Can you clarify, I thought the naming rights money went to McNair? It does in the other Houston sports teams..right?
Goes to the stadium owner which is Harris County for all 3. Just noticed when it went from Reliant to NRG the payments went to $12 mil/yr.
Aside, Minute Maid pays $7.4 mil/yr.
It was also my impression that McNair got a big chunk of the naming rights.
This article seems to affirm this (need to read the entire article to include the name change from RELIANT to NRG.:
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Reliant Stadium May Be Changing Names, But Texans Still Lining Pockets With Naming Rights Fees
Jeff Balke | March 13, 2014 | 8:00am
For over a decade, Bob McNair has been given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his ownership of the Houston Texans. "He brought football back to Houston and he spent a billion dollars to do it," is the familiar refrain. Part of that sentence is true. After the Oilers left, he most certainly brought a team back to Houston, albeit at large part because of LA's unbelievable ineptitude (they were given every opportunity to get the next NFL franchise and fell flat on their faces each time). But, the idea that McNair shelled out $1 billion for the Texans is inaccurate, and he's made more than his share back...and then some.
First, a history lesson. In 1994 there was a real possibility the city could end up with zero pro teams and no new stadia. The Oilers were on their way out the door. The Astros were threatening a move to northern Virginia and the Rockets would soon be playing footsie with Louisville. Yet, within 10 years, the Astros moved into Minute Maid Park, the Rockets into Toyota Center and the Texans were born at Reliant Stadium.
That began with a very narrow victory in 1996 at the polls and the passing of a somewhat controversial bill in the Texas Legislature, which created the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority and allowed that entity to collect a few pennies of car rental and hotel occupancy taxes for the purpose of building sports facilities. First up was Minute Maid Park (then Enron Field, shudder) followed by an extremely contentious pair of elections needed to pass the funding for Toyota Center.
In fact, the Rockets' home is by far the most used facility, yet it required two referendums to pass and a bunch of money from team owner Leslie Alexander. At the time the second referendum was underway, it had become a foregone conclusion that the county would pay to build a new football stadium for what would become the Texans.
What was not really discussed at that time -- and something that could have easily torpedoed the second basketball arena referendum and sent the Rockets packing to Louisville -- was that Reliant Stadium would cost about as much as both other facilities combined and very little would come from the team, something opponents to Minute Maid and Toyota Center had argued over vehemently. In fact, former Oilers owner Bud Adams was laughed out of town and all the way to Nashville when he suggested the city assist him in building a retractible roof stadium in downtown for which he would foot nearly half the bill.
Not only did the Texans get an essentially free stadium, which represents nearly half of that $1 billion McNair supposedly paid to get the team, but they get 75 percent of the more than $300 million in naming rights being paid by Reliant. It's the third largest naming rights deal in all of sports. Toyota Center clocks in at under a third of that amount and Minute Maid is a little over half.
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