Oakland Raiders’ Fanbase Must Focus On Present
The 2015-16 NFL season hasn’t even begun but fans of the Oakland Raiders find themselves already looking ahead. An offseason that should be filled with excitement and hope has been turned into one of questions and uncertainty.
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It has been quite some time since a Raiders’ team has entered the season with such a promising future.
The Raiders are hoping the combination of a talented young nucleus and seasoned veterans will finally start their rise out of NFL mediocrity.
Adding Alabama star receiver Amari Cooper to a promising young core led by Derek Carr and Khalil Mack, have many in Raider Nation believing the first steps toward getting back respectability have taken place.
The optimism surrounding the Silver and Black haven’t been this high since the Jon Gruden, “Chucky Era”, came to a sudden and painful ending.
But anyone familiar with Raiders’ history knows that with optimism comes pessimism.
Instead of discussions about how Cooper’s game changing explosiveness will open up the Raiders’ offense, many of the fan base are wondering how much longer Cooper and the Raiders will call Oakland home.
The news of a pending Raider move has become a yearly event.
Those who have lived in the Bay Area have become accustomed to the seemingly never ending threats and relocation plots that have followed the franchise, from Oakland to Los Angeles, and back to Oakland.
Many of us have learned to tune out the noise. We have accepted it as a “Necessary Evil.” We consider it a tax that must be paid for membership into “Raider Nation.”
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In the past, these threats of a Baltimore Colts’ style late night creep out of town were met with skepticism.
Pundits claimed though, that until an actual stadium was in place or “legitimate plans” were being orchestrated, the Raiders had little to no option to leave the Bay Area.
That was the sentiment felt by many across the NFL landscape. There was a portion of Raider fans who took the threats seriously, but most simply ignored them like a penny on the sidewalk.
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There was no secret regarding the NFL’s long standing plan to reinsert a franchise in Los Angeles.
The NFL considers Los Angeles prime real estate, so any pending move to Southern California would take careful planning. And past plans have included various NFL teams.
Fan bases from Jacksonville to Oakland have dealt with the never ending rumors of franchise relocation to sunny Southern California — sometimes as their teams used that threat to leverage a shiny new stadium out of the current home market.
The primary focus still remained on the field of play and not on the media hyped news stories about a relocation.
But that focus has slowly shifted away from the training camp exploits of promising rookies to the narrative of a joint stadium proposal with division rival San Diego.
Instead of Raider fans visualizing a decade of Derek Carr and Cooper connections, they are agonizing over the possibility of sharing a stadium with their So Cal rival San Diego Chargers.
Mark Davis and Chargers owner Dean Spanos have put aside the venom that exist between the two fan bases in pursuit of a state of the art stadium.
Carson California may not be Hollywood (or even Inglewood for that matter) but it has offered the two franchises something neither San Diego nor Oakland has — a shiny new stadium.
On May 20th, Mark Fabiani, the Chargers general counsel on stadium issues, was quoted by City News Service as saying:
"“the transaction that would enable the Chargers-Raiders joint venture to build an L.A. NFL stadium in Carson has officially closed this morning,”"
This latest threat has somewhat taken the shine off what could be a very promising year for the Radiers — a year that many long time, and long suffering, Raider fans have been longing for.
Not since Rich Gannon was shredding defenses with pinpoint passes to Tim Brown and Jerry Rice have hopes been so high.
Raider Nation needs to embrace its present. This is what you have been waiting for since the debacle of Super Bowl XXXVII.
Instead of getting caught up in a battle between city politicians and rich NFL owners, it’s time to get back to what really matters.
And what matters is the only thing that the late-great Al Davis cared about, “Just Win Baby.”