NFL Tickets And The Dallas Cowboys; Great Expectations
NFL tickets are being sold and sent out in preparation for the upcoming NFL season. But playoff tickets?
According to NFL.com, the Dallas Cowboys have sent their season ticket holders their allotment of preseason and regular season tickets. Included in the package is a sheet of NFL tickets, for playoffs and the NFC Championship Game. In case you’re wondering, no NFL team has pre-sent playoff and Championship tickets to their season ticket holders. Ever.
“It’s a convenience for our season-ticket holders to have everything in one package,” said Brett Daniels, the Cowboys director of corporate communications. “It’s an evolution to be fan-friendly. They have their tickets online and if we clinch a playoff berth they go to the computer and click they want the tickets.” Brian Lafemina, the NFL’s senior vice president of club business development, expects other NFL teams to do the same.
“It’s operationally efficient for the teams, and it’s convenient for the fan,” Lafemina said. “There are times when teams don’t know if they are hosting a playoff game until a week before, and doing this helps eliminate some of the friction that exists among the teams and fans. This dovetails nicely with our new policy. If a fan says they will pay if a game is played, the team can now charge that fan and the ticket is already in hand.”
“Included in this package are your 2014 playoff tickets and parking (if applicable) for two potential home games at AT&T Stadium,” read a letter that came with the season’s NFL tickets. “The barcodes on the tickets will be activated when a home playoff game is clinched and the tickets have been paid in full.”
According to ESPN.com, Cowboys spokesman Rich Dalrymple added that the team were readying NFL tickets for the playoffs to fans at the end of the season for the last three seasons while the team was trying to qualify for the playoffs on the last game of the season. Because of the playoff runs’ happening around the holiday season, Dalrymple said the Cowboys would be sending out the NFL tickets during the biggest shipping rush of the year, which unsettled both teams and fans.
The biggest issue was that NFL teams had problems selling out playoff games this past season, especially the Green Bay Packers, who required their season-ticket holders to pay for the full slate of playoff games before they clinched a playoff birth, the league altered the policy for NFL tickets for the playoffs. Now, teams can only charge for playoff games teams have already clinched, which is what the Cowboys’ new system automatically does.
So, if the Cowboys make the playoffs, and this streamlined procedure makes playoff ticket buying easier for the Cowboys and their fans, they’ll look like customer-satisfaction geniuses. If they don’t make the playoffs, people will be upset. But, the plan is still sound.
