The Florida Bobcats were an Arena Football League team based in Sunrise, Florida. They were previously known as the Sacramento Attack and the MiamiHooters, and played in the AFL for a total of ten seasons, the last seven in West Palm Beach and Sunrise in the Miami metropolitan area. The team was founded in 1992 as the Sacramento Attack, based in Sacramento, California. After their first season they relocated to Miami as the Miami Hooters, so named through a marketing deal with the restaurant chain Hooters. After three seasons the Hooters sponsorship was dropped and the team moved north to Sunrise where it changed its name. They folded after the 2001 season after years of weak attendance and poor performance. During their run they made two playoff appearances, once in Sacramento and once in Miami.
History
Sacramento Attack (1992)
The Sacramento Attack was an Arena Football League team that competed under that name in the 1992 AFL season only. They played at ARCO Arena for that season. The team was originally supposed to play in Los Angeles as the Los Angeles Wings, but the franchise never came into existence in Los Angeles, and moved to Sacramento, California as the Attack.
Miami Hooters (1993–1995)
After their inaugural season, the team relocated to Miami, Florida. They took the name Miami Hooters in an unusual marketing arrangement with the Florida-based restaurant chain Hooters, which was ordinarily more noted for its buxom waitresses than feats of athletic prowess. Naturally, the team adopted the restaurant's owlish logo and trademark colors as its own for three years, until this unusual arrangement terminated after the completion of the 1995 season. Desirous of staying in the general South Florida area, the team relocated to West Palm Beach as the Florida Bobcats. Subsequent linking of team names with products was to occur, notably the AFL's own New Jersey Red Dogs and the Toronto Phantoms, and the Detroit Neon of the Continental Indoor Soccer League. Originally the team was to be named the Miami Toros or Miami Bulls, with a similar logo for each name having been created.
Florida Bobcats (1996–2001)
When the Miami Hooters team discontinued its connection with the Hooters Restaurant chain after the 1995 season was completed, it developed both a new identity and a new color scheme involving teal and black as opposed to the former orange and brown associated with the restaurants. It also moved north to West Palm Beach in an attempt to reduce overhead. This proved to be a mixed blessing at best, however, as the relatively tiny seating capacity of the West Palm Beach Auditorium made profitable operations essentially impossible. In the 1997 and 1998 seasons the team played a total of five official league games at what were charitably called "neutral sites", lesser venues in what were at best secondary markets, where, however, even a less-than-capacity crowd could result in greater revenues from ticket sales than would a home game sellout — were there to be one. This development led to them being referred to by some of the league's pundits as "America's Team", a not-unironic comparison to what was then the National Football League's premier organization, the Dallas Cowboys. This situation was used to an advantage by the league to determine support for the sport in parts of the country where it had previously had little exposure, and should be credited at least in part for the development of the sport's minor league, af2. In 1999, the Bobcats moved into the far more spacious confines of the National Car Rental Center, now the BB&T Center, also home to the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League. They remained there until the team was folded after the completion of the 2001 season. One of the notable facts about this team is that they were quarterbacked through the majority of their existence by Fred McNair, the original "Air McNair" and older brother of 2003 NFL co-MVP Steve McNair. An attempt was made in the 2001 season to sell the team to various prospective owners, including Mark Cuban who later bought the Dallas MavericksNBA, but nothing came of the deal. The team subsequently folded having the distinction of holding the AFL record for the lowest single-game attendance for a regular-season game when they drew 1,154 fans against the Los Angeles Avengers on May 3, 2001.
