(07-29-2018 07:03 PM)Funkfo Wrote:  Army or Air Force coming to town would be HUGE because San Antonio is nicknamed "Military City, USA" as it has an Army base (Fort Sam Houston), two Air Force bases (Randolph and Lackland), and Camp Bullis (a 28,000 acre Army camp near UTSA used for training). We once even have a third Air Force base (Brooks), but it was shut down with military down-sizing. Needless to say, San Antonio is home to MANY retired and active-duty military personnel, so I don't understand why UTSA hasn't yet scheduled one of those academies. Navy would even be a big draw because even though San Antonio is Air Force/Army mainly, there are a lot of retired Navy in the city also because they have access to the military bases as well for shopping, health care, and other things.

Uh by who? If anyone should play a service academy it should be ODU playing Navy. You wouldn't find a ticket in Hampton Roads for that game. There are at least 180k active duty (mainly Navy) personnel or support staff in Hampton Roads alone.

Chill out. You talk as though I said UTSA is more deserving to play Navy than ODU. The question was which OOC teams would help our attendance, right?

I'm sure ODU playing Navy would be entirely appropriate also because of the military in the area. But unless I'm wrong, ODU's stadium only seats just over 20K to begin with, and is already sold out for every game. As such, the only thing that would technically build their attendance would be expanding the stadium. So even though it would most definitely be a great matchup for ODU, it wouldn't do anything for their attendance which is already maxed out to begin with. Now, I understand they are going to do improvements to their stadium, but the capacity will only increase by about another 1,000.

And I'm aware of Hampton Roads and the military installations in the area, but Hampton Roads is an area comprising about 3,800 square miles and at least 8 cities. By comparison, San Antonio is one city covering only about 470 square miles, so yes, the "Military City" moniker sticks and makes perfect sense because it's one city with 2 Air Force bases, 1 Army base, and 1 Army camp.

And as I already said, it was at one time 3 independent Air Force bases, 1 Army base, and 1 Army camp. The only thing that has changed is that one of the three Air Force bases has been mostly shut down and turned into an annex. But Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA), as it's called, which is the union of Fort Sam Houston, Randolph AFB, and Lackland AFB, and is under the jurisdiction of the Air Force, is the largest Department of Defense installation/enterprise our military has anywhere in the world, even despite most of Kelly AFB getting shut down.

Btw, even though Kelly AFB was closed as an independent installation, the fact that it still operates on a much smaller scale now as Kelly Field Annex, with many of its assets realigned, makes Kelly the oldest, continuously active air base in the US Air Force, as it opened only 13 years after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight.