It’s not unusual for teams around the NFL to offer stadium tours for fans, but Jerry Jones has taken the idea to extreme, weird levels that are patently Jerry Jones. It has players wondering what the hell is going on, fans wandering around in places no member of the public should be — and there’s also an A.I. powered Jerry Jones waiting to receive questions from fans who are willing to pay a premium fee.
This would all be great if the Cowboys were dominating in 2024, but instead the team, once thought of as a lock to at least make the playoffs, is struggling at 3-3 while getting lapped by the Commanders in the NFC East.
Tales of the Cowboys fan tours come to us from ESPN, and they detail an entirely surreal scenario when Dallas was preparing to face the Detroit Lions in a critical Week 6 game. Players were in the facility doing their Friday routines when an entire tour group came walking past the windows of their athletic facilities, fans peering through like they’re fish at an aquarium.
“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.”
Former Cowboys tight end Dalton Shultz talked about the tours in March, describing scenes from inside the Cowboys facility like a “zoo.”
What makes the Cowboys tours different from others around the league is the level of access fans get, paired with seemingly no awareness from the organization of when players need to buckle down and focus, rather than being distracted by random fans. This scenario is all the more strange to still be happening in 2024, largely seen as a “put up or shut up” year where the current suite of players and the front office need to show that this unit can win, or wholesale changes are needed.
Despite these high-stakes in Jerry World, there’s seemingly nothing that will stop the organization from achieving it’s primary goal: Making money.
Fan tours start at $40, and have strange add-on features from there. For an additional $30 you can become an “Ultimate Fan,” which means getting a tote bag, a lapel pin, and a certificate signed by Jones denoting that the person who spent the money is a “certified fan” of the Cowboys. For an additional $90? A Q&A session with an A.I recreation of Jerry Jones — which sounds like the most terrifying thing on the planet.
There’s no shortage of players who spoke to ESPN about how much they hate the fan tours, and how it pulls focus away from winning football games. Safety Jayron Kearse was candid about how disrupting the process is.
“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.”
Others have expressed that they feel on-edge, and unwilling to freely communicate inside the facilities because there’s always a chance a tour group could be lurking around a corner and overhear a privileged conversation which should stay inside the locker room.
Ultimately it’s all about the culture Jerry Jones has bred in Dallas. One that loved to say the team is committed to winning, but far too often puts moneymaking ventures like fan tours, or vanity projects like glass windows over the goal of making the Super Bowl.
Jones knows about the dislike his players have for the tours, and he doesn’t care. He believes it’s part of the duty for players to interact with fans — meaning they have to get used to it.
