It was bad enough for the Dallas Cowboys, the so-called America’s Team, to lose to my beloved New England Patriots 48 to 27 last week at Texas Stadium. When the team loses on the field, it is usually felt throughout the organization. Fast-forward a few days, and this time the front office had the domain name cowboys.com in their grip, and then lost it.

Where many sports teams have the one-word name of their team as their domain name, many do not, as I wrote about previously. One team is the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, whose domain name is dallascowboys.com. The name cowboys.com had been a country and western themed Web site, and was put up for auction this past week by Moniker.

The sports franchise was well aware of the auction, and bid on the domain name. Their bid was for US$275,000.00, which was the winning bid. But the team believed their bid was for only US$275.00, minus a few trailing zeroes, and after realizing this requested their bid be voided. It was, and cowboys.com later sold to a group of investors led by Eric Rice of BulkRegister for US$370,000.00. That is thousands, not hundreds, and nearly US$100,000.00 more than the team’s previous winning bid.

Years ago I recall reading an article about Cowboys owner Jerry Jones where he spent millions on an airplane yet balked on the price of a pair of shoes in the hundreds. It is not known for sure if Jones was involved in the decision making, though in an article in the Dallas Morning News Brett Daniels, the team's director for client services and corporate communications, confirmed the Cowboys had the original winning bid. The thinking may have been that since they already had an established Web site at dallascowboys.com, why would they want cowboys.com, where there was a distinct difference between the two Web sites? As the Morning News' coverage is basic, you can read more about the sale from Sahar on the Conceptualist.

Where letting cowboys.com slip through their fingers won’t cause the Cowboys to not win the Super Bowl, this is like fumbling a football to lose the game. With the rising costs and demand for domain names, the infrequency of a domain name like this coming onto the market and a new billion-dollar stadium to replace Texas Stadium in 2 years, this amount of money is small in comparison to these and other costs in pro sports today.

Or maybe the Cowboys did not realize a domain name could cost this much? If this was the case, Jones should have consulted with Steve Forbes, the Forbes magazine publisher who spoke at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East conference a couple of weeks back, as Jones is ranked number 317 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the world.

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