By Chris Cates/sports editor
The Cotton Bowl has a new home—-—a home which, itself, doesn’t yet exist.
The traditional game will move to the new Dallas Cowboys stadium for the 2009 season’s Cotton Bowl game Jan. 1, 2010, and this college football fan couldn’t be happier.
The new stadium will first be put to use by the Cowboys at the beginning of the 2009 season.
It covers 2.3 million square feet and can seat up to 100 thousand fans.
The dome itself is more than 700 thousand square feet and is considered the largest building of its kind in the world.
Cotton Bowl games have always been played at the stadium of the same name (the Cotton Bowl) in Dallas.
The Cotton Bowl stadium opened in 1932 and has been home to the game since 1937.
While some are probably sad to see the game leave after 70-plus years, I think it’s the right move at the right time.
Why not give the game some new life by moving it to, quite possibly, the single greatest stadium built to date?
With better seating (to the tune of 30 thousand-plus), better location, state-of-the-art scoreboards, etc., how can you go wrong?
A Texas oil executive, J. Curtis Stanford, essentially started the Cotton Bowl game when he paid for it out of his own pocket 70 years ago. In the game’s first year, TCU beat Marquette 16-6.
And despite the fact that the game lost money, it returned the next year and has been a mainstay ever since.
In the most recent Cotton Bowl game, Auburn beat Nebraska 17-14.
The Cotton Bowl has been struggling in recent years, despite a $3 million payout, almost exclusively because of the location.
The old stadium wasn’t getting the attention the game deserved.
Things had gotten to the point where Texas and Oklahoma had been trying to move the traditional Red River Rivalry game to another location.
With the move to the new Cowboys stadium, everything will improve—partly because the stadium will be amazing, but mostly because it’s a fresh start for a game that was losing its luster.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe there won’t be an annually packed stadium to see some of the Big 12 and SEC’s best in early January, and that is what has been missing.
A key reason for the move is the Cotton Bowl Board’s desire to make the game a BCS bowl game and eventually the location of the national championship game.
There’s no arguing that the new stage will put the game in a better position to accomplish this. Despite the fact that Texas is synonymous with football, none of the BCS bowl games is played in the state.
Although the game will be played at a new location, it will keep the same name.
The new $1 billion stadium will have a retractable roof, a feature the ancient Cotton Bowl stadium couldn’t boast.
It was believed that the game was kept from becoming a BCS bowl back in 1994 because the old stadium could be prone to, and without protection from, bad January weather in Texas.
But with a brand new stadium and a brand new roof comes brand new hope for the future of the Cotton Bowl.
They say everything’s bigger in Texas.
The Cotton Bowl Board is just hoping it’s enough bigger in Arlington to get attention on a national scale.
And if what we’re hearing about the new Cowboys stadium is accurate, I don’t think the board will have to wait too long.
