LANDOVER, Maryland — It was Nate Davis’ third time attending an NFL game at FedEx Field, but he wasn’t rooting for the home team.
Davis and his two friends are Dallas Cowboys fans from the Philadelphia area. They made the trip to Landover, Maryland to watch the Cowboys take on Washington on Oct. 29. Even though Philadelphia also has an NFC East rival that hosts the Cowboys every year, Davis seems to prefer to go to Maryland.
“It’s like we’re in Dallas, there’s so many [Cowboys] fans here,” Davis said.
A generation ago, Washington’s was one of the NFL’s best teams. Even for diehard fans of the team, tickets for home games at FedEx Field and RFK Stadium were hard to find. Now, on fall Sundays, it’s not unusual to see thousands of fans wearing colors other than burgundy and gold at FedEx field, cheering on the visiting team.
This fall, Capital News Service set out to quantify the presence of visiting fans at FedEx field. At two home games — a loss to Dallas on Oct. 29 and a loss to Minnesota on Nov. 12 — CNS took detailed photographs of each section and analyzed them with a computer program that made it easier to count visiting team fans in the images.
Intense rain at the Cowboys game made it difficult to get an accurate count of the visiting fan presence for the entire stadium. But CNS determined that there were at least 3,345 Vikings fans in the crowd on Nov. 12 — about 5 percent of the announced attendance of 74,476 on that clear day.
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It’s possible there were more Vikings fans in the crowd than CNS counted. Our count was conservative, only marking someone as a fan if they were clearly wearing Vikings apparel.
Against the Cowboys, Washington’s biggest rival, the presence of visiting team fans was also striking. In Section 119, in the lower bowl on the 20-yard line, CNS counted 135 Cowboys fans to 111 Washington fans, while another 249 could not be determined based on their clothing. In sections 106 and 107, CNS found 84 Cowboys fans, 111 Washington fans and 311 who could not be determined based on their clothing.
“We own this place,” Cowboys fan Chip Garland bragged. “Put that in the paper.”
Washington posted its second-highest home attendance mark of the season that day, with 78,428 fans, just a few hundred fewer than their season opener against the Philadelphia Eagles (78,685). The Cowboys went on to win, 33-19, and the majority of fans stayed through a second half affected by steady rain.
Father and son Brad and Braedon MacArthur traveled from their hometown just north of Toronto to FedEx Field to attend their first Cowboys game.
Their Lyft driver told them on the way to the stadium that Maryland is “50/50” in terms of Washington and Dallas fans, they said. An hour and a half before the game, they had already met Cowboy fans from Austin, Texas and Virginia.
Washington fan Mike Greene, a native Marylander, was also at the Cowboys game. He said he has seen the effect of visiting fans even at non-division rivalry games. He once sold some of his season tickets to an acquaintance whose fan affiliation he wasn’t aware of.
“I’m a sales guy and one of my customers knew that we had season tickets. So she wanted my tickets and I’m thinking it’s a good way to build a bridge,” Greene said. “Come to find out she’s a Pittsburgh fan and she wasn’t even there – she gave all [the tickets] to her Pittsburgh fan friends. We got here and it was a significant number of Pittsburgh people here, and that did affect the home-field advantage. They were pretty loud.”
Greene agrees that Dallas has fans all around the country, “but they’re not the only ones.” He said he has gone to Dallas for games three times and earlier this year attended Washington’s Monday night game at Kansas City.
“You’d be amazed” how many Washington fans also travel, he said. “We met people there from Idaho that were (Washington) fans.”
Rolando Montana is a Cowboys fan originally from Texas, now living in Arlington, Virginia. He’s been attending Dallas-Washington games since the days of RFK Stadium. But Montana didn’t believe it hurt Washington’s home-field advantage and said he’s experienced the inverse–he sat next to Washington fans the last time he went to a game in Dallas.
“You’ve got them in both places,” he said.
One other thing: His son was tossing a football around with a young fan wearing Washington red.
“Goes to show how easy people can get along,” Montana said.
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