Loyalty of Raiders fans taken for granted yet again.
Congratulations, Raiders fans: It’s official now.
You are the most screwedover fans in American sports.
Oh, sure, others have vied for the title in the past. Baltimore had a pity party for a time. Cleveland felt abandoned. Same with Houston. Old-time New Yorkers still like to talk about when two of their baseball teams left. Seattle still would like an NBA team, thank you very much.
But nobody has it as bad as Oakland Raiders fans. Screwed over by not one, but two generations of the same family.
Though that’s relatively old news — Mark Davis announced he was going to Las Vegas in March 2017 — this week has served only to emphasize the pathetic situation faced by some of the greatest fans in sports history.
It looks like Christmas Eve will be the final home game of the Oakland Raiders. The last hurrah for the Oakland fans who have been treated like dirt.
Abandoned twice. Loyalty taken for granted. Served a terrible product for most of the past two decades. Duped into believing there could be a winning farewell tour in Oakland, until Jon Gruden arrived and tore down the team. And now, it looks like, there might not even be another season to say goodbye.
You can blame the city of Oakland for filing the lawsuit against the team this week and forcing the Raiders’ hand. Or you can blame Davis and his minions for pulling a tentative agreement to play in Oakland in 2019 off the table in the wake of the lawsuit. Or you can blame the NFL, which has been using Oakland as a pawn for years.
What you can’t do is blame the fans. They have taken it
and taken it and taken it. And now they’re losing their team. Again.
Many of these fans already have lived through this. On game days, the Coliseum is full of twice-jilted fans, many of whom have passed on their abandonment issues to a second generation.
They had their hearts ripped out in 1982 when the team moved to Los Angeles. When the team came back in 1995, many of those fans — despite having sworn off the silver and black — came back. For their loyalty, they have received just four winning seasons, four playoff wins and a prolonged middle finger.
If the Raiders had been truly interested in staying in the Bay Area — and this goes back to the late Al Davis — they should have negotiated with the 49ers to build one super stadium to house both teams. That’s the only logical, proven solution for two NFL teams in the same market.
But Al Davis was opposed, and his son inherited that position, which is ridiculous. You think the Giants and the Jets like each other? No, but they both belong in the New York market. Just like the 49ers and the Raiders both belong in the Bay Area.
Where will the Raiders play next year? Who knows? The University of Nevada (in Reno) is tossed around as a real possibility. That’s where the RaidOn ers reportedly plan to take their training camp once they are the Las Vegas Raiders. The Raiders could go to UNLV for a year, but that would dilute their glittery arrival in the Vegas market in 2020.
Could they go to San Diego for a year? Bizarre. San Antonio, one of their previous flirtation cities? Also weird. Levi’s? That would serve only to underscore how stupid it is that the two teams didn’t find a compromise stadium years ago.
Cal? No. Stanford? Unlikely, though the amount of remaining fans might be small enough next year to easily fit into 50,000-seat Stanford Stadium.
Of course, Oakland remains a possibility. Probably the most likely solution. And how pleasant that would be — a year of a nasty, acrimonious partnership in a building full of dead mice, overflowing sewage and faulty X-ray machines (Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said the ancient X-ray machines in Oakland didn’t work well enough Sunday, which is why his return to the game was delayed after a rib injury).
Wherever the Raiders play, their fan base is sure to shrink. The enthusiasm was sucked out of this season before it even began, because of the trade of Khalil Mack to Chicago. The investment in season tickets is too much for so little in return.
Sunday, despite the influx of Pittsburgh fans, the parking lot wasn’t quite as crowded for tailgating as it has been in the past. But it was still a great scene: generations of fans who have made the drive for years, not only from all over the East Bay but also the Central Valley and farther. To play music and grill and hang out and talk Raiders.
“This is our real game,” one man who has been coming for years said, as he poured bourbon for his friends. “This is what I’ll miss.”
For the most screwed-over fans in sports, they were having a pretty good time.
Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: akillion@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annkillion