The Old Man and the Sun
A breakdown of how and why the Cowboys have the only stadium in the league where players regularly get blinded by the sun.
At 3-6, the Dallas Cowboys have many issues. But the most glaring problem—truly glaring, not in a metaphorical sense but a very literal one involving rays of powerful light—is that Cowboys players are unable to catch passes because they are blinded by the sun, which shines directly down the middle of the field at AT&T Stadium during late afternoon games—and TV networks make America’s Team play a lot of afternoon games.
On Sunday, the Cowboys failed to score a touchdown in a 31-6 loss to Philadelphia. Their only good chance at scoring one came when the Eagles lost a fumble at the 6-yard line—but was ruined by the sun. CeeDee Lamb got wide open in the end zone, Cooper Rush threw a catchable pass. Lamb simply ran by the ball, never seeing it due to the setting sun:
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Post-game, Lamb confirmed he lost the ball in the sun. When asked whether he’d like the team to install curtains, he said “one thousand percent.” Then reporters asked Cowboys owner Jerry Jones about the curtains. He went on a rant:
“Well let’s tear the damn stadium down and build another one. Are you kidding me? Everybody has got the same thing. Every team that comes in here has the same issues. I’m saying, the world knows where the sun is. You get to know that almost a year in advance. Someone asked me about the sun. What about the sun? Where’s the moon?
"Every venue has certain things that at certain ways and times can create an advantage. That really goes under the category of home field advantage It should be an advantage to the home team. ... It has been advantage for us to know where the sun is. I don't want to change that."
But in the 15 years of the new stadium, it pretty clearly has not been a homefield advantage, repeatedly harming the Cowboys. And it’s pretty hard to take an old man yelling WHERE’S THE MOON seriously.
Jones’ preference for routinely blinding his own players feels like a metaphor for the broader state of affairs for the most popular team in America’s most popular sport12. Other team owners at least pretend not to meddle in team affairs. But Jones is the league’s only dual owner-slash-general manager. And as the team looks directly at a potential disaster season—and also looks directly at the flaming ball in the sky—only one man is to blame.
And Jerry Jones is staring directly at the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the Dallas Cowboys. (This extended Taylor Swift riff was actually just an excuse to point out that AT&T Stadium put up sun-blocking curtains for The Eras Tour.)
The sun has existed as long as the Cowboys’ stadium has existed. (Longer, actually.)
In 2016, the Cowboys lost the season-opener to the Giants, 20-19. Jason Witten dropped this pass on a late drive with the Cowboys trying to get into field goal range:
Witten admitted the sun was an issue post-game, while head coach Jason Garrett dropped this banger:
"The sun's been there for five billion years, and it will be there for five billion more. It's not a funny issue, it's just a reality.”
There was talk of putting up curtains before the next home game, but ultimately they didn’t.
In 2017, Dez Bryant and Brice Butler dropped sun balls against the Chiefs. Butler said he spoke to Jones’ son Stephen, the team’s COO, about the sun situation after the game, while Bryant went straight to the top.
“The sun really is that big of a deal,” said Bryant. “The ball caught the light and I lost it a little bit. I went to the sidelines and I said, ‘Coach, there’s nothing I can do about it…. Hopefully, one of these days (Jones will) fix it… It's a big problem."
In the 2022 playoff loss against the 49ers, Cedrick Wilson didn’t even attempt to catch one Dak Prescott pass, ducking out of the way because he simply couldn’t see anything.
“It’s one of those things you can’t do anything about. I turned around and couldn’t see Dak or the ball.”
Against the Eagles in 2022, the Cowboys ran a third-down end zone fade route to Michael Gallup towards the only part of the field where the sun was shining, leading to a dropped touchdown:
The sun has also bothered Dallas’ opponents from time to time, but it seems to happen way more often to Cowboys players. At the very least, we can refute Jones’ claim that it’s some sort of advantage the Cowboys have built in for themselves. They keep running plays to the sunny part of the field, and their players openly beg for change.
The sun issue is, like, extremely avoidable.
Ancient civilizations that couldn’t write or play football famously designed all sorts of structures around the position of the sun on certain days. The Cowboys spent a billion dollars on this building and did not think about the concept of “afternoons.”
Here’s a fun fact which generally surprises people: Almost all football stadiums are built with a north-south alignment3. Don’t believe me? Here are Google Maps satellite images of the first football stadiums I thought of off the top of my head, with north at the top of the screen.
(I went on a bit of a “college stadiums with colored turf” kick.)
Big stadiums, small stadiums, old stadiums, new stadiums, pro stadiums, college stadiums: All built with the same directional bearing, give or take a few degrees, because it’s hard to play football with the sun in your eyes. Our other great outdoor sport, baseball, also figured this out: MLB requests that teams build stadiums such that the batter is facing east-northeast, since the sport would be ruined by hitters trying to pick up the ball while squinting into the setting sun4.
AT&T Stadium is built along an east-west alignment. But it gets worse! Not to go all Farmer’s Almanac on your ass, but in the northern hemisphere, the sun sets to the northwest in spring and summer, then sets to the southwest in fall and winter. AT&T actually tilts west-southwest. If you overlay a compass on the stadium, it’s got an alignment of roughly 70 degrees east-northeast/250 degrees west-southwest.
That means that in October, November, and December—THE MONTHS THE COWBOYS ARE PLAYING—the sun is blasting light right down the center of the field, goalpost to goalpost. On today, November 14th, the sun sets in Arlington, Texas at a bearing of 248 degrees west-southwest—almost the exact angle of the stadium. It’ll stay around there for most of the rest of the season, bottoming out at 242 degrees west-southwest on the winter solstice. It’s really remarkable how they specifically chose the worst angle at which to build the stadium.
Of course, AT&T is a dome. That should solve the problem, because sunlight notably does not pass through walls and ceilings. However, the Cowboys chose to construct a gigantic window on the west side of the stadium. Ahh. Jones says the idea was to create an outdoor feel in an indoor stadium, but other teams have done that without the sun issue: the Raiders’ big windows face northeast, and the Rams managed to keep their stadium open on all sides without the sun blaring through.
But even if you do build a stadium at the exact wrong angle, and even if you do put gigantic windows on the west side of the stadium—there’s still a fix! You can pretty easily put up curtains to block out the sun. The Cowboys have those curtains! AT&T put up events like Wrestlemania, concerts, and the NCAA basketball championship. (It’d be pretty messed up to have one team shooting into the sun for an entire half.)`Jerry just doesn’t want them for the Cowboys.
Why did the Cowboys build their stadium this way?
Here’s a 2016 quote about the situation from Bryan Trubey, the executive vice president of HKS, the architecture firm which built the Cowboys stadium and the Rangers stadium next door, Globe Life Field.
That stadium was developed as part of a master plan. That master plan will play out some day and the alignment between the stadium and the ballpark is one of the key elements to the entire master plan.
Ahh, I see! The east-west alignment was part of a long-term “master plan” which eventually led to the Rangers’ stadium being built. I’m not exactly sure why the alignment was essential to the plan—it sure looks like they could’ve built a north-south stadium on the Cowboys’ parcel of land, which actually would’ve left more room for the eventual Rangers stadium and lots—but hey, it panned out. Clearly they knew what they were doing. Trubey continued:
When you get to the west side of the stadium, when we get the higher densities there, when you have 14-, 15-story buildings, which is not out of the realm of possibility, it’s a completely different situation,” Trubey said
OK, I take it all back. They had no idea what they were doing. He’s saying the architects felt good about leaving the gigantic west-facing windows because the stadium would bring more people and bigger buildings, and someday,, somebody would build 15-story buildings in the neighborhood west of the stadium, which would block out the glare. This is just awful planning, and it has not worked out at all. The area to the west of the Cowboys stadium remains a residential neighborhood comprised of single family homes to this day, and the tallest apartment building in all of Arlington is 8 stories tall. I no longer believe the stuff Trubey said earlier about the master plan.
With the Cowboys, Jerry runs everything
He’s the owner, team president, and GM, cutting business deals and cutting players at the end of training camp. He’s the longest-tenured GM in the league by a full decade, and the team’s head of player personnel is… his son, Stephen, and his other two children, Charlotte and Jerry Jr., run other departments of the team.
In fairness, Jones has been a successful owner. He bought the team in 1989, and within a decade, they’d won three Super Bowls. The team is the most valuable sports franchise in the world, and by far America’s most popular team in America’s most popular sport. And Jones surely has some football expertise—he won a national championship as a player at Arkansas, and has made some legitimately great draft picks over the years. The Cowboys have the ninth-best record in the league since he bought the team.
Two things are clear about Jones: He demands full control over all things, and is stubborn enough to hang on to his dumbest ideas. The sun isn’t the only thing causing a stir right now: The Cowboys are also currently taking heat because Jones sells tours of their training facility, The Star, allowing fans to come into close contact with players trying to get through their workday. As with the windows, players have actively complained about the tours, calling it “like a zoo.” But Jones likes the tours (and the $10 million they generate per year) and says he will not reconsider5.
This is how the Cowboys operate. If Jones likes something—even a dumb thing, or a dumb coach—the Cowboys hold onto it. If he doesn’t like it—even if it’s a good thing, or a Hall of Fame coach—the Cowboys discard it.
And Jerry likes the sun. Maybe it’s because of the cool photos6 created by the sunbeams pouring through the windows. Maybe it’s because Texas Stadium had that open roof, “so God could watch his favorite team.” Maybe he just doesn’t want to admit there’s something wrong with his billion-dollar stadium, a monument to his own wealth and success.
The Cowboys are 3-6. They rank 30th in turnover margin, 31st in scoring defense, 31st in yard per rushing attempt, 32nd in wide receiver separation… and it’s been 30 years since their last Super Bowl. The Jets, Bears, and Jaguars have reached conference championship games more recently. They have bigger problems than the sun. But the sun blasting into Cowboys’ faces quite literally shines a light on what’s wrong with the team.
Jerry Jones is the closest thing we have to an old-timey king in America. He has secured absolute power, millions of followers, and hereditary succession. And you know what kings really love doing? Making arbitrary requests about the massive construction projects they commissioned. (Seriously—pretty recurring theme throughout history.) And he’s insisting that an obvious, fixable problem is actually fine, can’t be changed in any way, and is in fact part of his plan. There’s an old story about that—I guess it’s good the only thing Jerry Jones should be covering up is the sun.
BTW, I just figured out how to do footnotes. Wheeeeee! I am going to abuse this feature.
There are a handful of outdoor east-west stadiums—Husky Stadium in Washington comes to mind—but they tend to be older, and most have put big grandstands blocking out the sun.
Some MLB teams have stadiums where the hitter faces southeast instead of northeast—but never west.
Another instance, in Don Van Natta’s excellent 2014 ESPN profile of Jones: Jones changing the training camp location over Bill Parcells’ wishes because of a soda sponsorship.
It is going to rule so hard when England loses a World Cup game over this.
Great article, as always.
I am concerned that this line, "Jerry Jones is the closest thing we have to an old-timey king in America", isn't going to age well because....