in-house scouts work from this very office.
Around the corner, Cowboys analytics staffers Jason McKay and John Park watch tape with their office doors open while guides give a spiel about the “biggest trade in NFL history,” the 1989 deal that sent Herschel Walker to Minnesota, ultimately landed Dallas 18 players and inspired an NFL rule change.
For $40, fans get a taste of the authentic day-to-day player and coach experience in Dallas. Kalyn Kahler / ESPN
Downstairs, when it’s unoccupied, fans visit the Cowboys team auditorium, and the tour guides highlight the imported Italian leather seats and also make sure you know almost every room is available to rent. Want to have your fantasy football draft or baby shower in the Cowboys’ war room? Prom in the team cafeteria? It’s all possible for a price.
The Thursday 10 a.m. tour squeezed in a quick stop before a special teams meeting started. (The 10:20 a.m. tour wasn’t as lucky because a coach went into the room just as they arrived.) Soft rock played on the speakers and the giant screen at the front of the room displayed an introduction slide to that morning’s meeting. The computer was open to another slide that read, “Scouting report.”
By now, Dallas coaches know better than to put any game-planning content on the screens of unattended meeting rooms, as fans could enter at any point.
“I would not put tours on an agenda for a football schedule,” a former Dallas coach says. “But you can control what you can control and that one, that’s one thing that you’re not going to be able to control.”
The Saturday 10 a.m. tour lined up in front of the weight room window to watch receivers coach Robert Prince complete a set of hang cleans with a weight bar just a few feet behind the glass.
“It was a little weird, honestly, because I had never seen anything like it,” Commanders cornerback Noah Igbinoghene says of the tours. Igbinoghene played in Dallas last season after starting his career in Miami. “That just shows you the type of business they are and just everything that is Dallas. You expect it, but seeing it in person was kind of crazy.”
While taking in the expanse of the cafeteria, one woman on the Saturday 1:20 pm. tour turned to her husband and said, “I’ll be a dishwasher, I don’t care! Just to be around this every day.”
Jerry Jones: ‘Since the day I walked through the door, I have been trying to get fans every place I could get them.’ Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images
IN THE LOCKER room Sunday night after Dallas’ 38-point loss, the largest margin during Jones’ tenure as owner, eight-year Cowboys veteran cornerback Jourdan Lewis is frustrated. Because Detroit didn’t just win; the Lions showboated as they beat up on the Cowboys. Everything they did on offense worked. The backup quarterback came in with eight minutes left in the fourth quarter with a 47-9 lead, and his first play was a 19-yard pass.
“Honestly, we got to stop thinking about the postseason so fast,” Lewis says. “We got to go game by game. … We got to look at it like every game is the Super Bowl, and that’s the problem. We can’t think about what’s ahead.”
It sounded as if Lewis were referencing his own teammates and coaches, as much as he was complaining about the media coverage of the Cowboys. Just that morning, Jones discussed his postseason expectations for the team on Fox’s pregame show.
“It’s just everything that’s surrounding the Cowboys,” Lewis says. “Super Bowl or bust. They’re not good this year because they lost a big one, or, they aren’t good this game because they beat this team.“
Does “everything surrounding the Cowboys” include the fans inside the facility?
“It’s Jerry’s world,” Lewis says. “That’s not our job to go out there and tell Jerry what to do with his organization. Our job is to go out there and win games, regardless of if you see [tours] as a distraction, like the media or anybody else. We got to go do our job regardless of the circumstances. So we can’t look at it like that. … He made a multibillion dollar organization like this. It’s not going to stop, so get used to it.
“Football players, we are some of the most mentally tough people in the world — supposedly. You challenge a man’s will every single snap. So if [the tours are] a problem, that’s going to carry on in other aspects of our game. So hopefully that’s not a problem.”
That Sunday night, Dallas sports radio lights up with angry callers complaining about the team’s lack of urgency and lack of culture. Jones is mentioned in nearly every call. The team is 3-3, but the Super Bowl expectations imposed, or depending on how you look at it, inflicted by Jones, have made the drubbing feel catastrophic.
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Two days later, a few hours after Jones stirred up another news cycle by admonishing Dallas radio hosts for asking him questions he thought he shouldn’t have to answer, the owner takes a break between sessions at the fall league meeting in Atlanta to discuss the tours with a reporter. He hardly needs any questions to get going on one of his favorite topics.
“It’s great when someone like you would come along and say, ‘Well, I’m hearing that this is maybe a negative,'” Jones says. “That just makes people that much more interested and makes them go. So I search out for negatives because that causes more people to read and come take the tours and look at the deal. That is exactly the whole philosophy of how I run the Cowboys.
“… Since the day I walked through the door, I have been trying to get fans every place I could get them in the makeup of the game. In my mind, it absolutely is inspirational to players, not take away from players.”
That sounds like a closing statement, and Jones has overstayed his 10-minute break by at least 10 minutes. His handler looks ready to move him along, so the reporter turns off the recorder. But then Jones delivers his final point, and he knows it’s a soundbite that will sell.
“Did you get that down?” Jones asks. “Turn it back on.”
Then he doubles down.
“Now tours, anything that we promote, sure as hell doesn’t make a difference on whether we made that tackle, or didn’t make the tackle as was the case last weekend.”
