San Antonio Texans

The San Antonio Texans were a Canadian Football League (CFL) team that played in the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1995 CFL season. They had relocated from Sacramento, California, where the team had been called the Sacramento Gold Miners. After relocating, the team still had the same ownership in Fred Anderson and the same staff, including General Manager Dan Bass and Head Coach Kay Stephenson. The Gold Miners/Texans franchise played three seasons (five if the Texans' WLAF incarnation, the Sacramento Surge, is also counted) before folding in 1995.

Franchise history
In the 1993 season there were supposed to be two U.S. teams in the CFL, the Sacramento Gold Miners and a different San Antonio Texans; however, the original Texans franchise folded without ever playing when its owner, Larry Benson, ran out of money and was forced to withdraw.

The Gold Miners played the 1993 and 1994 seasons in Sacramento. However, their home stadium, Hornet Stadium, was completely inadequate as a professional football venue. Anderson tried to build a new stadium, but when these plans fizzled, he opted to move the team to San Antonio as the Texans.

On the field
The Texans were unique in that they were the only one of the CFL USA teams whose stadium, the Alamodome, had a playing surface large enough to accommodate a regulation Canadian football field. In addition to having a playing surface wide enough for the full 65-yard width of a CFL field, its end zone seating could be retracted to accommodate the full 150-yard length of a CFL field.

In their third season in the CFL and their first as the Texans, the team had the second-highest scoring offence in the league, which was led by veteran quarterback David Archer. The franchise finished the 1995 CFL season with a 12–6 record, finishing in second place of the South Division, which sent them to their first playoff berth.

In the playoffs, the San Antonio Texans soundly defeated the Birmingham Barracudas, 52–9, in the Southern Semi-Final at the Alamodome. However, their playoff run and the franchise's last season would end after falling to the eventual CFL champion Baltimore Stallions in the Southern Final by a score of 21–11.

San Antonio's two backup quarterbacks had connections to the National Football League's (NFL) Buffalo Bills. The first was 45-year-old former Bills quarterback Joe Ferguson, who had retired five years earlier. The second was Jimmy Kemp, son of Bills quarterback (and politician) Jack Kemp. Head coach Kay Stephenson was Jack Kemp's backup on the Bills squad in 1968 and served as head coach of the Bills in 1985; both stints were very unsuccessful.

Off the field
The San Antonio Texans had respectable attendance, with the average being 15,855. In one of their games at the Alamodome, attendance reached 22,043, in a 38–32 loss to the Calgary Stampeders.

However, at the end of the 1995 season, the CFL decided to fold the Birmingham Barracudas, the Memphis Mad Dogs, and the Shreveport Pirates. A few months later, Art Modell announced he was moving the NFL's Cleveland Browns to Baltimore to play as the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL. Stallions owner Jim Speros, knowing his franchise could not hope to directly compete with the NFL, moved the team to Montreal as the third incarnation of the Alouettes.

The end
With all this going on, it looked like Fred Anderson's franchise would be the only U.S.-based team in the CFL, again. However, Anderson did not want to follow that path and decided to fold the Texans after the 1995 season, which ended the CFL's attempt to expand to the United States.

Malcolm Frank was the last remaining player from the Texans to play in the Canadian Football League when he was a member of the Edmonton Eskimos in 2006. He retired after that season.

Players and builders of note

 * Mike Kiselak
 * Kay Stephenson
 * David Archer
 * Joe Ferguson
 * Jimmy Kemp
 * Malcolm Frank
 * Judd Garrett