Raiders letting it all roll
The NFL’s Oakland Raiders should be playing in Las Vegas by 2020 after a controversial move to the desert was approved by 31 of the 32 teams.
Viva, Las Vegas! Condolences, Oakland.
The Oakland Raiders are relocating to Sin City … eventually.
NFL owners on Monday morning approved the Raiders’ request to move to the gambling and schmaltz-showbiz capital of the world, effective by 2020.
The Raiders will play at least the next two seasons at their current home, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, before moving into a new $1.9-billion stadium in Vegas at the start of the next decade.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told a mid-day news conference that the iconic franchise will continue to be named the Oakland Raiders until actually relocating to Vegas, either in 2019 or 2020. The club has a pair of optional one-year leases at their current home and intend to fulfil them.
Raiders owner Mark Davis told the news conference he isn’t sure where his team will play in 2019.
Owners voted 31-1 Monday in favour of the relocation, NFL executive vice-president Eric Grubman confirmed to reporters. The Miami Dolphins were the lone holdouts, according to numerous reports. At least 24 of 32 owners (75 per cent) must approve any significant league change, including franchise relocations. Grubman refused to disclose the relocation fee that Davis now owes the league, but reports had ball-parked it in the $300-million range, about half the $650-million fee paid by both the Chargers and Rams to move to Los Angeles.
The Raiders were a founding American Football League franchise in 1960, and spent the entire decade as a top AFL team before the league merged with the NFL in 1970. From then through 1981, the Raiders fielded one of the league’s most powerful teams behind such legendary figures as head coach John Madden and quarterback Kenny (The Snake) Stabler. The Raiders won two Super Bowls in that era.
But in 1982, then-owner Al Davis moved the club without NFL approval down the California coast to Los Angeles, and for the next 13 seasons played in the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, winning another Super Bowl in 1983 behind star running back Marcus Allen.
In 1995, Davis returned the Raiders to Oakland and its old Coliseum home. The team hasn’t won a Super Bowl since. And in fact, had badly digressed on the field. Last season they made the playoffs for the first time in 13 years.
Al Davis died in 2011. That’s when his son Mark — a team water boy decades ago — became principal owner.
The NFL thus follows the NHL into Las Vegas. The NHL’s expansion Golden Knights begin their inaugural season in October.
The Raiders hanging around to play at least two seasons of lameduck seasons in Oakland apparently alarms neither Davis nor the NFL. But it should.
Buffalo Bills fans had planned to abandon the team in droves had it been sold three years ago to Jon Bon Jovi’s Toronto group. Fans of the original Cleveland Browns franchise in 1995 vandalized old Cleveland Stadium, and that was just for the one lame-duck home game played there after relocation news to Baltimore had broken.
You’d have to be naive to believe the Raiders’ passionate, intimidating fans will accept the club’s leaving with just “aw, shucks” shrugs.
“I wouldn’t use the term ‘lameduck.’ We’re still the Oakland Raiders, we love the Raiders and we represent the Raider Nation,” Davis said.
A group of diehard Raiders fans early Monday morning protested quietly in the lobby of the posh hotel where NFL executives, owners, GMs and head coaches are meeting through Wednesday morning. After a short time, the protesters were politely escorted off the premises.
The Raiders are the third NFL franchise in 15 months to relocate, after the Rams moved last year from St. Louis to Los Angeles, and the Chargers in January decided to exercise the right conferred by owners last year to leave San Diego and join the Rams in L.A. this year.
Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, made two unsuccessful pitches to NFL owners in recent days. One, on Friday, proposed that a new $1.3-billion stadium be built to replace decaying Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Goodell immediately rejected that proposal as too little, too late.
On Monday morning, Schaaf asked owners to delay voting on the Raiders’ Las Vegas plan, to give Oakland a chance to negotiate with a small group of owners on a new East Bay stadium, according to The Associated Press.
Mark Murphy, president and CEO of the Green Bay Packers, told Postmedia on Sunday that the NFL’s influential stadium and finance committees, plus top league officials, reviewed Schaaf ’s last-minute stadium plan and “said there’s no merit to it. It’s not a serious proposal.”
The chairman of the finance committee, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, told Monday’s news conference that his committee studied the Raiders’ Vegas proposal, and it will result in a more stable franchise.
Davis said he had “mixed feelings” about the relocation, but ultimately decided it was in the club’s best interests, and that his late dad “would be proud.”
For decades the NFL had refused to consider placing a franchise in “Lost Wages.” But with sports betting having quickly become an acceptable, even respectable, element of 2010’s society, and with the league’s soaring popularity this decade owed in large part to the widespread, skyrocketing interest in fantasy-football betting, owners would break records for hypocrisy if they kept citing that stale stance as a reason to shun Vegas.
So say hello to the new darlings of the desert: the Sin City Raiders.