The move to Las Vegas seems to be turning Mark Davis into his father.
The Raiders owner has become more of a renegade in recent months, willing to push back against the NFL -- and to speak out.
Sunday’s item from Vic Tafur of TheAtheltic.com, which focused on the notion that Davis won’t attend home games if the fans can’t, Davis also complained about the league’s lack of a standard approach to the question of whether and to what extent fans will attend games.
“Everything else in this offseason has been equity,” Davis told Tafur. “That if California wasn’t going to allow teams to go to their own facility, such as us -- to go to Alameda -- or the Rams or Niners . . . if only one team couldn’t go to their own facility, all 32 couldn’t go. The worst-case scenario state went for everybody -- so there was equity all the way through, everywhere.
“The draft -- since you couldn’t bring players into one state, you couldn’t bring them into anywhere, so we went virtual. And then, you get into attendance at the stadium and all of a sudden it’s the wild, wild west. ‘You all make your own decisions, don’t look at us. It’s not up to us.’ It’s like, whoa!”
It’s not like “whoa,” it’s like “ca-ching.” When it comes to attendance, the league and its teams should welcome as many fans as they can, even if some or many or most won’t be able to have any fans at all.
Davis still has a problem with that, because teams keep 60 percent of the ticket revenue and put 40 percent in the league-wide pool, simulating compensation for the visiting team.
“Unless they figure out financially how to share the gate money, based on some states saying maybe no people in and some saying 100 percent in . . . someone is getting more money than the other person,” Davis said. “That’s a competitive advantage. The clock is ticking and those are things we have to figure out still.”
The easy solution would be for the teams to share all ticket revenue. Unless the expenses associated with having fans present also will be shared, however, a decision to share revenue could make teams less inclined to even bother to try, if that team is looking at a partially-filled stadium at best.
But Davis still has a point. The teams that have no fans present will be blameless for it. The teams that can have fans attend game will have gotten lucky. There should be a way to ensure that the financial side of varying amounts of attendance has more fairness to all teams -- especially since there’s no way to make equitable the simple fact that some teams will have a home-field advantage thanks to the presence of fans, and some won’t.