SAN ANTONIO - - UIL Executive Director Dr. Jamey Harrison informed the media on Sunday that the UIL does not yet have a finalized contract for a host of the Texas High School Football State Championship Games after 2025.

This is the final season on the books for AT&T Stadium in Arlington, although it could be in the running to host again.

Since 2011, AT&T Stadium has hosted the event every year except one (2015, NRG Stadium in Houston). In the Class 4A DI and above state championships from those years, Dallas-Fort Worth teams won 31 trophies, compared to 16 for Houston area teams and eight for Austin area teams. The discrepancy has led several coaches to lament the home field advantage DFW teams receive. For reference, Galena Park North Shore, Katy and Richmond George Ranch all won a state title in the one year the games were held in Houston.

Austin Westlake head coach Tony Salazar, whose team lost the Class 6A DI State Championship game to North Crowley in 2024, wishes there was more of an open door to discuss the host site.

“Believe me, I don’t want to sound like a guy who has excuses,” Salazar said. “But it is kind of tough when you’re an Austin team and you play a Dallas team in the state championship game,” Salazar said. “They have three quarters of the stands, and you have your side of the stands filled up. Everybody in the metroplex gets behind the Dallas team with the hopes of beating any non-Dallas team.”

But there are a couple factors the UIL must weigh when selecting a host site. The UIL says the site must be domed due to the December weather, which narrows the choices down to AT&T Stadium in Dallas, NRG Stadium in Houston and the Alamodome in San Antonio.

“We’ve looked at a 10-year analysis of every school that had participated in state football, seeing how far it was from their school campus to each of the three domed stadiums (was),” Harrison said. “San Antonio is the biggest outlier; it is further away (from any of the schools).”

Coaches like Carthage’s Scott Surratt in East Texas and Canyon West Plains’ Adam Cummings in West Texas say that because their teams would face travel no matter what, they want the priority to be placed on the best venue.

“I know people in Houston and San Antonio, those metropolitan areas don’t like it,” Cummings said. “They feel like the DFW area gets an unfair advantage. But guys like us, everywhere is an unfair advantage if you want to get on that. I enjoy being in Arlington and getting to go play in Jerry’s World.”

“The experience (at AT&T Stadium) is second-to-none,” Surratt said. “I understand some people have to travel further, but we’re traveling three hours. The year it was in Houston, it just didn’t work out very good, at all, for everybody. The experience wasn’t near as good, for what reasons I don’t know. AT&T Stadium does it right.”

The UIL says AT&T Stadium also has an advantage over NRG and the Alamodome because it has four full-sized locker rooms.

“If you don’t have four full locker rooms, where the teams who are about to play can come into a regular locker room setting and get ready for the game while the ones who are playing in the game can come back to their own locker room, it’s really difficult to make that work,” Harrison said.

The UIL did not provide a timeline on when the contract for a host site will be finalized.