When Hurricane Katrina had finished with New Orleans, the Saints had to find somewhere to play their home games for the 2005-2006 NFL season. As you probably know, Katrina was not very nice to the Louisiana Superdome, and there is even talk of scrapping it completely. So, for one reason or another, the team ended up in San Antonio.

Now, because of a slick bill of goods sold by former Mayor Henry Cisneros to the local sports nuts, San Antonio is the proud owner and operator of a domed football stadium called the Alamodome. At the time that the former mayor was championing the building of this stadium, San Antonio had no professional, semi-professional, or minor league football team. In fact, the only local football teams which garner any attention at all are high school teams. So, you may ask, how did Cisneros sell the city on spending $186 million dollars on a football stadium with no football team to occupy it? Simple: Cisneros sold the city’s sports nuts on the pipe dream that the NFL would place a team here if we had a suitable stadium. Besides, he said, until we get that NFL team, the Spurs can use the Alamodome for their home games.

So, the city and VIA Metropolitan Transit (the local bus company) decided to authorize a 5 year half-cent sales tax increase to pay for the stadium, and construction lasted from 1990 to 1993. When the Alamodome opened, it was debt-free and VIA turned it over to the city. At first, everything seemed okay, as the Spurs moved over to the dome (having been removed from Hemisphere Arena by its razing) and the occasional college football game kept the populace quiet.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and the Spurs started grumbling about the “unsuitability” of the dome as a basketball arena. Also, they had won the NBA Championship, so they used this new-found clout to get a new basketball arena (the SBC Center) and promptly moved out of the Alamodome, leaving it without an anchor tenant.

So, the Saints are in town, they need a place to play their home games, and the Alamodome is just sitting there empty. City officials offer the use of the Alamodome to the Saints for their home games, and the Saints’ players are thrilled. While it isn’t their true home stadium, at least they will have a place to call home and, more importantly, won’t have to share with another team. The common sense in all of this is just amazing, which is probably why the NFL, and Paul Tagliabue, instantly killed the deal. Instead, the Saints would play their home opener at the stadium of their opponent, the New York Giants. Also, the Saints would play four of their remaining home games in Baton Rouge at LSU’s Tiger Stadium. The Saints would be allowed by the NFL to only play three of their remaining home games at the Alamodome.

The Saints’ players were not happy. basically, they are being asked to play all but three of their games this season on the road. So, why did the NFL and Paul Tagliabue insist that they not play all of their home games in San Antonio?

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has an opinion on the issue of San Antonio’s viability as an NFL city. Two words. “Small market.�

In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune published today, Tagliabue rejected the idea that San Antonio’s support for the displaced New Orleans Saints represents a chance for the city to prove its NFL worth. He inferred San Antonio isn’t capable of providing adequate support for an NFL team.

Responding to a question specifically about San Antonio’s qualifications, Tagliabue said the NFL has no plans to move “any teams into small markets.�

“We’re going to be moving up in market size, not down or flat,� Tagliabue said.

The commissioner thinks that San Antonio is “small market” and can not support an NFL team. While I happen to agree with that assessment, the question here isn’t whether or not the New Orleans Saints are going to permanently move to San Antonio. The question is where are the Saints going to play their home games for the 2005-2006 season, and how can the NFL make it as easy as possible on them? In this sense, the commissioner obviously has no clue.

It also must be pointed out that the NFL under Tagliabue has an agenda here. The NFL badly wants to put a team in Los Angeles to tap into all of the money there.

With regard to the city’s first-day sales of 50,000 tickets for the Saints games, Tagliabue was asked: “Might this turn into an opportunity for that city to prove that they should be in the mix?�

“Ever since we approved the move of the Raiders and the Rams, I’ve been saying that our goal is to get a team back to L.A., either through expansion or whatever, and we’re not going to be moving any teams into small markets,� Tagliabue said.

“We’re going to be moving up in market size, not either down or flat. That’s our goal. So that’s been my mindset. We’ve had enough teams move from large markets to small markets. So if … any teams are relocated in the future, the objective is going to be to concentrate them — put it this way — in markets that can really support them.�

So, what should San Antonio take from all of this? Well, if it can only take one lesson away from this situation, it needs to accept the fact that the NFL is never going to put a team in San Antonio. Period. To the NFL, San Antonio isn’t any better than their rank as the 40th television market in the country. The main objective of the NFL and its owners is to make money. In order to make money, the NFL has to put teams into the biggest television markets possible in order to draw the largest audience possible. Unless San Antonio’s rank as a television market becomes much improved, the NFL isn’t even going to pay lip service to the possibility of putting a team here.

What San Antonio needs to do is relax, enjoy the three Saints games which will be played here, wish the Saints well when they leave, and then move on. The city’s sports nuts, who spend an inordinate amount of time calling the local 24-hours sports talk radio station, need to give up the pipe dream of having an NFL team of their own. Do they really think that Jerry Jones and Bob McNair (owners of the Cowboys and the Texans, respectively) are going to allow another team into Texas to cut into their fan and merchandise-revenue bases? If they do, they need to put the crack pipe down.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 1:39 pm by Nick, and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.