As expected, NFL owners meeting at a Phoenix resort have given their blessing to Raiders owner Mark Davis’ plan to move the team from Oakland to Las Vegas on a 31-1 vote.

The Monday decision came after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell rejected Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s last-minute appeal to delay the relocation vote and consider a new stadium proposal unveiled last week. The plan called for building a $1.3 billion football stadium on a 55-acre parcel south of the Oakland Coliseum, where the Raiders now play – a proposal that Schaaf described as a “fully financed, shovel-ready project.” It was structured around a $600 million commitment from the Fortress Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

But in a lengthy letter released by the NFL, Goodell made clear the league didn’t buy the idea the proposal was either fully financed or shovel-ready. It stated that none of the various proposals offered by the city and its potential development partners at any point had ever come close to meeting the league’s basic requirements to retain the Raiders.

“We have been prepared for nearly two years to work on finding a solution based on access to land at a certain cost, without constraints on the location of the stadium or timing of construction, and clarity on overall development,” Goodell wrote. “However, at this date, there remains no certainty regarding how the site will be fully developed.”

The Nevada Legislature’s October decision to commit to providing $750 million in public dollars to a new Raiders stadium proved decisive, as many NFL insiders had predicted.

Raiders will keep playing in Oakland for at least two years

The pain of losing a team with one of pro sports’ most fanatical fan bases will be particularly acute for Oakland. That’s because unlike the last two NFL team relocations – the San Diego Chargers in January to Los Angeles and the St. Louis Rams a year ago to Los Angeles – Oakland will continue to be the Raiders’ base for two or even three more seasons as a $1.9 billion, 65,000-seat stadium complex is built in Las Vegas. The 35,500-seat Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas used by UNLV’s college football team is not up to NFL standards.

This extended goodbye doesn’t sit well with some in the Bay Area. “Mark Davis didn’t deserve the fans he had. Get out of here, right now,” one columnist wrote Monday afternoon.

In a Phoenix news conference, Davis acknowledged fans’ pain and said he would “use the coming days [to] try to explain to them what went into making this difficult decision.”

Now Schaaf and other Oakland leaders will need to make big decisions about whether to pursue another NFL team – similar to decisions still to be made in San Diego, where a Major League Soccer team has its eyes on the Qualcomm Stadium site.

But Goodell’s letter – while polite – offered clear hints about the chilly reception Oakland might get if it seeks another team without having fully established and vetted funding to pay for most or nearly all of a stadium project. Goodell noted Schaaf’s acknowledgment that substantial direct taxpayer funding is very unlikely.

Oakland’s hope for future NFL team: Benevolent billionaire

Unless one (or more) deep-pockets billionaires emerge who is willing to mostly or entirely fund a new stadium – like Rams owner Stan Kroenke is doing in Inglewood – this creates a bad dynamic for Oakland. The city will never be considered a serious contender to get a relocated team without a stadium in place. But building a stadium without first getting an NFL commitment is a billion-dollar-plus gamble.

The NFL owners’ decision adds to what has been a rough year for Oakland. The Raiders’ delayed exit adds to the angst stemming from the Ghost Fire blaze that killed 36 people in January and the pending departure of the Golden State Warriors from the Oracle arena in Oakland for new digs by the ocean across the bay in San Francisco.

The St. Louis Rams may have once again become the Los Angeles Rams, capping off the biggest suspense story in the National Football League, but the controversy over the city’s final lineup of teams has flared up yet again.

Chargers ’16

In San Diego, where the Chargers have gone down to the wire with city officials on a possible move that once looked like a done deal, the next twist depends on voters. Although analysts and fans have cautioned that one NFL team may be plenty for Los Angeles, especially so soon on the heels of the Rams’ return, the stadium deal holding the Chargers’ future in the balance has failed to rally popular support. According to a YouGov poll conducted late last month, only “a quarter of San Diego adults strongly or somewhat support the proposal for a new, taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion stadium and convention center downtown,” as USA Today recalled. “The poll showed more than half — 52 percent — strongly or somewhat opposed the measure, with the other 23 percent not stating a preference.” 

“To win the vote, the team needs two-thirds of voters to approve the project because it’s a tax hike for a special purpose in California. If the vote fails, the Chargers have until Jan. 15 to decide whether to move to Los Angeles, where they have an optional deal to share a lucrative new stadium with the Los Angeles Rams.”

If the push to use the ballot to keep the Chargers in San Diego has been a slog, however, city officials’ backup plan has emerged as a potentially dramatic Hail Mary pass — to the judiciary. City Attorney Jan Goldsmith told radio host Darren Smith “he would ask the state’s high court to ‘take jurisdiction’ over the city’s November election as it pertains to two stadium-related ballot initiatives: the Chargers plan to raise the city’s hotel tax to build a stadium and convention center, and the Citizens’ Plan, which would increase the tax to help pay for tourism marketing and an off-the-waterfront convention center,” according to U-T San Diego. Although “no public money could go toward stadium construction,” the city’s inquiry “could come as early as next week, if county officials examining signatures declare that either or both initiatives have qualified for the ballot,” the paper added. 

Vegas or bust?

Oakland’s Raiders, the other California team caught up in the L.A. relocation game, have struggled to strike a deal with their own home town. According to NBC Sports, League Commissioner Roger Goodell appeared to discourage another move to L.A., suggesting “you never want to see a community lose their franchise once, much less twice,” making reference to the Raiders’ ping-ponging over the decades between L.A. and Oakland. “I think there’s a solution there, but it takes the community to help identify it,” he said. In the wake of the Rams deal, and unable to count on the Chargers to come through on the stadium-sharing deal that had briefly given the duo a bettor’s edge against the Rams, the Raiders have shifted their attentions from L.A. to Las Vegas.

“Of course, the NFL has allowed communities to lose franchises twice: St. Louis lost both the Cardinals and the Rams,” NBC Sports noted. “So it wouldn’t be unprecedented for the Raiders to vacate Oakland twice. But Goodell said the recent authorization of a new stadium in Las Vegas isn’t enough to bring the Raiders to town.”

Nevertheless, Las Vegas has thrown its considerable weight behind serious plans to lure the team in. The Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee recently cast a unanimous vote “to recommend $750 million in public funding for a $1.9 billion stadium,” ESPN reported, drawn from hotel taxes. That sum would be added to $500 million from owner Mark Davis, “which includes a loan from the NFL for a new stadium, to the project,” the network added. “The family of Sheldon Adelson — chairman of casino and resort outfit Las Vegas Sands Corporation — has pledged another $650 million for the proposed 65,000-seat, domed venue, which would be shared with the UNLV football team.”

The Spanos family, owner of the Chargers, has until January 2017 to decide whether to serve as a tenant in a to-be-built mega-stadium in Inglewood owned by Stan Kroenke and the officially relocated Los Angeles Rams. If the Chargers don’t take the option, Raiders owner Mark Davis will then have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

In the days after the Jan. 12 announcement that the NFL had given its blessing to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Inglewood, there was considerable cynicism in San Diego and the sports world in general about the Chargers’ one-year option. The assumption was the team was gone.

But in the past 10 days, there have been glimmers of hope that the Chargers may yet be able to work with the city and county of San Diego to build an NFL-worthy stadium with $350 million of public subsidies. The main reason is the emergence of Fred Maas — a high-profile developer and former leader of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversaw highly successful redevelopment efforts in downtown San Diego — as a special advisor to the Chargers helping get a stadium built. The Union-Tribune has more:

“(Maas) has been around San Diego a long time,” Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said on a video posted to the team’s web site. “… He’s very familiar with all the political aspects of what goes on in the city, how all that works. His knowledge of San Diego as a whole will help us.” …

 

Maas was the stadium point man for former Mayor Jerry Sanders, as well as the former director of the Centre City Development Corp.

 

The Chargers suggested to Faulconer that he consider Maas to head the city’s side of stadium negotiations in 2014.

 

After meetings with Faulconer, Maas withdrew from consideration, citing concerns about the commitment he would have to make considering all that the new mayor was working through. … It was around that time in late 2014 that many people close to Spanos began to indicate he had essentially given up on getting a stadium deal in San Diego.

The San Diego Reader offered this tart description of Maas: “a specialist in steering public money into private real estate ventures.”

Raiders owner blasts A’s over long lease

Meanwhile, in Oakland, no Maas-type figure has emerged to help owner Mark Davis deal with local governments. While the Raiders renewed their lease for another year at O.co Coliseum, Davis is sounding increasingly downbeat about the lack of progress toward a new stadium — especially because of the actions of the Oakland A’s, the other primary tenant at the Coliseum.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s,” Davis told CSNBayArea.com … . “They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back. Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”

That’s from coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Leaders of Nevada’s largest city are wooing Davis. Their strongest argument is the prospect of the Raiders not having to pay much or anything toward construction of a new stadium that an NFL team could share with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ football team. Last month, the Review-Journal reported, Davis went to Vegas and …

… met with casino giants Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta, UNLV president Len Jessup and former school president Donald Snyder. Adelson’s Sands Corp. has proposed building a $1.2 billion domed stadium … .

Long-standing NFL concerns about having a team in America’s sports betting mecca remain intact, if not as prominent. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft have come under fire for their early investments in DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports betting site that has exploded in popularity since 2014, and they may be forced to sell their shares.

The Chargers were given a one-year option to move — an option that seemed far more like an unserious public-relations ploy to suggest that they hadn’t made their minds up than a sign they actually might not leave. Team owner Dean Spanos and his stadium point man, Mark Fabiani, have an awful relationship with the San Diego establishment, starting with Mayor Kevin Faulconer. If the Chargers choose not to leave San Diego, the Oakland Raiders would then have a one-year option to move.

This followed a wild day at the NFL owners’ meeting in Houston. The NFL relocation committee initially voted 5-1 to support the Chargers’ and the Raiders’ plan to build a stadium in Carson, move their teams and lay claim to the Los Angeles market. That was followed by subsequent votes of all 32 owners in which 20 backed requiring the Chargers to abandon their partnership with the Raiders and share a stadium in Inglewood with the St. Louis Rams, and 12 backed the Carson plan.

As the day wore on, support emerged for a third option: clearing the Rams to move to Inglewood and build a stadium there, while allowing the Chargers to join the Rams in a year or two after reviving talks with San Diego officials on how to fund and build a billion-dollar-plus NFL stadium. That morphed into the decision to give the Chargers an option to stay in San Diego with a one-year window to join the Rams in Inglewood.

Here’s more from the Los Angeles Times:

Until the stadium is complete, the Rams are expected to play temporarily at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. If the Chargers join them, it’s unclear where they will play, though the NFL sees Angel Stadium, Dodger Stadium and even the Rose Bowl, which declined last year to bid on hosting a team, as potential options. …

 

The maneuvering between the projects included Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Iger joining the Carson project pending its approval. In the weeks leading up to the vote, he vigorously lobbied for Carson, making phone calls to NFL owners, as did Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who orchestrated Iger’s involvement. Iger presented Carson’s plan to owners Tuesday, along with Davis and Spanos.

Chargers assured they’ll share in Inglewood bonanza

According to many reports, the key to the NFL owners’ landslide vote was assuring the Chargers that they wouldn’t be in a completely subordinate position in sharing the Inglewood facilities with the Rams. Moving to Los Angeles would be much less of a bonanza for the Spanos family if it had to pay heavy rent and was shut out of many of the ancillary ways that stadiums and big mixed-use development projects make money. The Times put it this way:

In the last several days, fellow owners worked behind the scenes to bring Kroenke and Spanos together in an accord that allows them to be equitable partners in the Inglewood stadium. The only shared stadium in the NFL is in East Rutherford, N.J., which is home to the New York Giants and Jets.

So what’s next for the Raiders?

In an odd interview Tuesday night, owner Mark Davis suggested he might take his team to Great Britain or some other locale far from the western division of the American Football Conference; his team’s lease is up at what used to be known as the Oakland Coliseum.

But coverage in the Bay Area has focused on the likelihood of the NFL pressuring the Raiders to play in Santa Clara at the 49ers’ gleaming 2-year-old Levi’s Stadium — with the sort of subservient relationship to the 49ers that the Chargers hope to avoid in Inglewood.

A series of unflattering media reports have depicted Raiders owner Mark Davis as clueless and outmatched by his responsibilities, with relatively few financial resources. Even if Davis had the best press in the world, however, he would have huge obstacles to overcome. Unlike the owners of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams — the other teams in the L.A. triangle — he has no leverage with his home-town officials. Between their own budget headaches and a long history of scraping with Mark Davis’ late father, previous owner Al Davis, Oakland officials have no interest in offering a subsidy of any kind to the team and appear indifferent to the team departing.

Meanwhile, the Raiders’ and Chargers’ announcement earlier this year that they wanted to build a shared $1.7 billion stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County is far less advanced than Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s planned $1.8 billion Inglewood stadium project. Kroenke has all has necessary environmental OKs to begin construction, and as the league’s second-wealthiest owner, the multibillionaire has no need to hunt for public subsidies or partner with other teams.

If Kroenke is willing to flout league rules and move a team without permission from three-quarters of team owners — as Al Davis did when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982 — he has clear sailing ahead. But if the league puts up enough obstacles to a unilateral move — say, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell trying to withhold TV contract money or threatening some other highly punitive action — Kroenke would be forced to reconsider. As the past three years have shown, Goodell is the most unpredictable commissioner of a major U.S. sport in memory.

No team has enough owner support to relocate — yet

Pro Football Talk, generally the best connected of any media covering the NFL, looks at a possible — perhaps likely — scenario. It appears to be what Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan was talking about last week after owner meetings in New  York City when he referred to a “Plan C.”

With Chargers owner Dean Spanos definitely having the nine votes needed to keep Rams owner Stan Kroenke out of L.A. and Kroenke likely having the nine votes needed to keep Spanos out of L.A., the future of the NFL in Los Angeles could hinge on the ability of Spanos and Kroenke to work something out. …

 

Some owners actively oppose Kroenke’s desire to move the Rams, believing that Spanos has tried long enough to get a new stadium in San Diego, and that St. Louis is on the verge of crafting a viable stadium proposal to keep the Rams. But if at least nine owners feel strongly enough about Kroenke getting the L.A. market to vote against the Chargers, the situation will remain at impasse, with both teams in limbo.

 

A brokered deal would hinge, as many such arrangements do, on money and/or other considerations. With each owner able to block the other from moving, one owner needs to persuade the other owner to drop his opposition. In addition, then, to the relocation fee that would be paid to the league generally, the owner who moves to L.A. may have to make a large, separate payment to the one who doesn’t.

 

Likewise, the arrangement could include other terms. For example, if Spanos accepts that the Chargers will stay in San Diego and the Rams will move to L.A., the league could agree that only one team would be in L.A. …

 

It’s becoming more and more clear that something will happen, sooner than later.

Owners eager to set up team in L.A.

Meanwhile, the eagerness of the other owners to get a team in Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. Last week, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Jr. and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay all told reporters in multiple interviews that it was quite possible the NFL would have a team playing in the nation’s second-largest market in 11 months.

It seems unlikely that the league would allow two teams to play in temporary quarters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or at the Rose Bowl in the same season. So NFL insiders offer this scenario as increasingly plausible: Kroenke gets the necessary support in a January vote to allow him to bring the Rams back to Los Angeles — after he makes a big enough payoff to Chargers owner Dean Spanos to drop his interest in Los Agneles.

The NFL has long liked the idea of teams sharing new stadiums, as the New York Giants and Jets do in the Meadowlands facility in northern New Jersey. So perhaps “Plan C” is for the Chargers to sign on as a secondary tenant in Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium. But that’s an awfully complex negotiation to finish by the January vote at which NFL owners want to take decisive action.