Every other city on the UFL's expansion list is a name somebody said out loud. Boise is the one where the league sent a term sheet.
BoiseDev obtained the public records in January. The UFL and Boise State had a verbal agreement to put a team in Boise for the 2026 season, at Albertsons Stadium, with terms worked out and both sides ready to move. It didn't happen. Six months later Mike Repole named Boise anyway.
With Birmingham and Houston closed for 2027 and two markets open, the file is worth reopening.
What the Deal Actually Was
Talks opened in February 2025. League staff visited Boise that April. A term sheet went out on May 1.
The terms: two seasons with an option on a third. Five home games a year at Albertsons Stadium, plus a possible playoff game. Projected attendance around 10,000. The UFL covering direct operating expenses, with the dollar figure redacted from the records. One home weekend was going to be packaged with Boise State's spring game as a "Spring Festival."
"We are thrilled to have a verbal agreement in place," UFL executive vice president Daniel Carey wrote. David Dykeman, the league's director of football operations, had written in April that "this partnership could be incredibly beneficial for both sides."
Both sides were past the hypothetical stage. They were talking about which weekends.
Then the League Changed Hands
Repole bought into the UFL in July 2025, two months after that term sheet went out.
On October 7 the league announced its 2026 markets: Columbus, Louisville and Orlando. All three play in soccer stadiums. Boise wasn't among them, and the email traffic in the records stops around the same time.
Cody Gougler, Boise State's deputy athletic director, said the discussions "were paused following league decisions to focus on other markets." The school noted both sides understood the topic could come back up. Nobody said it was dead.
Then on June 13, 2026, Repole listed nine possible landing spots to ESPN's Kevin Seifert. Boise was one of them.
The UFL's July 30 announcement didn't mention Boise. It didn't mention any of the nine.
Where Boise Actually Is
This matters more for a football league than it does for most businesses.
Boise sits in southwestern Idaho, about 40 miles from the Oregon border, in the Mountain time zone. The nearest metro area over a million people is Salt Lake City, 340 miles and five and a half hours away. Portland is 431 miles. Spokane is 420. Seattle is 491. Denver is 817.
Driving to a UFL market is out of the question. Dallas is 1,576 miles. St. Louis is 1,625. Columbus is 1,992. Orlando is 2,613.
Flying is better than people assume. Boise Airport has 29 nonstop destinations across eight carriers, including Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Las Vegas. But of the current UFL markets, only two have nonstop service: Dallas on American, three times a day, and Salt Lake City on Delta, five times a day.
Everything else is a connection. Which is the case for taking Boise and Utah together rather than either one on its own. Salt Lake is the closest big city to Boise and it's on the same expansion list.
The Market Is Small and Getting Less Small
Boise is the 98th TV market. That's the smallest of the nine candidates by a wide margin, and it's the first thing anyone brings up.
The population trend goes the other way. The metro was 617,900 in 2010 and 845,900 in 2024, a jump of almost 37 percent while the country grew about 10 percent. Ada and Canyon counties together crossed 847,000 in 2025, up 3 percent in a single year and 14 percent since the 2020 census. Median household income in the metro runs about $88,695.
For scale, Green Bay's metro is 328,268. Boise is 2.6 times that.
There's also nothing in the way. No NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or MLS team operates anywhere in Idaho. Boise State football is the biggest thing in the state and it doesn't play in the spring.
The Stadium Is the Whole Problem
Albertsons Stadium seats around 37,000. It opened in 1970, and in 1986 it became the first football field in history with a surface that wasn't green. The blue turf is the market's identity.
It's also the size Repole has spent a year rejecting. He told Sportico last October he was "tired of putting it on TV and watching 10,000 fans in a 60,000-seat arena." The term sheet the league sent Boise State projected roughly 10,000 fans in a 37,000-seat stadium.
That's the tension. The deal was negotiated before Repole arrived, under a front office that was fine putting spring football in college stadiums. The league he bought into then walked to three soccer venues.
The soccer option in Boise doesn't solve it either. The Stadium at Expo Idaho opened in Garden City on April 4, 2026 with 7,247 seats. It was designed to expand to 15,000, but nobody has funded that, and Ada County has it leased to Boise Pro Soccer for 30 years at $150,000 a year.
So the choice is a building twice too big or a building half too small. Boise State went 9-4 last season and averaged 32,891 at home, and the Broncos moved to the Pac-12 this year, so Albertsons isn't going to shrink.
Boise Stallions Is Sitting Right There
Here's the part nobody has connected.
Boise has had a pro football team called the Stallions. The Idaho Stallions started in the Indoor Professional Football League in 1999 at the Idaho Center in Nampa, drawing 4,316 a game. They moved into Boise the following year and were renamed the Boise Stallions for the 2001 season.
It ended badly. The team went 14-30 across three years and never made the playoffs. One owner was later convicted of embezzlement, the league took the franchise over mid-season in 2001 after paychecks bounced, and the whole operation folded that August with a 79-18 loss to the Omaha Beef.
But the name has local history, and more to the point, it's unclaimed. Nobody has ever filed a federal trademark on Boise Stallions or Idaho Stallions. Not the old team, not anyone since.
Meanwhile USFL Enterprises, one of the two entities that files UFL team names, owns STALLIONS as a registered mark on its own, with no city attached to it. BIRMINGHAM STALLIONS is a separate filing where the word "Birmingham" is disclaimed. The nickname can travel. The city can't.
The league has tried moving it before. DALLAS STALLIONS was filed in January 2021, got a Notice of Allowance that November, and was abandoned in December 2024 after five extensions ran out.
One complication worth naming: Boise State is the Broncos. Two horse names in one market, with the UFL team playing in the Broncos' stadium.
What Would Have to Happen
Boise doesn't need a market study. The league did that work in 2025 and liked what it found.
It needs a venue answer that fits the rule Repole used to close Birmingham. That means either somebody funds the expansion at Expo Idaho, or the league decides Albertsons Stadium is an exception it can live with, or Boise waits.
The city's other pro football team is waiting too. The Idaho Horsemen paused for 2026 after six seasons in the National Arena League and plan to return in 2027 in a new location. "We understand that teams taking a year off face challenges, and some never return," owner Chris Reynolds said. "But this is not the end."
Boise has heard promises before. In 2023 the relaunching Arena Football League named the city among 16 markets for its 2024 season. No venue, no ownership group, no team name ever followed, and when the schedule came out Billings had the slot instead.
The difference this time is that the UFL got to a term sheet. That's further than anyone else on the list has gotten, and further than anyone in Boise has gotten in a long while.
We ranked all nine candidate markets against Repole's own rules here.