If you thought you were surprised that the cities of Tucson and Birmingham were making a proposal to host the Raiders next year, imagine being the mayor of Birmingham.
Because he knew nothing about it at the time.
According to Howard Koplowitz of AL.com, leaders in Birmingham were caught off guard by the report of the unusual idea of splitting the seven remaining Raiders home games between Arizona and Alabala
“I’m unable to communicate anything to you about a proposal, so I couldn’t articulate it to you,” Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin said at Tuesday’s council meeting. “There has been nobody on our team that has talked to the Raiders organization, so there’s nothing I can tell you because I don’t know.”
Birmingham city councilor William Parker was named in the initial report, having joined with a Tucson lawyer to promote the pie-in-the-sky venture.
“Legion Field needs more programming and that’s what we’re doing at Legion Field is to pursue all opportunities and let everyone know that Legion Field is open for business and the city of Birmingham benefits from that,” he said Tuesday.
Council president Valerie Abbott was looking for more details because “I haven’t found a council member who knows anything.”
The report, originally from the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, said the plan was to split games between the University of Arizona’s stadium and Birmingham’s Legion Field, which hosts AAF games and a few college games a year.
The Raiders need a home for 2019, and are currently talking with officials in Oakland about going back to the Coliseum for a year before their new place in Las Vegas is built, and those talks have been described as “meaningful and productive.”