Well that was a frustrating ending to a frustrating season. All our hopes and dreams exploded in week two and that’s about when ticket sales for the #MetLifeTakeover pretty much dried up. We were facing some tough odds anyway with week 18 being a January flex game. We couldn’t organize busses from our bar and some of the out of town groups couldn’t either, the Jets season collapsed and so secondary ticket sales were in the dumps and our tickets were selling for three times as much as the lowest secondary sales, oh, and the freezing cold weather didn’t help.

We were worried the #MetLifeTakeover would be a disaster… well it turns out it was a blast anyway. We doubled our tailgate sales in the week leading up to the game, suddenly the game counted for something and that little bit of hope got people got on board again. Dolphins fans had been scooping up tickets on the secondary all season and you could tell it was mostly Dolphins fans in the stadium… they just weren’t sitting up in the cheap seats with us… but it felt like they all came to our tailgate.

Despite the cold weather everyone had an absolute blast (before the game). I can’t tell you how many people told me how much the tailgate meant to them. First time folks said they would absolutely be coming back and even after the game we heard from people who had a blast despite the cold and the score. Even on a personal level, for the first time ever, I wasn’t looking forward to the Takeover, but it only renewed my excitement about future Takeovers. I want us to kill it next year. I say this all the time, but it really is true, football is better with friends. No one at home on their phones yelling at me for my optimism on Twitter can understand how much more fun it is, win or lose, when you are surrounded by people who love this team enough to brave 20 degree weather to watch a truly awful football game.

So yeah after paying everyone we almost certainly lost money on the Takeover for the first time ever, but we still managed to raise nearly $2000 through our raffles and merch sales and we will of course be donating all that to charity. Our biggest raffle prizes were provided by the Miami Dolphins Foundation and we have been working with them since the very start of this club. Specifically we donated $1000 to the Nat Moore’s Endowment through the MD Foundation because, outside of Jason Jenkins, no member of the Dolphins organization has been more supportive of Dolfans NYC. We have also decided to put another $1000 to the LA fire relief efforts with $500 going to Habitat For Humanity Wildfire Fund and another $500 going to direct donations to people on the ground in LA. If you know any Dolphins fans impacted by the fire please reach out, we would love to help them directly as well.

Anyway, I am so glad that we could have some fun and do some good for the world, even in a down year. We will have a video recap coming sooner or later. (The teaser for the video has already been posted on our Instagram.) But in the meantime check out a handful of photos that I took below.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out and here’s hoping next year the game is in October! Phins up!

Tags: dolfans nyc, DolfansNYC, dolphins, metlife stadium, metlife takeover, metlifetakeover, miami, miami dolphins, new york jets, nyc, tailgating

This entry was posted on Friday, January 17th, 2025 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Photos, Recaps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.