The National Football League is not an independent spring-summer baseball league where teams come and go and on an odd occasion, a team could play an entire season of road games. But with the city of Oakland suing Mark Davis’s Raiders and the NFL for damages because the city believes Davis and the NFL violated the league’s relocation policy by allowing Davis to take his business to Las Vegas, it appears Oakland should not count on Davis playing home games in that city in 2019. Oakland wants the $80 million that is still on the books for renovating the city’s stadium that lured Al Davis back from Los Angeles in 1995. Mark Davis has one game left in Oakland on Christmas Eve and then has to look for a place that will house at least seven Raiders home games.
Why would any city want Davis’s 2019 business? It would be just for rent money. But cities will consider having Davis’s business even if it is at best for seven to 10 days during the 2019 season. Davis will pay rent and whatever city lands his business will be able to say we have the NFL. Oakland will remain in the running if Davis cannot find an option because the city could use his rent money. San Antonio has NFL dreams and has provided a temporary shelter for the NFL before, in 2005, the city took in Tom Benson’s New Orleans Saints as Benson’s business could not operate in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city. There is a story that San Diego, which the NFL abandoned in 2016, could house Davis’s business but no one knows what San Diego is going to do with its stadium in the near future. Perhaps Davis will check out Santa Clara’s 49ers stadium. The NFL seems to have a commonality with independent baseball leagues. Franchise instability.
