Saturday night the Dallas Cowboys and Seattle Seahawks will square off in the first round of the playoffs. The winner moves on, the loser goes home, that’s the way this thing works.
As the Cowboys are winners of their division they’ll be the ones hosting this game. It’s the first playoff game at AT&T Stadium in two years (the fourth overall in its existence) and the next opportunity for the Cowboys to experience playoff success in the Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott era.
Obviously the Seahawks are a tall order. It was five years ago that they won the Super Bowl and they’re back in the tournament after missing out last season. Everybody remembers the last postseason meeting between the two squads but those teams were very different. There was no Dak, no Zeke, no Pete Carroll, and no AT&T Stadium as it was in Seattle.
Speaking of Pete Carroll, he has some thoughts on the stadium that the Cowboy call home. AT&T Stadium isn’t exactly known for being a ferocious home field advantage in the NFL like Seattle. Carroll offered a potential explanation (a weird one) on why it isn’t too noisy in there and went on to call it an “unusual place” due to the environment.
“I think their scoreboard may get in the way of the sound — bounces back at you or something, I don’t know,” Carroll told reporters. “It’s a real glitzy place, you know? When you come out of a football locker room ready to play football and you go into a night club — it’s kind of like we’re in the club, then wait a minute, you’ve got to play ball. Then you come back through the club and they’re all . . . anyways, it’s unusual. Then they’re right there with you too. Those people that are sitting behind us, I don’t know how they see the game. It doesn’t look like they care, they’re having such a good time. It’s an unusual place.”
Not everybody has experienced a game at AT&T Stadium but in my own personal opinion there’s nothing nightclub-y about it. It’s a world class facility in every way and there are a lot of smoke and mirrors (not literally) as far as the production value associated with it, but that’s how premier sports and entertainment venues work. There’s no nightclub element.
When Carroll mentions the people sitting behind them he’s talking about the suites that the Cowboys sell that are located behind and beneath (also on the side of) the benches. Tons of stadiums have suites like this, I was at the Cowboys game in Atlanta earlier this season and toured the stadium to find out that they have an entire bar back there. Dallas is hardly alone in this capacity.
As noted the Cowboys don’t boast one of the more formidable home crowds in the NFL, although they did only lose one game at home this season. The team has implored fans to wear white to Saturday’s game against Seattle, but it’s more than that that’s required.
Fans in the stadium need to be loud in order to make things difficult on the opposing offense. Things are so not strong with the home crowd that Dak Prescott had to publicly ask fans this week not to yell when the Cowboys are on offense.
Pete Carroll’s Seahawks won’t have their famous 12th Man at their back on Saturday night and it doesn’t seem like they’re expecting anything difficult to deal with as far as the crowd. It would be something special if Cowboys fans went ahead and proved him wrong in the “unusual place” that is AT&T Stadium.