Oakland Raiders: Owners Vote Breaks Davis’ Way, Team Headed For Vegas

Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis, after a process of fits and starts, has won approval to move his franchise to Sin City.

In the end, all of the drama had been sucked out of the Oakland Raiders’ relocation vote. Word had been circulating for days that Mark Davis had done enough to secure the 24 needed votes and that the actual vote was merely a formality. And unlike a lot of rumors that circulate around the owners meetings, this one proved to be accurate.

Some expected some of the old guard owners – the Rooneys and the Maras – to perhaps, cast a symbolic vote against, but in the end, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the move – 31-1. The lone vote against relocation came from the Miami Dolphins.

The vote concludes several years of drama and intrigue surrounding the Raiders’ stadium issue. Owner Mark Davis and the Oakland politicians have tried – and failed – to come up with a viable solution. Multiple times.

And to many who have kept up with the process in its entirety, Oakland mayor Libby Schaff seemed far more interested in keeping the Oakland A’s in town rather than the Raiders. Oakland politicos and the A’s got together and cut a very sweet deal on the existing Coliseum site – which proved to be a tremendous obstacle to getting anything done on a stadium for the Raiders.

When casino magnate Sheldon Adelson pulled out of the deal – leaving a huge funding gap – many thought the deal to move the team to the Silver State was dead in the water. But Davis, proving a little savvier than most people give him credit for, found another avenue to get the deal done.

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Schaff sent a letter to Goodell in recent days, in which she declared the latest revised effort to keep the team in Oakland to be “viable and responsible.” It was a sentiment that Goodell apparently disagree with as he outlined in his response to her.

"“Despite all of these efforts, ours and yours, we have not yet identified a viable solution. It is disappointing to me and our clubs to have come to that conclusion.”"

Goodell went on to write that Schaff’s revised proposal was not “clear and specific, actionable in a reasonable time frame, and free of major contingencies.”

One NFL executive who saw Scahff’s proposal, was not convinced of its viability or that it was a good faith effort. In fact, this executive went on to say they viewed the eleventh-hour effort as a way to “save face” when the inevitable came to pass.

And indeed, the inevitable has come to pass with today’s vote approving the Raiders’ relocation bid. Las Vegas Raiders doesn’t quite roll off the tongue just yet, but we’ll have a couple of years to get used to it.