Super Bowl Lawsuit

Super Bowl Lawsuit

1. Why were there not enough seats at the Super Bowl for every ticket holders? Who is at fault for the seating problems? How many customers were affected?

Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, wanted to break attendance records at Super Bowl XLV. He and the NFL hired Seating Solutions, a New-York bases company, to put up temporary seating to accommodate 15,000 extra people. During the project, numerous safety problems were found and the contractors were behind schedule. A couple of hours before kickoff, they walked off the job, leaving approximately 1,200 seats unfinished (Schrock, 2011).

Jerry Jones and the NFL were ultimately responsible for the seating problems. They knew of the potential problems a few days before the Super Bowl (Albergotti & Eaton, 2011). They sold tickets for the seats to fans and it was their responsibility to make sure the seats were available. If they could not guarantee this, they should have notified the ticket holders of the dilemma. They could have offered a refund and saved the ticket holders a wasted trip. The ticket holders would still have had the option of a refund or still showed up for a possible seat. The ticket holders should have been given the choice.

About 1,250 fans were affected by this snafu. Some fans were given vacant seats inside Jerry Jones’s showplace stadium. Some 400 fans had no seats at all. They were given a choice of watching the game in standing-room areas or on television at a club inside the stadium (Albergotti, 2011).

2. What is the NFL's offer to the ticket holders who did not have a seat? How have the ticket holders reacted? In what ways is the offer a good deal? In what ways is it lacking? What else could the NFL offer that would be reasonable?

The NFL offered these ticket holders two different options. The first option was a cash payment of $2,400, which was three times the value of the ticket, and a ticket to next year’s Super Bowl. The second option...