Bye Bye Oakland

The Oakland Raiders are moving to Las Vegas. It's a damn shame.

Yesterday at the Annual League Meeting in Phoenix, the NFL's 32 owners voted 31-1 to approve the Raiders' proposal to relocate to Las Vegas. The team that's only a team because the Minnesota Vikings' sudden switch from the AFL to the NFL is on the move for the third time since their inception in 1960. The Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982. They moved back to Oakland in 1995. Now they are free to move to Las Vegas. At least this time the move has been overwhelmingly endorsed by the NFL. The only vote against was cast by the Miami Dolphins. They must still be pissed by the "Sea of Hands" game.

The soon to be Las Vegas Raiders already have funding in place for a stadium. A sparkling new domed stadium is expected to be ready by the 2020 NFL season. That's what made the move possible. The Raiders will play in Oakland this season and will have a contract option to play there in 2018. That could make for an uncomfortable/very sad two seasons. They will apparently have to find a temporary home for the 2019 season.

It's always a terribly sad day to see professional sports teams bolt from the fans that love them. This is the third NFL relocation in about a year. The Rams left St. Louis for Los Angeles. The Chargers left San Diego for Los Angeles. Now the Raiders will be leaving for Las Vegas. It's interesting that all three teams on the move once called Los Angeles home. Two of them returned there. As a Minnesota Vikings fan it was tough to deal with the threat of my team moving. These franchise moves are always about new stadiums. The Vikings' owners had been fighting for decades to get funding for a new stadium. It was a such a fight that Red McCombs decided to sell the team rather than continue it. The Wilf family bought the team in 2005 and picked up the stadium fight. The Metrodome was made on the cheap and outdated the moment that it opened in 1982. It was a dump and a hazard by the turn of the century. The dome had to be replaced if the Vikings were to remain in Minnesota. The threat of that move was tiresome and frightening. Fortunately for the fans the Wilf's stuck with the fight and public funding was finally passed in 2012. Raiders owner Mark Davis clearly grew tired of the fight and the fight his father fought for decades. I definitely didn't follow the Raiders stadium quest as closely as I followed that of the Vikings but it just felt like Davis was more committed to moving than staying. Part of that could be due to what looked like an ambivalent stand by the decision-makers of Oakland. They didn't seem to care whether the Raiders stayed until it was obvious that Davis was committed to moving. Even then their attempts were half-hearted, at best. Davis and the politicians never showed much interest in working together. There has to be a committed interest on both parties to get a stadium deal done. Maybe the Raiders and the city of Oakland could have agreed on an effort to spiffy up the existing stadium. Even that left a problem as the Raiders shared their home with the Oakland A's. Gone are the days when an NFL team and a MLB team shared a stadium. It's ludicrous to play football into October on a field with a dirt baseball diamond in the middle of it. One of the two teams needed a new home and it was the Raiders that wanted one. Stadium construction is a controversial issue and I can see both sides. The thing that those against have to realize is that if they don't want to help chip in on the cost of a stadium they aren't going to have a team. Despite what most people think footing the bill on a billion dollar stadium isn't something that most NFL owners can afford. And Mark Davis is on the low end of the NFL owner money scale. He didn't get any of the wealth that he might have from a lucrative day job. He inherited a team that his father somehow finagled into his own. They are one of the only NFL families that didn't start their football lives already rich. Davis needed a lot of help to finance a new stadium and Oakland never offered much. Las Vegas offered a lot.

The only people that truly lose in the relocation of a franchise is the fans. The team gets a spectacular new stadium. The new city gets a football team. The old city and the fans that live there get nothing. That sort of loss can do some damage. It probably shouldn't in a grand scheme of things sort of way but it does.

"I have mixed feelings."-Mark Davis

I don't know. Yanking a team from fans doesn't show much but Davis was forced to do something.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said that he never wants to see relocation of a franchise. I believe that anything that makes money is what he wants to see. It's always about the money and rarely about the fans. Mark Davis and especially the NFL and Goodell showed again that new stadiums are more important than the fans.