As professional sports go, San Antonio has the NBA's Spurs and minor league teams in ice hockey, baseball, soccer and football. But if the city's mayor has his way, San Antonio will become the permanent home of an NFL club.
"I really believe the momentum that San Antonio has experienced over the last few years," Mayor Ron Nirenberg told KSAT-TV in a recent interview, via the San Antonio Current. "Most recently with the announcement of major jobs coming to Brooks City Base as well as the downtown UTSA campus and the rise of Texas A&M, the community college districts as well, you will see an NFL team in San Antonio in the next 10 years."
Where would a San Antonio-based NFL team play? Nirenberg wouldn't speculate about a new stadium but he did offer this: "(One) of the great features and one of the great strengths is that we have a publicly owned stadium, a facility that is ready for almost any professional sports event under the sun."
Back in 2005, the Saints played three games in San Antonio's Alamodome after Hurricane Katrina. Attendance in those games: 58,688 vs. the Bills; 65,562 vs. the Falcons, and 63,747 vs. the Lions.
In 2015, when the Raiders were talking about leaving Oakland for Los Angeles in 2016, then-San Antonio mayor Ivy Taylor said her city would happily host the Raiders should the team relocate to L.A. but need a place to play until a new stadium was built.
The Raiders are still in Oakland but announced in March 2017 that they'll moving to Las Vegas where a new stadium is set to open in 2020.
As it stands, San Antonio has been a contingency plan for NFL teams in other cities. That doesn't necessarily translate into this city landing a team of its own. Plus, as the Current notes, one of the biggest hurdles might be convincing the Cowboys and Texans, the two NFL teams in Texas, that there's room for a third team in the state.
