A Third NFL Team in New York City?

For more than four decades, there have been three NHL teams in the Greater New York area: The New York Rangers, the New York Islanders, and the New Jersey Devils.

So why can't there be three NFL teams in the Greater New York area?

And unlike the two the league has now, the third NFL team can actually be in the Big Apple itself: as the Giants were closing in on their first Super Bowl championship in January of 1987, Ed Koch, the city's eccentric (to be nice about it) mayor, refused to give the Giants a parade in the city if they won Super Bowl XXI (which they did) — saying, "If they want a parade, let them parade in front of the oil drums in moon-ARCH-ee" (the name of the town, in Bergen County, is typically pronounced "moon-AH-kee").

More than a few rumors since then have been flying about the possible construction of a football stadium adjacent to the Jacob Javits Center, which opened on April 3, 1986, almost 10 months before the Giants won their first-ever Super Bowl across the Hudson (when the Giants won that Super Bowl, it was the first time that a team that opened the regular season with a loss had ever won the Super Bowl).

This would return pro football to the borough of Manhattan for the first time since 1963, when the Jets played their home games at the Polo Grounds.

But instead of building the stadium near the Javits Center, there is another possible location where the stadium can be built: the site of Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens, which will close in the spring of 2026, when the reconstruction of the new, state-of-the-art Belmont Park will be complete.

The new UBS Arena, now the home of the NHL's Islanders, is adjacent to Belmont — and the Resorts World New York City casino abuts Aqueduct, and would have a new football stadium as its new next-door neighbor if the latter ends up getting built where the racetrack stands now.

(Speaking of racetracks: Because the Chicago Bears' new stadium is not going to be built at the former site of the fabled Arlington Park, that track was torn down for absolutely no reason whatsoever, leaving Hawthorne Racecourse, a third-rate facility, as the "best" racetrack in a state that once had Washington Park — never rebuilt after its grandstand was destroyed by a fire in 1977 — and Sportsman's Park in addition to Arlington).

And since the NFL's three Florida franchises — the Miami Dolphins, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — are inexplicably all in different divisions, the third New York franchise could go in the AFC North, where Baltimore is a mere 192 miles away, and Pittsburgh is 369 miles away.

By contrast, the Big Apple is separated from Miami by 1,276 miles, and from Dallas by 1,547 miles — so it would be difficult to claim that the third New York team would be too far away from their division rivals.

Plus, if anyone wants to say that 8.3 million-strong New York City can't support three NFL teams, it can be pointed out that Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is doing just fine at accommodating two NFL franchises.

Adding a third team in New York City to the list of potential expansion teams — a list that already includes San Antonio, San Diego, Columbus, Oklahoma City, and maybe even Portland — should yield at least a 34-team league, or maybe even a 36-team league, sometime in the foreseeable future — which will help the league recoup the nearly $4.7 billion they lost in an antitrust suit brought by NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers.

And the greater the number of teams, the easier it will be to conduct an 18-game regular-season schedule — and if one of the new teams is a third team in New York City, no longer will we have to hear that the Buffalo Bills are "New York State's only team."