Other than the continuing winning streak, we have the perfect Christmas present you’ve been searching for to give to that special Cowboys fan.
Blogger mike has generously donated a pair of tickets for the Cowboys’ Christmas day game against the rival Philadelphia Eagles. Without getting into why someone would buy Christmas day tickets only to have to give them up (mrs. mike?), we wholeheartedly appreciate the donation.
So, we at TheBoys Blog will be auctioning off TWO CHRISTMAS DAY TICKETS to the Eagles at Cowboys game (Section/Row/Seat assignments to be published shortly). The game is a 4 PM Local start time.
I am feverishly working on a way to setup an auction link for items such as these (link will probably be in the left column and go directly to eBay or something) but until then I would like to have anyone interested in the tickets to place bids in this thread. The least expensive seats in Texas Stadium are $53, so keep that in mind when you bid. Once the seat assignments are disclosed, I will post what ticket price is. Hopefully, we will already be higher than that by then.
So check your schedules (as if you don’t know already what you’ll be doing on Chrismtas day) and let the bidding begin!
ADDEDNUM: I do not want to turn this into a free-for-all for requests, but I will do this in this one exception: If anyone has two tickets to this weekend’s Saints game that they are unable to make, please contact me or Rafael via email (click on our names). Thank you.
With the new contract between the television networks and the National Football League, a new concept was introduced — the flex schedule. This allows the league and networks to switch games and times to broadcast specific games based on maximizing both revenue (advertising sales, etc.) and viewership. It is designed to bring you marquee matchups for your television and football enjoyment.
The one of the main benefactors of this new concept has been the Dallas Cowboys.
Take a look at what has transpired over the past week or two — the noon game between the Cowboys and Indianapolis Colts was moved to the second slot of games. This gives all of the west coast fans a chance to see a prime game at 1PM local time instead of 10 o’clock in the morning.
And more recently, not only has the league moved the NFC East matchup of the Cowboys/Giants to a 3:15 CT start, but they also moved the subsequent game — Saints at Cowboys — to the Sunday Night prime time game slot replacing the Bills/Jets game.
The Cowboys already have a Saturday night game at Atlanta and a 4PM CT game on Christmas Day against the Eagles.
The league and networks obviously want the Dallas Cowboys to be a main part of the season’s second-half lineup and, because of continued success on the field, they appear to be getting what they want.
Due to the overwhelming response to The’Boys Blog we are once again forced to make changes.
As you may recall, we moved to a new hosting company in March of this year because the traffic was too high for our other host. Now we must move to a new server with the same company because of the continuing increased traffic (nice problem to have).
Starting Sunday morning at round 2 AM ET our site will be down. The tech guys will be moving us to a server that will give us more horsepower. Right now we are on a server that is shared with over 640 sites. The new server is not only a faster, stronger machine but is only shared by 80 sites. That should increase our speed, resolve our respsonse times and eliminate the dreaded CPU Threshold limits that the current server is providing.
Everything should be completed by 6 AM Sunday morning. If you experience problems accessing the site during those times, that is the reason. Also realize that any postings you make during that timeframe might not make it over.
We at The’Boys Blog would like to that everyone for their patience during these growing pains. If it weren’t for you folks we wouldn’t have this problem — and like I said, it’s a nice problem to have.
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Yes, everybody, by now you have noticed that you have to refresh the page after you post. This is a problem that arose after our hosting company upgraded software (PHP, for you techies). It is causing one of our caching plug-ins to, well, burp.
They are looking into the problem and I am trying to search Knowledgebases to see if it has been reported. We are going to move the site this weekend to a high-CPU server which should help performance.
I have two options - leave it as is and force you guys to refresh (yes, annoying) or disable the plug-in and occasionally receive the dreaded CPU Threshold Exceeded message. I’ll let you know what I find out when I get any news…
Again, sorry for the degradation of your Cowboys blogging experience…
Congratulations to our two winners of the lithographs: y and Swidge! I will be contacting you to get mailing information so that you can enjoy your new prize!
Rafael and I would once again like to thank everyone who parted with their hard-earned money to help us provide you with top-notch, ”real” reporting from training camp. With that and other ventures we have going on to enhance our blogging experience, any help we get is duely appreciated.
Since Rafael is back from training camp we felt it was time to give away the two lithgraphs of the Triplets that were generously donated by our frields at the Hamster. These lithographs, as you can see, would fit nicely on any Cowboy fan’s wall.
We are going to go until Monday to allow for any last minute “stragglers” who want to get into the drawing. All you have to do is donate what you can to offset expenses we incurred on the week-long 2006 Cowboys training camp reporting. Anyone who has donated is already entered.
The link for donations is at the bottom of the left-hand column — do NOT confuse that link with the one for the Fantasy league! If you use the fantasy league link your name will not be entered into the drawing.
Once again, thanks to all of you who have/will contribute. If it weren’t for your support we wouldn’t be able to provide the content that we have.
And the winner is … drum roll, please … Becho!
We only had a few entries so I took everybody’s name that posted on the thread and had an unbiased co-worker (who’s not a sports fan, BTW) select a name.
Becho: Please contact me offline at raul@theboys.com so I can get mailing instructions.
Thanks everybody!
To bide us over, I thought it’d be interesting to read what some of us feel were memorable moments that we witnessed while being at a Cowboys game. It doesn’t necessarily have to be any specific play.
For example - two of my most memorable moments came on Halloween, 1993, when I took my then-9-year-old son to his first NFL game - Cowboys at Eagles. We lived in Pennsylvania at the time. It was a 4PM game - out of character for an East Coast game - because the Giants were playing the Jets at 1 PM. It was a cold, rainy day. This was the game that Emmitt ran for 237 yards - his single game record, his only 200-plus rushing game and a current Cowboys franchise record.
Of course, we were dressed in our Cowboys gear and, also of course, endured chants of “a-hole” from the parking lot to the stadium seats by the Philthy faithful. We were sitting in the last row in the 500 level. There was a walkway just above us that went around the stadium and above that were the 600 and dreaded 700 levels.
After Kelvin Martin scored on a reverse, we turned around to watch the replay on the big screen. At that moment, about 5 guys wearing Eagles garb in the 6th row of the next level yelled down to us, “You guys from Dallas?” I responded, “No,” and they yelled back, “Didn’t think so!” and began high-fiving each other and laughing loudly.
I sit down only to immediately hear my son yell back “You guys from Philly?” They yelled in unison, “YES!”. My son yells back, “Thought So!”, turned to me, winked and gave me the thumbs-up, and sat down.
Those guys never said another word to us the entire game. A Eagles family next to us - Mom, Dad, and 2 daughters - just chuckled.
The second memorable moment?
It drizzled all game. Towards the end of the game, Emmitt rips off a 62-yard touchdown up the middle of the Eagles defense to put the game out of reach. Just as he crosses the goal line, the sky opens up and the rain just pours down.
How appropriate - in a game where Emmitt rained down on the Eagles, so did the weather.
Nobody said a word to us as we walked out to our car.
What memorable moment did you experience in person?