The Napa Valley may remain part of the Raiders Nation.
Mark Davis’s National Football League Raiders business may not be completely abandoning the San Francisco Bay Area after the season. Davis’s team will be playing home games in Las Vegas in 2020 but there are other aspects to the team’s business including a training camp site. The team has been holding training camp about a one hour car ride away from Oakland in Napa since 1996 and Davis has a year to go on the deal. Davis has said that he would like to remain in Napa beyond 2020. Davis’s business has the team staying at the Napa site for a month in 2019 which is much longer than the NFL teams that do leave their practice facilities for training camp. Most NFL teams now train year-round at team-built complexes in their markets. An attempt to start a “cheese league” with teams training in Wisconsin in the 1990s did not gain traction.
Davis’s business will also remain in the Bay Area following the 2019 season as players will be able to work out in the Oakland area facility and attend early mini-camps in the Oakland area. The franchise be able to open up a training facility in Henderson, Nevada not far from Las Vegas in June, 2020. The National Football League will officially kick off Davis’s Las Vegas arrival by holding its annual draft in April, 2020. Davis’s team is playing just seven regular season games in Oakland in 2019. The team and the government entity that owns the stadium came to a last-minute agreement that allowed Davis to play two pre-season and seven regular season games in Oakland. The schedule puts Davis’s team on the road between September 15 and November 5. Davis’s business is just playing out the lease. Davis’s future training camp could be in Napa, Reno, Nevada or Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
