Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Who Dat? Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Host Dem Saints?

In the "Be Careful What You Wish For" department, a city's collective lust and angst and inferiority complex has come to a head in the most unlikliest of circumstances. San Antonio will host three NFL games this season, splitting time with Baton Rouge as the New Orleans Saints' home field.

In football-mad Texas, this is the penultimate realization of an obsession that goes back decades. That's why the Alamodome was built nearly 15 years ago--to grab one of the NFL expansion teams that instead went to Carolina and Jacksonville. But now, with the nation watching, and the NFL looking skeptically on, San Antonio will succeed or fail on its own merits.
"For the long haul, the stakes are very high for us," said Henry Cisneros, former mayor and U.S. Housing secretary.

He said the city's short-term focus should be helping recovery efforts, but the next few months also could determine whether San Antonio would be able to sustain an NFL franchise.

"At the very least, this puts us in a class of cities to be considered for expansion or relocation in the future," Cisneros said. "But these ought to be two separate propositions. Let the long term take care of itself."

The Alamodome will host three Saints games, Oct. 2 against the Buffalo Bills (at which point Jacquandor will develop an unreasonable loating for the Alamo City when his beloved Bills go down hard), Oct. 16 against the Atlanta Falcons and Dec. 24 against the Detroit Lions. The NFL supposedly fought against having any games in San Antonio because the Powers That Be expect only meagre crowds in the 20,000 range to turn out. The perception of SA as a sleepy little Mexican tourist town with a couple of military bases persists, decades after the fact. SA is the 8th largest city in the nation--larger than Dallas, in fact--although it ranks somewhat lower when metropolitan area is considered. The economy is booming with a huge corporate influx--led by the new Toyota complex--and SA's role as a trade hub with Mexico thanks to NAFTA.
San Antonio has been home to eight teams in at least nine leagues since the mid-1960s, including the Canadian Football League and United States Football League, and hosted nine NFL exhibition games since 1949. But a regular-season NFL game never has been played in the city.

The Alamodome was built for the NFL. Like St. Petersburg's wooing of Major League Baseball, the mantra was "If you build it, they will come." Unfortunately, when the Alamodome was designed, stadium philosophy hadn't quite evolved to where it is today. The 65,000-seat dome is a wonderful place to see a football game. The sight lines are some of the best anywhere, and there's an intimacy that belies its huge size. Unfortunately, the biggest drawback of an NFL team playing there is the lack of many luxury suites, which have become the bread-and-butter of profit driven teams. There are only 32 suites in the Alamodome, compared to 59 in the much-smaller SBC Center, where the NBA Spurs now play. If the stadium is ever to host an NFL team long-term, a significant remodelling project to expand the number of suites is a must.

But that doesn't mean crowds won't show. I remember when 60,000 tuned out for pre-season--pre-season--fumble-fests between the Dallas Cowboys and the long-departed Houston Oilers. The AlamoBowl has become one of the most successful of the second-tier bowl games, drawing hefty crowds. Whenever Texas A&M has played in the dome--be it the Big XII championship game, AlamoBowls or against SMU in 1994, attendance has always topped 51,000 and sold out at least twice. There are no major college football programs in the city. Cowboys fans are ubiquitous. There are high school games that draw 10,000 to the dome, and attract 5,000-plus to high school stadiums on a weekly basis. If any of the Saints three games in San Antonio draw less than 50,000--and this is without marketing or season-ticket sales, mind you--I'll be shocked. If all three games are sellouts, I wouldn't be surprised. Heck, I remember when the Oilers were regularly blacked out locally because Houston couldn't sell 55,000 tickets into the Astrodome.

There's a fine line being walked here, made all the more perilous by Saints owner Tom Benson's deep ties with San Antonio and NFL owner's longstanding ploy of threatening to move (insert team here) to SA in order to wring stadium concessions out of whatever host city they're currently negotiating with. Buck Harvey serves up the words of caution best:
You've been given some NFL games now, as well as your role.

You are a safe haven. A convenient venue. A Christmas Eve party host.

You don't really have the Saints — just a good seat for a remarkable story.

This is the way it should be. There might come a time when relocation talk is appropriate, but anyone who does it now in San Antonio has no sense of tragedy or respect.

Anyone who does it now also has no thought of how this might feel in reverse. If something awful happened to San Antonio, and the city emptied with South Texans spreading across the country, how would you react to Las Vegas or St. Louis courting the Spurs within days of the catastrophe?

You'd be angry, and you would see these people as vultures.

That's very true, and it strikes at the heart of San Antonio. Even though the Spurs are among the most-profittable NBA franchises of the last several years, the mere fact that SA is a "small market" means that every time a big-money investor starts looking to buy a team to move to whichever city you choose (Las Vegas comes to mind), the Spurs are at the top of the list.

But San Antonio's obsession with the NFL isn't specifically about a team called the Saints. It's about any team. Expansion would be preferrable, but if some other team wants to relocate--remember, San Antonio was used as leverage when the Los Angeles Rams were negotiating with St. Louis--then SA would welcome them with open arms. And, not to come across as vultures, but the Saints are included in that list. But that's little more than idle speculation. The fact of the matter is that San Antonio has three games, and it's time to put up or shut up.
"It could lead to something bigger," Mayor Phil Hardberger said. "But first we have to do our thing, and that's make sure we sell out these games."

....

Benson and Hardberger acknowledged the hardships of storm victims in the Gulf Coast and the circumstances that forced the Saints to move their headquarters here 11 days ago.

That said, Benson, Hardberger and other civic leaders pitched — with something close to pep-rally exuberance — the Saints' three Alamodome appearances as an opportunity to catapult San Antonio into the ranks of viable NFL markets.

"This is about three games," former Mayor Henry Cisneros said. "It ought not be judged as a lead-in to getting an NFL team. But it is an opportunity for us to show we are a bona fide NFL city."

Should the games sell out, Hardberger said, "a lot of opportunities will naturally come our way. We won't have to seek them. Performance counts."

But, Hardberger cautioned, "the opposite is also true."

"If we fall on our face," he said, "a lot of salesmanship is not going to help us."

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