Well, it was intriguing while it lasted.
On Wednesday afternoon, the CBS affiliate in Dallas reported that the first regular-season game at the North Texas Football Cathedral might be blacked out locally, due to 1,200 tickets that were released for public sale because no one was interested in paying the $5,000-per-chair PSL.
The possibility that such an indignity could be visited upon the proudest sports franchise in America was nearly incomprehensible.
For fans of the Eagles, Giants, and Redskins -- and for anyone who doesn’t like the Cowboys -- the mere suggestion that the game might not be available for viewing by local residents induced partial involuntary self-urination.
Per Todd Archer of the Dallas Morning News, however, a blackout won’t be happening.
But Archer’s blurb on the matter is unclear. He suggests that there would have been no blackout, even if none of the 1,200 tickets had sold.
If that’s the case, why did the Cowboys decline to tell CBS 11 on Wednesday afternoon the number of tickets that still needed to be sold, and why did they tell Archer on Wednesday night that only a few hundred remain?
Finally, a quick point of clarification on the blackout rules. To qualify as a sellout, all non-premium seats must be sold.
So it doesn’t matter if the total attendance is 100,000. If a single non-premium seat is unsold, the venue is not sold out.
In this case, our guess is that the remainder of the 1,200 tickets tied to the unsold PSLs will be purchased by someone in time for the Giants-Cowboys game to be televised locally by NBC.