It's May 15, 1993, San Antonio, Texas. The Alamodome has just opened to the public as the new home for the San Antonio Spurs NBA team. The 65,000 seat stadium is a beacon of modern features and ingenuity, designed to lure an NFL team to the growing city of San Antonio. It’s now been over 30 years after the stadium broke ground, the NFL team never came, and even the spurts moved out after only 9 years. What went wrong at the Alamodome? How did a massive modern stadium not attract an existing NFL franchise, or an expansion team at a time when the NFL was handing them out like candy? Let's find out.
The Alamodome was designed to be modern by early 1990s standards. The stadium itself is roughly in the shape of a rectangle. It has 5 levels and seats a standard crowd of 65,000 but this can be expanded to host high profile events like the Super Bowl by adding an additional 7,000 seats. The stadium was also planned to open with 66 luxury seats, but only opened with 38 of them situated near the Spurs basketball court. The other boxes were set to be built when the future NFL franchise moved in, but this never happened. Eventually in 2006 14 more suits were added to the facility, but the space has never been built out to its fully intended suite number.
While the NFL didn’t move a franchise to the stadium, the League did test the waters. Throughout the 1990s from the opening of the stadium in 1993 and up until 2001 the NFL hosted 6 preseason games at the facility. It wasn’t until 2005 that the NFL truly gave the then 12 year old Alamodome a fighting chance.
With hurricane Katrina having battered the Superdome, the New Orleans Saints needed somewhere to finish their 2005 season. The Alamodome stepped in to serve as an emergency stadium while the Superdome was either repaired or replaced. The Saints played their week 4, week 6, and week 16 games at the Alamodome. The other home games were played at LSU’s Tiger Stadium and the New York Giants Stadium. The home games at the Alamodome were a massive success with despite the short notice, the Saints averaged just over 62,000 fans, nearly selling out the venue on average. The NFL liked the results they were seeing and some officials indicated that San Antonio would be on the shortlist for any future expansions. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones even publicly stated he would support a San Antonio NFL team, although some people speculated his statement wasn’t genuine. In the end the Superdome was repaired in time for the following season, and the San Antonio Saints experiment was a short-lived success.
On April 15, 2005 (prior to the Saints temporarily moving in) the San Antonio City Council voted to spend $6.5 million dollars in renovations and updates to the facility, with an additional $8.3 million approved in early 2007 in an effort to lure either an MLS or NFL team to the facility. Neither of these update plans would work.
By today’s standards, the Alamodome is a relic of the past. NFL teams now want large glass stadiums with limitless amounts of luxury boxes for high roller fans. The Alamodome on the other hand is somewhat claustrophobic, with little to no room to add the amount of luxury boxes that would be needed by an NFL franchise. Estimates have been made that $150 million dollars of renovations would need to be made in order to get an NFL franchise to even take the facility seriously.
Although arena football teams, the AAF, and many others have tried to make the venue work, no one has been able to crack the secret formula to help make the Alamodome successful. Currently the only full time tenants are the UTSA Roadrunners of the NCAA, and the various rotations of concerts, and other conventions.
In the end it looks like no NFL team will ever land at the Alamodome, aside from perhaps another preseason game if the NFL wants to do more market studies of the area. The city of San Antonio did everything right. They built a modern for the time venue, invested and promoted to try to lure a team, but were just truly unlucky in trying to lure a franchise to the city. In the end the venue is successful as a concert space, conventions space, and college football stadium, but will never get its shot as a permanent host of an NFL franchise.