Oakland, Roger Goodell are both talking to Raiders fans but neither of them are making any sense

The city of Oakland and Roger Goodell are both talking to Raiders fans, but neither is hitting home with their message.

As a potential vote of the National Football League’s 32 owners on the relocation request of the now-Oakland Raiders looms large today, the messages spun out from all sides of the debate leave much to be desired.

In 1966, a Batman movie spun off the television series of the same name featuring Adam West as the Dark Knight. In the film, there’s a scene depicting the fictional equivalent of the United Nations Security Council. All the council’s members are speaking at the same time, and in different languages, creating a chaotic atmosphere in which no one is being heard, much less understood. Raiders fans must feel the same way right now.

The situation regarding all the spin put out in the media from all sides resembles this scene from “Batman.” Everyone is talking at the same time, about different aspects of the situation, and no one is making any sense.

The NFL’s message to Raiders fans

Through months leading up to this week’s NFL owners’ meetings in Phoenix, the message from the NFL to Raiders fans is that the league would prefer that the Raiders stay in Oakland on the contingency that a new stadium deal to the NFL’s liking became a reality. Back in October, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had the following to say about a potential relocation:

"“We’d love to have the Raiders stay in Oakland. We think that that’s a positive thing, we’ve also been very clear over the past couple years that that requires getting a long-term resolution to their stadium,” Goodell said. “We still don’t have that solution. Our staff is working with the mayor and officials in the Oakland area to see if there are alternatives out there, but we don’t have one yet.”"

One of the reasons that the NFL opposed the Raiders moving to Las Vegas is the proximity to legalized gambling. The NFL’s official stance on the expansion of legalized betting on sports has been opposition. This is evidenced in the NFL’s involvement in the opposition to a law that would have legalized betting on sports in the state of New Jersey and banning players from participating in a charity event that involved poker.

The latest message the NFL has given Raiders fans came on Saturday, again from Goodell. He wrote a letter to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, essentially rejecting the city of Oakland’s latest proposal to keep the Raiders in the city. Goodell called the proposal “not viable” and stated that “key issues that we have identified as threshold considerations are simply not resolvable in a reasonable time.”

One of those reasons seems to be the fact that the proposal includes setting aside part of the new stadium site – 15 acres to be exact – for use by Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics. On that subject, Goodell noted that, “we also accept that you do not wish to exercise (and may not be able to exercise) the contractual termination rights related to the A’s.” The NFL seems to want any new facility on the current coliseum site to be a football-only venue.

Summing up the NFL’s message to Raiders fans, the NFL says that it wants the Raiders to stay in Oakland because of concerns over the gambling present in Las Vegas. That has become unfeasible due to the current stadium situation, however. The city hasn’t acted in a manner sufficient to give the Raiders what they need to be successful, so the league has no choice but to relocate the team. There are a lot of holes in the NFL’s message, however.

Why the NFL’s message isn’t coming through clearly

Confusing the reception of the NFL’s message are its actions, screaming so loudly it’s difficult to hear the NFL’s words.

On the issue of gambling, it seems that team owners are indifferent at best on the issue. The NFL seems prepared to approve the Raiders’ relocation to Las Vegas without any plan in place to keep its personnel from getting involved. A quote by an unnamed owner of an AFC team reveals the actual prevailing mindset of the ownership.

"“From a gambling standpoint? That’s a joke to even say that’d be a problem. That was an issue decades ago. Now? Sports gambling is going to be legal. We might as well embrace it and become part of the solution, rather than fight it. It’s in everyone’s best interests for it to be above-board.”"

Los Angeles Chargers owner Dean Spanos echoed this indifference about gambling from the owners on Sunday.

The claims about lack of viability in the Oakland proposal seem hollow as well, because it could be argued the NFL hasn’t done enough thorough research on the Las Vegas plan. On top of the Raiders refusing to meet with the city of Oakland for over a year, the profitability of the Las Vegas stadium proposal is built on a foundation of assumptions that are so optimistic, they teeter on being unrealistic.

Stanford economist Roger Noll laid out the reasons why he believes the Las Vegas stadium plan is a pipe dream in terms of being economically sound last week. He highlighted a belief that 500,000 additional new tourists to Las Vegas will magically appear on an annual basis, community support that may fade when dollars currently being spent in casinos are instead spent on the Raiders, and the large unanswered question of who is providing the securities for the $650 million loan that the Raiders would take from Bank of America.

Finally, the league’s insistence that the city of Oakland essentially kick the A’s to the curb is curious for a couple of reasons. The A’s have looked at other sites for a baseball-only facility as recently as August, which would have freed up the city to give the Raiders the football-only stadium the NFL says it wants. On Sunday, A’s President Dave Kaval made it clear that the A’s want the Raiders to stay in Oakland. The bottom line is that there’s nothing in the history of the relationship between the two franchises that suggests the A’s have been a roadblock to a new football stadium in Oakland.

Secondly, while the Las Vegas stadium would be a football-only venue as the NFL desires, the Raiders would still be sharing the stadium and the city. The National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights will have had at least a two-season head start on the Raiders in building a fan base in Sin City if the Raiders relocate. Additionally, the Raiders would share the stadium with the football team at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. If sharing a market is such a concern, why relocate a team to a less populous city in which another league’s brand will have already been working to cement its fan base?

It isn’t difficult to see where the disconnects between the NFL’s message and activity are, but an evaluation of the city of Oakland’s spin doesn’t produce much better results.

The city of Oakland’s message to Raiders fans

The city of Oakland, led by Mayor Libby Schaaf, put out a similar message to the NFL’s, placing all the blame for the impending doom on the other party.

Schaaf has touted the superiority of the proposal to build a new stadium on the site of the current facility in comparison to the Las Vegas plan.

This has coincided with fan rallies and the public release of a letter to the NFL by Schaaf and the other investors in the project.

Put simply, the message that the city wants to put out is that it has done its best to keep the Raiders. Despite these optimum and preferential terms, the Raiders and the NFL are dead set on Las Vegas, like a horse with blinders on.

Like with the NFL’s message, however, just a tiny bit of scrutiny applied to the city’s message reveals the man behind the curtain.

Why the city’s message is almost as unclear as the NFL’s

The reality of the situation makes the city of Oakland look like a husband or wife who realizes that he/she has lost her/his spouse, and is now scrambling to do all the things that he/she should have been doing regularly for years in a last-ditch effort to save the marriage.

The first issue is that the proposal has one large question looming over it: what’s in the deal for the Fortress investment group, which would be forking over hundreds of millions of dollars? A logical answer would be a stake in the Raiders, something that current ownership would probably be adverse to.

That leads to the second issue, which is a point that is somewhat beyond the city’s control but relevant nonetheless. Without the involvement of the Raiders ownership, there is no stadium deal. While it’s true that the Raiders have refused to come to the bargaining table, it’s not clear how hard the city has pressed them on that front. There seems to be significant activity by the city to build the proposal, but that brings up the final question in consideration of the city’s message.

The last question that the city has failed to answer is where was all this significant activity on the football stadium issue when the Raiders were willing to come to the table? The Raiders moved back to Oakland in 1995, and the well-publicized issues with the Coliseum have been ongoing for years. Obviously the same administration hasn’t been in place the entire time that the Coliseum has literally been full of crap, but the opportunity to find investors in a new stadium has been there throughout. Schaaf states that the city, “isn’t giving up in the fourth quarter. That only begs the question to be asked, what has the city been doing throughout the first three quarters?

Amidst unclear information from both the city and the NFL, on top of silence from the Raiders themselves, Raiders fans are left as bewildered as anyone attempting to listen to the dialogue in that scene from “Batman.” In three to four years time, the NFL team they love could be gone, leaving those fans with no answers to as how and why it happened in the empty space created.