Whether it was Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift (there's a debate), the saying “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” is apt for the now-famous falling debris ahead of the Dallas Cowboys’ Monday Night Football game at home on Nov. 18.

For those with hazy memories, ahead of kickoff, AT&T Stadium, the Cowboys’ home in Arlington, Texas, had finally opened its retractable roof — the snazzy features befitting the National Football League’s most valuable franchise, according to Sportico — for the first time since 2022.

Not long after the roof opened, ESPN caught a thin piece of metal floating, feather-like, from the ceiling and landed on the field. What followed was speculative bedlam and the media going near berserk. The coverage, captured on video, quickly shaped into a near Roofgate-type affair.

Here’s what happened according to a report by the City of Arlington, Texas: In a statement released on Nov. 19, the city offered a summary of the review between a city building inspector, the deputy fire marshal and the Dallas Cowboys organization. It turned out that high winds blew an unsecured metal cover off a housing holding low-voltage wires unrelated to the roof or its operation.

"The metal was a cover that had not been properly secured on top of a cable tray, which is where low-voltage electrical wires are grouped together," the statement read. "While the roof was open, wind blew the unsecured cover off the cable tray, which was on the catwalk near the top of the stadium. No further inspection is needed."

Besides Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who has endured a handful of controversies involving his $1 billion stadium, there may not have been a more captive observer of what unfolded than Steve Little, president of KPost Roofing, whose company performed the original roof system installation in the late 2000s.  

Little, speaking from his Dallas office after the brouhaha, knew unquestionably that wherever the metal came from, it did not fall off his roof. 

“Well, they haven't opened the roof in two years … [but] it originally looked like it was the side of an HVAC air handling unit or a drip pan of HVAC, and I can only speculate,” he said before the official report had been made public, “I have no idea.” 

Little explained how something as complex as a retractable roof works, which is hardly easy to synthesize, but essentially, the two roof sections merge into rubber gaskets, creating a seal.  “[W]hen they went to open it … it may have nudged a cover loose.” 

As it turned out, this was an even more conservative guess since the official determination was that a wind gust blew the cover off.

“I will tell you first, Blue Star Development, which manages the stadium and all of Jerry and [his wife] Jean’s properties, does a hell of a job,” Little added. “They are very proactive [and] perform preventative maintenance all the time; they're constantly taking care of their facilities.” 

Little (whose pride of construction may be overshadowed by his possibly being a Cowboys fan) did note with some irritation that the ongoing reporting of the incident was inaccurate from the start and based on an assumption that since an item fell onto the field, it must have come from the roof.

“So, your article is incorrect because there's nothing wrong with the roof,” he told me after I shared the initial draft of this dispatch with him. “The roof is not falling apart; it's the ceiling or the deck. Things fall off a roof; they fall down from the ceiling. If something [had fallen] off the roof, it would have fallen off the outside of the stadium.”

Not having a good rebut, I acknowledged my error, and Roofing Contractor may be the only media outlet to report the story accurately.

The metal, seemingly no larger than 4 feet by 2 feet, nearly eclipsed that Dallas has yet to capture a win at home this season. The gods may be in their favor tomorrow — Thanksgiving Day — as they welcome the New York Giants. Big Blue, with a 2-9 record and already having been shut out earlier this season by the Cowboys, gives Dallas fans hope.

Given the Cowboys’ lackluster season and the NY Giants' even more abysmal offense — 32nd in the league this year — the real winner of tomorrow's game is the roof of AT&T Stadium.