The Raiders Are Talking About Leaving for San Antonio, and Oakland Should Let Them Go

Here's a good indicator of how entitled and cynical your average NFL franchise owner is: On Tuesday Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis confirmed that he met with city officials in San Antonio, presumably to discuss moving his team to the Texas city because his current hometown won't give him $600 million.

One way to write about this story would be to repeat the words "Mark Davis is a greedy asshole with more chutzpah than brains" a couple dozen times and call it a day, but I guess we could use some context. The people who run the city of Oakland want to work with developers to create something called "Coliseum City," a bunch of new hotels, retail space, residential units, and public transportation improvements centered around the space where the nearly 50-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum (technically the O.co Coliseum) now stands. This shiny new neighborhood (plans for which have some longtime area residents worried) could also include some new sports facilities, but the city council has said that it won't be devoting any public funds toward constructing these stadiums—a fairly reasonable request, especially seeing as how Oakland spent $14 million to host Raiders games a couple years ago while cutting the police department budget and the city and county still owe about $140 million on the renovations made to the Coliseum in the 90s. Despite this, the Raiders want the city to issue $600 million in bonds to pay for a new home field—preferably, one that would only be used for football, a request that only a greedy asshole with more chutzpah than brains could make.

Complicating matters is that the Raiders share the Coliseum with the Athletics, who just signed a ten-year lease to remain there (technically they can leave pretty easily in a few years if they like, and the team has talked about moving to nearby San Jose, but we don't need to get into that). The Raiders have wanted to tear down the stadium and build a football-only facility in its place (with a new home for the Athletics next door, presumably) for some time now, but it's not clear where the money for that would come from. Earlier this month, when it came out that the Raiders were basically getting a wrecking ball ready, no one thought they were serious—county supervisor Nate Milley even told the San Francisco Chronicle that the idea was "totally preposterous…This is either smoke and mirrors or they're on crack."

The news that Davis was not-so-secretly mulling a move to San Antonio, where the Raiders would probably play in the Alamodome until a new stadium was built, was greeted with similar detachment by city officials. As Oakland City Councilman Larry Reid said, "If the city of San Antonio is willing to float $600 million worth of bonds, then certainly that is an option for the Raiders to consider." That is an extremely polite way of saying that if Davis can find a sucker willing to spend hundreds of millions to build him a new toy that will jack up the value of his franchise, he should go do that.

This is the correct response. As noted by San Jose Mercury News columnist Tim Kawakami, the talk of San Antonio is just one stage of what's sure to be a long, torturous negotiation over a stadium deal. Davis has also dropped hints he's thinking about moving the team back to LA, where the Raiders played from 1982 to 1994, and he could threaten to go to Portland, Oregon, if he really wanted to. But why let him make those veiled threats, even as a transparent play for leverage?

The NFL is a state-sanctioned monopoly that gets fat off of our tax dollars. The average team is worth more than $1 billion and nearly all of them make money for their oligarch owners. The league is not a public utility, it performs no great service for the citizens of the cities its based in, and it's borderline criminal that those towns sometimes spend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance stadiums that primarily benefit the owners. If Mark Davis can get some city to throw millions at him and his team (which has been terrible for over a decade, by the way), Oakland should wave goodbye to him. A football team run by an owner who's threatening to leave isn't worth the money and pain it takes to keep it around. Quite simply, you don't need greedy assholes with more chutzpah than brains in your town.

Harry Cheadle thinks Seattle made the right choice by not building a new arena for the Sonics, by the way. Follow him on Twitter.