San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
DAVIS’ WORST NIGHTMARE
Raiders owner must watch one of his biggest rivals win NFL’s biggest prize
Mark Davis chortled when I asked him about the upcoming Super Bowl, of which — as owner of the Las Vegas Raiders — he is technically the host.
“Who’s got it better than us?” he crowed, channeling the trademark phrase of a coach he didn’t hire but who his team will now go against twice a year in the AFC West.
He was being sarcastic.
“There’s bad news and good news in this game,” Davis said. “The bad news is one of these teams is going to win the Super Bowl. The good news is one of them isn’t.”
The Kansas City Chiefs versus the San Francisco 49ers, to be played in the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium on Sunday, is a worst-case scenario for Davis. The Chiefs are the Raiders’ most loathed division foe, a rivalry dating to the early days of the AFL. The 49ers are the team the Raiders uncomfortably shared a market with for 47 years and were eventually eclipsed by in the 1980s.
On Sunday, Davis’ stadium will be filled with red, a color he so abhors that after buying the Las Vegas Aces WNBA team in 2021 he said he planned to remove red from the team’s color scheme (that has yet to happen).
Still, Super Bowl LVIII may be the closest Davis gets to a Super Bowl for a while, considering the state of his NFL franchise. The Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas to begin the 2020 season, and the fate of the team has been as futile and chaotic as it was in its previous 17 seasons in Oakland. Since losing the Super Bowl in January 2003, the Raiders have had just two winning seasons, making the playoffs both times but losing in the wild-card round.
Davis is on his fourth coach since making the move east, firing Jon Gruden after his disturbing emails were revealed, firing the interim coach (Rich Bisaccia) who replaced Gruden, firing incompetent Josh McDaniels (who had completely lost the team) and — just last month — tapping interim coach Antonio Pierce for the full-time position. Even that stabilization hasn’t gone smoothly: when Davis and I spoke by phone it looked like Pierce had hired Kliff Kingsbury to be his offensive coordinator, but within 24 hours Kingsbury had backed out and was headed to the Commanders.
Despite the on-field struggles, the move to
Vegas has been rewarding for Davis. According to Forbes, the team’s value and revenue have doubled since the move from Oakland. Once one of the financially struggling teams in the NFL, Davis now oversees a franchise worth an estimated $6.2 billion.
“It shows what publicprivate partnerships can build,” said Davis, who benefited from $750 million in public funding that went toward the building of the stadium.
Davis crows that he has one of the greatest facilities in the league: not only the stadium but the Raiders’ massive training center in suburban Henderson. The Chiefs have had use of that facility in the leadup to the big game, a condition of the Super Bowl bid but a concept that might be making his late father Al irate from beyond the grave. (Davis joked that Al would have bugged the place to monitor what the Chiefs would be doing.)
“Those players might be leaving their business cards in the lockers,” Davis said, implying that the Chiefs players will be so impressed with the facility they might want to join the Raiders. And he takes pleasure that the Chiefs will be in Vegas knowing that “we kicked their ass here on Christmas Day.” While the move to Nevada has worked out for him, Davis is less than thrilled about the other Oakland team that is trying to follow him to Vegas. He has long contended that John Fisher’s tactics with the Oakland Coliseum property hampered the Raiders from finding a solution in Oakland.
“I’ve made it clear what I felt about the management of the A’s,” Davis said. “They were a big part of pushing us out of Oakland. For them to follow us down here, well, I’m all for baseball if they think they can make it. And I like the four-letter word j-o-b-s.”
Last spring, Davis told the Las Vegas ReviewJournal that he would never forget what Fisher’s A’s did in Oakland, saying, “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium. … They didn’t want to build a stadium and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, ‘We’re the base team.’ ”
Davis resented that the A’s adopted the slogan “Rooted in Oakland” after the Raiders’ move as a way of implying the baseball team was devoted to the city in the way the Raiders never were.
“The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders,” he told the Review-Journal. “They were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well, all they did was f— the Bay Area. For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty (screwed) up.”
Davis’ greatest competitive success since arriving in Las Vegas has been the Aces, who have won the past two WNBA championships. When he acquired the team, Davis was committed to spending money and made a splash by hiring NBA assistant Becky Hammon and paying her a milliondollar salary. His starstudded team has been riding the wave of popularity in women’s basketball.
He thinks Joe Lacob being awarded an expansion franchise in the Bay Area will continue the growth of the league.
“They’re going to be competitive,” Davis said. “We’re raising the bar. We’re excited the league is growing, and we’re hoping to threepeat.”
But for now, the football season is still continuing, though not in the way Davis hoped. The Raiders were to host of the owners’ party on Saturday night and another party on Sunday after the game.
Between those two events?
“I’ll be rooting against both teams, though I welcome them as a host,” Davis said. “I still think the Raiders can win it all.”