One of the strangest weeks in league history also wasn’t very surprising.
With no viable stadium plans in their current towns, the Chargers and Raiders have each taken the available steps to move. For one franchise, it was automatic; for the other, most boxes need to be checked.
As widely expected over the course of the past several months, NFL Media has reported (i.e., the NFL has announced) that the Raiders will file a request for relocation from Oakland to Las Vegas. If 23 of the 31 other franchises approve of the move, the Las Vegas Raiders eventually will be born.
According to the Bay Area News Group, Sands casino owner Sheldon Adelson still may not be involved in the birth. Goldman Sachs will bridge the gap between team, league, and taxpayer commitment and the expected cost of a $1.9 billion stadium in Las Vegas, if a deal can’t be struck with Adelson, who has been driving a hard bargain with Raiders owner Mark Davis for weeks.
Last year, lawmakers in Nevada approved $750 million for the project. The enormous contribution of public money will make it difficult if not impossible for the league to embrace a city that, for decades, it had shunned.
The requirement of 24 votes to approve the move means that only nine teams can come together and kill it. There’s currently no momentum among the owners, however, to build a coalition large enough to block the move -- especially since any effort to do so could spark another round of antitrust litigation with the team that successfully won a legal battle when the league tried to block its move to Los Angeles more than 30 years ago.
As some have suggested, the move to Las Vegas could reinforce the status of the Raiders as the most popular team in Los Angeles, even though the Rams and Chargers are both headquartered there.