“San Antonio Chargers” has a nice ring to it, no? The city name is pretty close—you’d only have to change “Diego” to “Antonio” on the jerseys. TXU could be a sponsor. And the team may struggle just enough over the next two years to get a shot at Johnny Football.

As Jonathan Horn of UT-San Diego (that stands for Union Tribune, not the Universty of Texas) reported, Rick Perry’s recruiting trip to California included talk about Southern California’s only NFL team, which has been trying to get out of Qualcomm Stadium and into a new facility for the past decade.

Chargers owner Dean Spanos was the statewide finance chair in California for Perry’s presidential campaign, a relationship that had UT-San Diego commenters floating the idea of the team’s city switch back in 2011.

Perry downplayed the possibility of such a move last week, but we’re all blogging about it anyway (H/T to Rick Dunham of the Houston Chronicle). Wrote Horn:

“You’d have to ask the Spanos family. Dean is a good friend and I would be lying if I didn’t tell you, come to Texas and we would love to have their athletic club there,” Perry said. “But there’s a family whose been there forever. If it gets so difficult for them to be able to operate, that’s always an option, but again you’d have to ask them. I have no indication that the Chargers are going to be coming to Texas anytime soon.”

“Athletic club?” Why is Rick Perry talking like William F. Buckley Jr.? 

The governor, of course, is known for rewarding his contributors. But if anything, he’s already done the only favor Spanos needs—providing the Chargers with a theoretical alternative to put pressure on its current city, a role that San Antonio has down pat (Minnesota Vikings, Florida Marlins). 

Beyond that, the conventional wisdom says the Chargers would more likely end up in Los Angeles, where a new stadium (once built, that is) would certainly trump the Alamodome. As Jason Garrison of SB Nation wrote, Qualcomm, which was built in 1967, is the fifth-oldest stadium in the NFL. But the Alamodome, despite being built in 1993, is also something of relic: once Minnesota and San Francisco move into their new facilities, it would be the NFL’s ninth-oldest stadium.