"San Diego means Mexico."
So said Perry Mason in a 1959 episode of the eponymous show, The Case of the Lucky Legs (wonder how they got away with that title in 1959).
San Diego is a mere 27 miles from Tijuana, Mexico — and San Antonio, for its part, is 150 miles from the international twin cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
This makes San Diego and San Antonio the most obvious choices for the NFL's 33rd and 34th franchises.
It's just like Ralph Kramden's iconic line from The Honeymooners: "I'm goin' bowlin', but I'm not goin' bowlin'," in that both of these teams would play their home games on our side of the border.
Unless President Trump does not allow it — and this is why the owners need to pull Bad Bunny from the halftime show at Super Bowl LX and replace him with a "compromise candidate," meaning not a Lee Greenwood or a Jason Aldean (what are Joey Fatone and his erstwhile bandmates doing these days?), the league can count on fans coming across that border to see these teams — and if Jerry Jones or Cal McNair don't like it, Roger Goodell can tell them what the late Bernie Mac told his young nephew in House Party 3: "Son, just be yourself. If people don't like you when you're bein' yourself..." (Bernie's next words are unprintable on a PG-13 site like this — but if you still want to know what those words are, they were uttered by UFC Hall of Famer Rashad Evans in Episode 6 of Season 2 of The Ultimate Fighter, which Evans won and then went on to defeat Season 1 winner Forrest Griffin at UFC 92 on December 27, 2008).
Another major virtue of the choice of San Antonio and San Diego as expansion teams is that both can easily be slotted into existing divisions, with no realignment necessary. The San Diego team would obviously go into the AFC West, while an innovative destination for the San Antonio team would be the NFC East, so as to give the Cowboys a natural geographical rival — something Dallas hasn't had since the 2002 realignment (from 1988 through 2001, the Cardinals played in the NFC East, which at least arguably met this standard).
As for stadium issues, the Alamodome, which was built fairly recently (it opened in 1993) can at least for the moment be the San Antonio team's home, which solves one dilemma (the Saints hosted three games at the Alamodome when Hurricane Katrina damaged the Superdome and the surrounding neighborhood in 2005; average attendance in the three games at the 64,000-seat building was 60,889).
And, unlike the players, the owners are supposed to collaborate rather than compete with one another — so they can pool their truly massive resources to build a new stadium in San Diego, whose population is 1.4 million (San Antonio's is just over 1.5 million). The owners would likely need to step in because San Diego voters have twice rejected ballot initiatives to finance the construction of a new football stadium in the city, once in 2015 and the other the following year.
So far as the schedule is concerned, for the first two seasons, San Antonio and San Diego can get to play each other once, plus all 16 teams in their own conference once (Seattle and Tampa Bay did this in their expansion years of 1976 and 1977). This will give the owners an opportunity to figure out what the schedule format will be in subsequent seasons — and an increase in the regular season to 18 games would probably fit into the arrangement somewhere.
A 34-team league would also open up the possibility of increasing the playoff field from 14 teams to 16. After all, as Irene Cara sang in the 1980 movie Fame, too much is not enough.
For any sports league, it's either grow or die — and it's time for the NFL to do the former, as it has not done that in 23 years.
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