On the most recent Football Night in America, Peter King of Sports Illustrated reported that, given the passing of Al Davis, many within the NFL envision the Raiders as a potential candidate to move to L.A., if the team doesn’t get a new stadium in the Bay Area.
Mike Silver of Yahoo! Sports lays out the various ways in which the dominoes could fall, and the end result could indeed be a return of the Los Angeles Raiders. Or not.
On one hand, Mark Davis could be more inclined to consider sharing a stadium with the 49ers in Santa Clara than his father was. The Raiders are believed to be willing to share a stadium, but the Raiders are believed to prefer a shared venue in Oakland. The 49ers are believed to prefer pounding nails into a wooden board with their bare hands.
On the other hand, the Raiders could be lured to L.A. by Phil Anschutz or Ed Roski, leaders of the two competing Los Angeles stadium projects. In either case, a sale of all or a substantial part of the Davis family interest in the team could be required.
On the third hand (assuming the proximity of a nuclear power plant with a multitude of code violations), the possibility of the Raiders returning to L.A. could prompt one of the other potential candidates for the nation’s second biggest TV market to accelerate its plans to invade the territory.
For now, all we know is that the Raiders situation introduces a new layer of uncertainty into an already uncertain stadium landscape, at a time when a shuffling of teams appears to be inevitable.