Owners of the NFL’s teams, meeting Monday at a Phoenix resort for the annual league meeting, voted to ratify the Raiders’ proposed move from Oakland, California, to Las Vegas.
The franchise is to remain in Oakland while a $1.9 billion stadium for the Raiders and UNLV’s football team is under construction. But then the Raiders are headed to Vegas in a move that once would have been practically unthinkable to the NFL, given the league’s longstanding public opposition to sports gambling.
It is the third franchise relocation approved by NFL owners in a little more than a year. They voted in January 2016 to ratify the Rams’ move from St. Louis to Los Angeles. The Rams played this past season in L.A. and they are to be joined there in the 2017 season by the Chargers, who announced earlier this year that they would exercise their option to move from San Diego to L.A.
It is the second time that the Raiders will leave Oakland. The franchise departed following the 1981 season and played in Los Angeles from ’82 through ’94 before returning to Oakland.
Raiders owner Mark Davis set his sights on Las Vegas after the owners last year chose the Inglewood, Calif., stadium proposal of Rams owner Stan Kroenke over the Carson project proposed by Davis and the Chargers’ Dean Spanos. The L.A. option granted then to the Chargers would have passed to the Raiders if Spanos had kept his team in San Diego. But Davis didn’t wait for that possibility, pledging he was committed to taking his franchise to Las Vegas.
Owners initially seemed wary about the size of the Las Vegas market. But those concerns melted away as the league contended there was no viable new-stadium alternative in Oakland to keep the franchise there. After the city submitted a revised stadium-financing plan, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell reportedly wrote to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf that the parties were yet to find a solution to keep the Raiders in Oakland.
Any reluctance by the league and the owners to place a franchise in the country’s gambling capital never seemed to become a significant obstacle to the move proposed by Davis. By the time Monday’s vote was taken, it had become clear that no meaningful opposition to the relocation had formed among the owners.
The Raiders had to scramble to reassemble the stadium-financing deal in Las Vegas when casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dropped out. But Bank of America agreed to provide the $650 million of funding that was needed after Adelson’s withdrawal. The Raiders are to provide $500 million and there is $750 of public financing in place.
The Raiders’ lease in Oakland gives them one-year team options for the 2017 and 2018 seasons.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Mark Maske
