RAIDERS ROLL THE DICE WITH DELAYED MOVE TO LAS VEGAS
Owners approve departure from Oakland, but it’s still at least two seasons away
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 US$1.9-billion stadium in Vegas at the start of the next decade.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told a midday 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. If local authorities invite the Silver and Black to stage home games at the Coliseum for a third lame-duck year, the Raiders probably would accept, he said.
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 Davis owes the league, but reports estimated 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 to Los Angeles and for the next 13 seasons played in 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 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 waterboy 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 lame-duck 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 lameduck home game played there after the Baltimore relocation news had broken.
You’d have to be naive to believe the Raiders’ intimidating fans will accept the club’s departure with shrugs.
“I wouldn’t use the term ‘lame duck.’ We’re still the Oakland Raiders, we love the Raiders and we represent the Raider Nation,” Davis said. “There are going to be some disappointed fans and some angry fans. It’s going to be up to me to talk to them and let them know why, how and what has happened and hopefully we can work things out and work together for the future.
“I have mixed feelings, obviously. I love Oakland, I love the fans in Oakland.”
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.
These moves leave the St. Louis, San Diego and Oakland markets without an NFL franchise.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf made two unsuccessful pitches to NFL owners in recent days. One, on Friday, proposed a new $1.3-billion stadium be built to replace the 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.
“Never that we know of has the NFL voted to displace a team from its established market, when there is a fully financed option before them with all the issues addressed,” Schaaf said in a statement to The Associated Press. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t do everything in my power to make the case for Oakland up until the very end.”
Mark Murphy, president and CEO of the Green Bay Packers, told Postmedia Sunday the NFL’s influential stadium and finance committees, plus top league officials, reviewed Schaaf’s lastminute 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, said at Monday’s news conference 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.
“My father used to say that the greatness of the Raiders is in its future and the opportunity to build a world-class stadium in the entertainment capital of the world will give us the ability to achieve that greatness.”
Goodell lamented another franchise relocation, saying he feels bad for Oakland-area Raiders fans, but underlined “this is an important step for us and trying to get some stability for the Raiders long term.”
For decades, the NFL had refused to consider placing a franchise in Las Vegas. But with sports betting having quickly become an acceptable element of 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 stance as a reason to shun Vegas.
So say hello to the new darlings of the desert: the Sin City Raiders.