The Dallas Cowboys vs. … the sun? Yes, it's a problem, and yes, other NFL teams are talking about it

BRICE BUTLER, WHO played receiver at Jerry World for parts of four seasons from 2015-2018, thinks this whole conversation is useless because Jones is never going to put up curtains.

“It sucked, but our coaches would say, you just gotta make plays,” Butler said. “You’re paid to make plays, so…”

The difference this season is that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong in Dallas. As the frustration builds with each blowout loss, the nuisance of the sun at AT&T is up for reexamination.

AT&T is one of only two NFL stadiums built on a southwest-northeast axis, and it is the only NFL field that has a transparent southwest end zone. The only other field on that axis, Huntington Bank Field in Cleveland, has a solid wall blocking the southwest end zone.

Nineteen of 30 NFL stadiums have end zones situated on a north-south axis. It’s most common for NFL game natural lighting to change from shady to sunny as the sun crosses the north-south field on a mostly horizontal path. One side is shaded, and one side is bathed in sun. Home teams will often strategically place their bench on the side that is shaded in the afternoon so their players can stay out of the heat. And in some cases, such as Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, the engineers actually designed the structure to protect the home sideline in the shade for the entire afternoon, while the visitors are forced to sweat it out in the sun. Thirteen of those 19 north-south stadiums are outdoors, so the sun is overhead.

The sun sets directly west on the fall equinox, this year on Sunday, Sept. 22, when the Cowboys hosted the Ravens at 3:25 p.m. But every day after the first day of fall until the first day of winter, the sun moves south to take up a lower position in the sky.

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“This time of year, the sun angle is low enough that the sun actually can stream into your windows,” said Rick Mitchell, chief meteorologist for NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

Mitchell notes the way dogs and cats curl up in that bright, warm patch of sun in the house this time of year. “Once they find that, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is heavenly,'” he says. “It doesn’t happen all year. That’s kind of what this is.”

The Cowboys have played a disproportionate amount of games while the sun is setting at home, owing to the team’s popularity among television viewers and the presence and time of the annual Thanksgiving game. Since 2009 when AT&T Stadium opened, the Cowboys have played 43% of their home games in the 3 p.m. central time window, and 22 home games in the 3:25 p.m. time slot, mainly reserved for nationally televised games, the most of any team not in the AFC or NFC West.

Thursday’s 3:25 CT game against the Giants is next on the schedule, and it’s right at the time of day and period of the year the meteorologist cites as an impactful time for the sun.

“It’s easier for the sun’s rays to beam through that big set of windows that they have in that end zone,” Mitchell says. “And that’s why it’s not as big of a deal earlier in the fall. Plus, the sun sets earlier. When football season first starts, sunset is probably 7:30. But we’re just at that perfect storm of the year for those rays to affect AT&T Stadium.”

ONE EXECUTIVE FROM an NFL club gave ESPN a tip for researching this story: Check late-afternoon games and what direction the teams that lose the coin toss choose.

Many spend time scouting this, because they believe there is a potential edge to gain when you know exactly where the sun will be. And the prevailing theory is, if the sun is in the receiver’s eyes, it can cost you points.

When Dallas played Philadelphia on Nov. 10, the sun wasn’t going to be a factor in the second half with a 5:29 p.m. sunset. So when Dallas won the coin toss and chose to receive — not the more common choice to defer — it meant Philadelphia got to choose the direction — to defend the west goal — which meant they’d be defending the east goal in the second quarter, where the sun would be in the eyes of the Cowboys receivers.

In 26 chances to choose field direction in games at AT&T Stadium since 2020, opponents had a fairly even distribution of direction — 11 times east and 15 times west. For the late afternoon window, opponents chose to defend the west goal eight times and the east goal three times, and in four games after the clocks changed, three times Dallas opponents chose to defend the west goal in the first quarter and put the sun in Cowboys’ receivers eyes in the second quarter.

But trying to determine a team’s sun strategy isn’t as simple as tracking their choices. Because from the beginning of September to the end of October, sunset moves up an hour (whereas from the end of daylight savings through mid-January, it only changes by 25 minutes in Dallas), and that variance means that different portions of the game will be impacted by sun.

When Dallas hosted Baltimore in the late-afternoon window on Sept. 22, the sun affected the teams mainly in the second half of the fourth quarter, but three weeks later, with sunset 30 minutes earlier, the sun started to glare in the third quarter and subsided 10 minutes into the fourth quarter.

Jones is adamant that the Cowboys also know where the sun is when they go out for the coin toss and make their choices. Their recent track record makes it unclear whether that knowledge is much of a factor.

Of the 14 times Dallas has chosen a field direction at AT&T since 2020, no matter the time of the game or the week on the calendar, Mike McCarthy’s Cowboys have chosen to defend the east goal all but once. This implies their choice doesn’t have much to do with the sun’s ever-changing path across the stadium and through the southwestern windows.

And in the late-afternoon time slots that have fallen post-daylight savings time, Dallas chose to defend the east goal seven of eight times, which means that the sun would be in their receivers’ eyes when looking back at the quarterback for much of the second quarter when it’s the brightest. Maybe Dallas prefers the sun is not in its QB’s eyes, but a team spokesperson declined to make any Cowboys staffer available to talk about it, citing competitive reasons.

“The team has a system and process in place that we utilize regarding images of the sun, timing and assorted other details,” the spokesperson said.

Dallas’ offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer is in his third year with the Cowboys and told reporters that the staff talks about the sun “all the time,” but he’d never experienced it impact a play like that until Week 10 of this year when Ferguson and Lamb were blinded.

“It was one play,” he said. “We are mindful of it, we talk about it and there are certain areas of the field where it definitely gets a little more difficult. But we can’t turn the ball over… “

Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore was a quarterback for the Cowboys from 2015-17 and was Dallas’ offensive coordinator from 2019-22, so he was familiar with the sun’s pattern ahead of Philadelphia’s Week 10 win at Dallas.

“The sun plays a decent role, so you just have to call plays according to it knowing certain parts of the field at times can be a little bit challenging,” Moore told reporters after the win. “We had it in the first quarter in the red zone, but in the second quarter we were going the other way. “

When Jason Garrett coached the Cowboys from 2010-19, he says he was prepped on the sun’s movement by then-Cowboys football operations director Bruce Mays, who showed him pictures of the sun each week.

“He would come into my office and say, ‘Hey, at 3:25 when we go, here is where the sun is going to be, and then 3:45 and 4,'” Garrett told Pro Football Talk. “And it wasn’t only what happened last week, but last year, and understanding we are playing on Nov. 11, so this is where the sun is going to be on Nov. 11.”

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Garrett told PFT his strategy to combat the sun for those late-afternoon games was to defer if he won the coin toss so that his opponent could choose to kick or receive and then he’d be able to choose the direction he wanted to go.

“But the trickiest part of this thing is, everyone says, ‘Oh, you want to make sure your receivers aren’t looking into the sun,'” Garrett said. “You understand your receivers are the most important people to not look into the sun. But then your quarterback is looking into the sun.”

“You don’t want the sun in your eyes, as far as your receivers, if it’s the fourth quarter, because you may have to throw the ball,” former Washington head coach Ron Rivera said. “That’s always something that you would think about. So if you get to make that choice, this is the direction we want to kick.”

The sun is always going to be a factor in an outdoor game, but multiple staffers for other clubs said AT&T is in a tier of its own for requiring sun scouting.

“That stadium is tougher than other stadiums,” one opposing coach said.

EACH STADIUM HAS its own quirks that teams must prepare for, such as SoFi Stadium’s translucent roof, which can create some sunlight issues as well, Miami’s sweltering sideline, and those bright lights at Kansas City at night.

And the same can be said about division opponents, who have played there once each year since it opened in 2009. NFC East rivals have a 4.3% drop rate on targets in all non-afternoon games at AT&T, an identical figure to their 4.3% drop rate in games outside of late-afternoon games in Dallas since 2009, and a 3.2% drop rate on targets in late-afternoon games there.

And in games like Eagles-Cowboys, played at a time that carries the danger of a receiver not seeing the ball at all, those numbers are equally unrevealing. The Cowboys have caught 68% of their targets in late-afternoon games at AT&T and 68.3% of targets in all other games there.

The sun’s damage just feels more pronounced now because, as Butler puts it, “the team sucks.”

Per ESPN research, two of the Cowboys’ three worst catch percentages in any late-afternoon home game with Prescott have come this season. Dallas caught 56% of targets from Prescott in two late-afternoon home games this year (Week 3 vs Ravens, Week 6 vs Lions), when before this season, the lowest percentage of targets the team had caught from Prescott in those games was 65% in 2021.

In all of their home games this season, regardless of start time or quarterback, the Cowboys have caught just 61% of their targets at home, which ranks 31st in the NFL (only the Browns are worse at 58%).

Jones will embrace the implications of this data, not that it would matter much if it supported the opposite perspective. The owner has said multiple times that he wanted the indoor stadium to feel like an outdoor one. He invited the sun to be part of the grand show.

Thanksgiving Day 2023: Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey missed an extra point while kicking facing the sun in the southwest windows. pic.twitter.com/Hz8aOaOaXL

— Kalyn Kahler (@kalynkahler) November 27, 2024

The sun didn’t dazzle at full strength during last season’s Thanksgiving Day game, played five days earlier than this season, on Nov. 23. The forecast recorded broken clouds in the afternoon. With 8:46 to go in the second quarter, the orange glow was visible through the upper right portion of the southwest windows. It didn’t cast its usual oppressive glare onto the field, but kicker Brandon Aubrey did miss an extra point with 26 seconds left in the half, kicking into the southwest end zone and facing the glowing windows. It was his third extra point miss of the season.

The last time Dallas played at home on Nov. 28 was in 2019, and the sun wasn’t an issue in the second quarter at all because the conditions were cloudy and foggy with drizzling rain. The first half ended at 4:49 p.m., and the sun set at 5:23 p.m. It was mostly dark outside the southwest windows by the time the third quarter began.

The Thanksgiving game-day forecast this year is a bit of a mystery as to whether the sun will influence this game. NBC 5 in Dallas says: “Chilly and breezy with intervals of clouds and sun.”