The real losers of Super Bowl XLV

Super Bowl XLV's announced crowd was 103,219, a little more than 700 seats short of the record for the largest attendance at a Super Bowl.

Jerry Jones, owner and general manger of the Dallas Cowboys, said in the week leading up to the Super Bowl that he had expected 105,000 at Cowboys Stadium, which opened last year and cost about $1.2 billion to build. So why didn't the game set an attendance record?

Twelve hundred and fifty ticketholders entered Cowboys Stadium on Sunday about 90 minutes before the kickoff and found that their seats had been taped-off because of safety concerns.

"We simply ran out of time on a couple of sections," Eric Grubman, NFL executive vice president said in a statement. "The fire marshal did not step in late, neither did the police. They were there with us every step of the way. We were in consultation with them. We were in agreement with them. There were no disputes. Everybody was looking at it the same way. In fact, what they did help us gain was time to try to get it done, and at the end, we just ran out of time."

I don't understand how organizers ran out of time building safe seats for an event watched in the U.S. by 111 million people. Super Bowl advertisers didn't run out of time creating overblown commercials. The Green Bay Packers didn't run out of time preparing to shred the Pittsburgh Steelers' experienced defense, and they only had two weeks. The Cowboys were informed four years ago that they would host Super Bowl XLV.

Super Bowl organizers found similar or better seats for 850 of the 1250 displaced ticket holders, but that's about all they did right.

They gave the other 400 fans the choice of watching the game on monitors in the North Field Club behind the Pittsburgh bench or viewing the game from standing-room platforms in each corner of the stadium. While waiting for the situation to be resolved the fans were taken to an area outside the stadium, where it was a brisk 40 degrees. Some broke out in the chant, "Jerry [Jones] sucks!"

The 400 fans had tickets with a face value of $800, but if you know anything about the price of tickets for major sporting events, you know they probably paid much more. The NFL's announced refund of $2,400 to the displaced fans might cover the price of their hotel and plane tickets, but that's about it. Giving them tickets to another Super Bowl was a nice gesture as well, but even that falls short.

The collective bargaining agreement between NFL owners and players expires on March 4 of this year, so who knows if there even will be a Super Bowl next year. On top of that, the fans who attended Super Bowl XLV came to see a match-up between the Packers and Steelers, and its doubtful that they will face-off in the Super Bowl again next year. There hasn't been a repeat Super Bowl match-up since 1994, when the Dallas Cowboys played the Buffalo Bills for the second Super Bowl in a row.

My parents taught me an important lesson when I was young: Never make promises you can't keep. To me, selling an overpriced ticket for a service you can't deliver isn't an error - it's a crime. I hope the unlucky 400 fans lawyer up and get the money they deserve for such a disgusting breach of contract.