AP

Get your popcorn ready, folks.

At Super Bowl XLV, I spent $15 for a moderately-sized bucket of the stuff, which may have been popped on a Sunday but not that Sunday. At least I had a seat. Hundreds of others couldn’t say the same.

Their lawsuit against the NFL for appropriate compensation for showing up at the Super Bowl with tickets that couldn’t be honored gets very interesting on Tuesday. That’s the day Cowboys owner Jerry Jones will testify, at 11:00 a.m. local time.

NFL executive V.P. Eric Grubman also will testify, supplementing the August 2013 deposition testimony of Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Closing arguments currently are set for Wednesday morning. After that, the jury will deliberate.

It’s a given that the NFL will lose the case; the league already has admitted responsibility for the failure to have all seats ready to go. The question will be the size of the verdict, and how it compares to the league’s last, best settlement offer.

There’s also a chance the league applied extra pressure to the plaintiffs by making what the practicing lawyers call an “offer of judgment,” a device that makes the plaintiffs potentially responsible for certain litigation expenses incurred after the offer is made if the plaintiffs don’t emerge from trial with more than the amount of the offer. It often removes the “nothing to lose” mentality that often causes plaintiffs to roll the dice in search of a big verdict.

Big or small or in between, a verdict is coming — barring a settlement.