The Oakland Raiders have expressed interest in relocating the team to San Antonio; in fact, their owner Mark Davis recently met with city officials to discuss the matter. Jerry Jones was certain someone was messing with him when he caught wind of the meeting.
“I thought it was somebody joking with me when they came out here about (the Raiders) going to San Antonio. So I don’t have any comment, other than how valued I feel, and the Cowboys feel about our fans in San Antonio.”
It’s likely that Jones had known about the meeting before it took place, but has been attempting to downplay the whole situation with his whimsical reaction.
Jones even dropped some statistics in his comments on the matter, stating how many Cowboys fans there actually are in San Antonio. “I am very pleased that we have the fan base that we have down there and the percentage of fans we have (in San Antonio) he said. “I think it is 97, 98, 99 percent Cowboys fans in the area. But it doesn’t surprise me at all. I know that there were those kind of rumors regarding the Saints.”
For those of you who struggled with geography in high school, much like myself, below is a map of Texas. As you can see, San Antonio is about 275 miles southwest of Dallas. The cities aren’t exactly on top of each other. But with the Cowboys hosting some training camps there as well as having an astounding percentage of their fan base in that area, Jones’s “this state ain’t big enough for the three of us,” attitude seems justified.
NFL Spokesman Greg Aiello, like Jones, did not have much to say on the matter. Aiello told the San Antonio Express-News that the NFL has “received no applications from any of our teams to relocate at this point, so there is nothing for us to respond to.”
As for Mark Davis, he claims the meeting with the former Mayor and various other officials was simply spur of the moment. “Former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros is a friend, and Henry suggested I take the opportunity to meet with some of the city officials while we were in town,” said Davis. “I have nothing further to discuss on the topic.”
Another interesting detail that the San Antonio Express-News put out was that Davis took an ariel tour of San Antonio in a helicopter. Maybe he was just feeling “touristy.”
