Clark Hunt, who is certainly no Superman even if he is the chairman and CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs, is threatening to move his team out of town unless the voters in Jackson County, Missouri, of which Kansas City, Missouri is the county seat (Kansas City, Kansas is the county seat of Wyandotte County in that state) approve a 33-year extension of an 0.375% sales tax increase on April 2 that will keep the team in Kansas City.
(They wouldn't dare propose an income tax increase in a red state like Missouri, since that would never be approved.)
And if a majority vote "no" two days after Easter? Where are the two-time defending Super Bowl champions likely to end up?
Put that question on Family Feud and San Antonio would clearly be the number-one answer.
First off, Clark Hunt's father, Lamar Hunt (for whom the AFC championship trophy is named) was one of the eight founding owners of the AFL — as owner of the Dallas Texans, who, after three years in Dallas, moved the team to Kansas City and became the Chiefs. So Clark Hunt has ties to the Lone Star State (and is probably the one man who could outshout Jerry Jones and force him to accept an NFL franchise in the Alamo City).
Furthermore, an NFL team in San Antonio would be the "woke" thing to do, as San Antonio is 64% Hispanic — and is the nation's seventh largest city, and the second largest in Texas (with approximately 173,000 more residents than Dallas).
The UFL will have a team in the city this spring, the San Antonio Brahmas, whose head coach should be familiar to most — Wade Phillips.
If Hunt decides to go somewhere else with his team besides San Antonio, the leading candidates include Columbus (population 905,748 — larger than Cleveland and Cincinnati combined) and Oklahoma City (whose population of 694,800 is more than that of 16 cities that have NFL teams). And both Columbus and OKC already have successful professional franchises in other sports (the NHL's Blue Jackets and the NBA's Thunder).
Some claim that the NFL has overexpanded already — when the truth is more likely that the NFL has underexpanded, which is why unscrupulous owners like Clark Hunt are able to hold their present cities hostage.
Another fallacious argument against expansion is that there are not enough "elite" quarterbacks to go around — and that's the NFL's fault, too. In 1977, the league as a whole gained more rushing yards (143.9 per team per game) than passing yards (141.9). Last season, NFL teams rushed for 112.7 yards per game and passed for 218.9 yards per game — a ratio of almost 2-1 in favor of passing yardage.
Maybe if the NFL actually started letting defenses play defense again, especially against the pass, teams wouldn't need to have a Patrick Mahomes or a Tua Tagovailoa to be competitive.
And when it comes to accommodating expansion teams, the NFL has up to eight "vacancies" at its "inn," providing that it adds an 18th regular-season games as it is almost certainly going to do anyway: even in a 40-team league, there could be two 20-team conferences, split up into four five-team divisions, effectively echoing the schedule format that the pre-merger NFL observed in 1967 through 1969, when each team played the teams in their own division twice, an entire division from the same conference once each, and an entire division from the other conference once each.
This means that all five teams in the same division would play 18 out of 18 games against common opponents (and to avoid the kind of ridiculous imbalance between strength of schedule at home and strength of schedule on the road that Dallas shamelessly exploited last year, each team can be made to play one out-of-division game against a first-place team from the prior year, one second, one third, one fourth, and one fifth, and the same allocation of non-division games on the road).
The bottom line is that owners should not be allowed to blackmail cities — and while expansion won't stop this entirely, it is liable to sharply curtail it.
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