Ego and Bad Design
I would like to go to the new $1.2 billion Cowboys Stadium in Texas to watch the movie The Matrix. I have no interest in watching a football game there. Full disclosure, I have never liked the Dallas Cowboys. I think it has something to do with a mean cousin who loved them and harassed me about it in grade school.
In a classic egomaniacal move Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones ordered a ginormous jumbotron that hangs 90 ft above the playing field spanning from one twenty yard line to the other, right in the likely flight path of many punts.
How big is this oversized HDTV? Its display screens are 159 by 72 feet and it weighs 432 tons. Talk about surround sound.
And talk about a design flaw. Their user experience expert must have been so focused on delivering an incredible experience for the fans attending the game that they completely forgot that the stadium was going to host actual football games.
How big a design error is this? You judge.
Christopher Moore, an Assistant Professor of Physics at Longwood University in Farmville, VA, blogged about the physics of punting on ilovephysics.com:
” A study in 1985 of 238 punts made by 24 different NFL punters found that punters typically don’t punt for maximum distance, but to balance distance with hang time. The study found that on average, NFL punters kick the ball at an angle of 57 degrees with an average speed of 60 mph. With these parameters, a NFL punt would have an average height of about 90 feet, which is exactly the height off the ground of the Cowboy’s scoreboard. Air resistance would probably decrease this number 10-15%, though. More important, though, were parameters for “elite” kicks. An elite kicker can boot the ball with speeds up to 70 mph. At the same average angle, that results in a height over 120 feet.”
The physics of kicking a football suggest that the jumbotron will be hit a lot. This is a huge design screw up and Jerry Jones should be forced to move the HDTV screen into his home where I am sure it would easily fit without getting in the way.
But no, this is the NFL where team owners rule the roost. Jerry Jones petitioned (probably more like told) NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that a new rule would have to be created to accommodate punts that will inevitably hit the video screen. And it was done. The NFL announced the following new rule:
“If a ball in play strikes a video board, guide wire, sky cam or any other object, the ball will be dead immediately, and the down will be replayed at the previous spot”
That the rule will come into play is no longer hypothetical. In the third quarter of the first exhibition game played in the new venue between the Cowboys and the Titans, the backup punter for Tennessee, A.J. Trapasso, hit the jumbotron squarely and the ball bounced straight down. The punt was ruled dead and the down replayed.
During warm-ups before the game Trapasso had hit the screen monstrosity three times and the Titan’s starting punter, Craig Hentrich had nailed it a dozen times.
You would think they could have figured this out during the design process. There is no room for ego in good design and I still don’t like the Dallas Cowboys.
Even egos are bigger in Texas : ) They don’t get much bigger than Jerry Jones.
I loved the interview with the Cowboy punter who said: they didn’t ask me (and pointed out that other stadiums had consulted with the punters). Design 101.
As a resident affected by the location of the new stadium, I was more shocked to get a context from my NFL-savvy husband over the weekend. The Cowboys only play in the stadium ~8 times a year (that’s all the home games on the schedule). What a waste of resources.
Sadly, when put to a vote (this, a statement on the fallacy of democracy), residents felt like it was a vote for or against the stadium (and who wants to vote against the stadium?). There are no successive voting options, like “I agree with the stadium, but only under these conditions”. There were very few people in the meeting I went to where a DC economist who specialized in the study of professional sporting venue builds and the impact on the local economy, said that we’d be looking at an $18MIL deficit as a community annually.
The interesting thing about the stadium however is how the design capitalized on adaptive behaviors. There are huge outdoor screens to capitalize on the tailgating phenomenon — expanding the experience outside the walls of the stadium.
I teach at a school which has been saddled with four bad additions to our campus in the last few years. Our auditorium has a stage too small and narrow for theater productions, and a massive amount of wasted air-space within the building while having no space for a theater shop program or flys or any of the other tools of modern stage craft. Our art building (while housing a wonderful art program) has no usable gallery space, and has high ceilings and drafty rooms and insufficient windows. Our dining hall is a vast barn of a building set on a north-south axis in such a way that the kitchen is overheated in summer and hot in winter, and the dining room is cold in winter, hot in summer, and too-bright with sunlight through its vast windows during mealtimes.
None of these were unavoidable problems; all of them resulted from an architect who knew nothing of Vitruvius’s demands that you first consider the path of the sun and the plan for the use of your buildings.
hello I believe the DC’s have done fairly well this season and I can’t wait for 2010 season.