Personally, I can’t wait. Las Vegas is a suburb of California. I will be happy WHEN the Raiders move to Las Vegas because … I love me some Vegas. Do you hear me? I don’t gamble on sports; I’ve played blackjack on one of my nights in Vegas. That’s it. I’m all about family entertainment.
The NFL on the other hand, wants you to think it is against gambling. BSP in our cynical way, knows otherwise. The NFL wants your money, and it knows the reason NFL ratings never go down is because of the gambling enterprise. Ladies and gentlemen, that is fantasy football. Fantasy football gets money to the league, keeps people buying the Sunday Ticket package, and gets very casual viewers to pay attention to games they might not necessarily care about.
A team trails by 15 points with eight seconds left. The trailing quarterback throws a touchdown pass. Okay. The kicker kicks an extra point, and you’re screaming at the top of your lungs! You’ve won your matchup today, on a play that was meaningless in the outcome of the game. You watched to the end. The league loves you.
When the NFL wants you to know what it thinks, it assigns the task to Monday Morning Quarterback of Sports Illustrated. MMQB says this:
The short-term future question is this: will there be 23 owners besides Jones sanctioning a move by Mark Davis and the Raiders to Las Vegas, even assuming a workable stadium financing plan? This would require 1) owners who are indifferent or adversarial toward Davis and his family to now support him and, more importantly, 2) a willingness to embrace gambling in a town built upon the industry.
Usually, when presented with a question such as this, the answer is always the same: follow the money.
Follow the money, and follow the Raiders to Las Vegas. If Mark Davis gets the financial backing from Nevada and can move the team there, the owners trying to stop the move are going to get sued big time. He’d for sure win, just like his dad did when he left Oakland. Mark Davis is finding out his lineage doesn’t mean nearly as much as how much cash he has in his bank right now.
Good write-up on this topic. I’d love to head to Vegas for a NFL game. Looking forward to following the blog!
Thanks. I’m sure the Raiders will get the chance to go to Vegas but I’m not sure who’s going to pay their transfer fee.
That to me is the sticking point.