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Say Hello to the Las Vegas Raiders … Eventually
The NFL owners have voted (by a vote of 31-1) to allow the Oakland Raiders to move to Las Vegas. What’s not clear is exactly when the move will take place. A new $1.9 billion dollar stadium (which would make it the most expensive stadium to date) is planned to be built in Las Vegas but is not scheduled to be open until 2020.
The Raiders will play in Oakland in 2017 and have an option in Oakland for 2018. Whether Oakland will still want them in 2018 is probably an open question and, in any case, with the new stadium not ready until 2020, arrangements will need to be made for a stadium and a city to play in for the 2019 season.
This article from a week ago in the San Jose Mercury News discusses the business plan and economics of the move for both the city of Las Vegas and for the Raiders.
Las Vegas will provide $750 million for the new $1.9 billion, 65,000 seat indoor stadium via the sale of bonds that will be repaid over 30 years by an increase in a hotel room tax. Las Vegas city leaders forecast that the new stadium will draw an additional 450,000 visitors per year who will spend an average of 3.2 days per visit. They also forecast that about a third of the Raider tickets will be purchased by these visitors although no other city in the NFL averages even 10 percent of tickets by visitors. Stanford economics professor Roger Noll is highly skeptical of the plan stating that none of the city’s assumptions have ever taken place anywhere. He states that “the probability that it could happen isn’t zero, but it’s pretty close to zero.”
I’m not an economist, but I share professor’s assessment of the city’s assumptions. That said, I think that Las Vegas could support an NFL team. The population of its Combined Statistical Area of 2.3 million is 27th in the United States, so it would be a mid-market franchise. I don’t know who else would also be fans of the new Las Vegas Raiders. My memory is that the north Nevada population center of Reno tends to support the Bay Area teams and my guess is that they split 50/50 between being fans of either the San Francisco or the Oakland teams. Also, I’d guess that most Bay Area Raiders fans will find other interests during football season. And, the idea that Los Angeles, which now has two NFL teams and where the Raiders played from 1992-1994, would provide any substantial fan base is a pipe dream. In the meantime, there should be plenty of seats available at Oakland-Alameda Stadium during Raiders games starting in 2017.
Published in General
I would have rather seen them move to San Antonio. Oh well.
I’ll always remember their time as the Los Angeles Raiders because of this video:
Elvis is in the House! @docjay … I gotta know what a Raider fan from Vegas thinks about this?!
He’s caught in a trap…
Oh my … you are good Mr. LaRoche!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShcosKO5b6o
As things stand now, when the Raiders leave the Bay Area will be without a Professional NFL team. (Though now that kneeling CK is gone, there may again be hope.)
Looks like they’re going to deliberately sell less season tickets and rely more on fans from other cities. A great way to kill home field advantage. I read or heard Jerry Jones made a killing on this move. Naming rights I believe?
Think about their home filed advantage. Their opponents will be hung over and sleep-deprived.
@docjay is offline much of this week. He’s scouting Las Vegas area locations for his concierge STD clinic.
The NFL continually finds new and innovative ways to suckify their once fantastic product.
Its just a matter of time before the Raiders somehow add glitter to their uniform.
Teams are going to continue to move from football towns to tourist destinations and will have their names changed to monikers more resembling boy band names. The Cleveland Browns will become the Key West Cabana Boyz. The Buffalo Bills will become the Universal Studios Rainbow Alliance. Etc.
There needs to be a rule where if a team moves, it must relinquish it’s name, logo, colors, and history to the city it is leaving. It really sucks that teams like the Chargers, Raiders, and Colts can just pick up and leave the fans. The Ravens did it right. Leave the history behind in case another club moves to town, they can inherit the team’s past.
Following the Raiders is like caring about Madonna’s sex life.
This would have left us without the Utah Jazz, Taras.
As well as the Tennessee Oilers (brief as it was.) It is a shame, though; the Utah Polygamists could have been the terrors of the NBA.
The Ravens did not do so voluntarily. The City of Cleveland pulled out every stop they could to appease the local fans, including congressional threats. The “name and colors” preservation was an obvious compromise when the outrage shifted from preventing the move at all.
The Chargers started out in Los Angeles.
If any city can make its games a spectacle like no other to attract visitors, it’s Vegas. They should invent ways to entertain the crowd while refs debate the latest rule changes.
I’ve spent 80% of my life being disappointed by the OAK/L.A./OAK/soon to be L.V. Raiders.
This changes nothing.
Well that seems fair. It would be unjust if the actual football fans had to pay a high enough ticket price to support this enterprise. No, the fair thing is to extract the money from people who don’t have a thing to do with football. I remember several years ago when the Minnesota Vikings (or was it the Twins?) decided that they just couldn’t stand to play anymore in a stadium built in the 1980’s. One of the early proposals was to substantially increase cigarette taxes to pay for it. I’ve never taken a puff of tobacco in my life but it burned me up that some farmer in Greenbush or a grocery clerk in Hibbing who have never even been to Minneapolis should have to pay more for their smokes so they could subsidize football/baseball/whatever fans.
Agree. Although to be fair, proponents would claim that the new stadium benefits the entire community economically including additional tax revenue. However, most studies I’ve seen show no such outcome. Here’s one by the liberal Brookings Institute showing that public subsidies for sports stadia are economic losers for the community.
Yeah, it’s not uncommon for people to make the case that by taking my money and using it for something that will primarily benefit themselves, I will also be better off for it. I wonder what they would think of a state that stopped subsidizing athletic competitions, but subsidized oh let’s see . . . science fiction conventions?
People with impressive titles and credentials that are hired by groups favoring the building of publicly financed sports venues will always (or it seems to me always) paint an unbelievably rosy picture of the benefits to the local community. To the best of my knowledge and belief, those projections never materialize.
There was a published report years ago (several years after the opening of Camden Yard) that compared the economic realities versus the economist’s predictions; those predictions were not close to being true.
Here in Miami, the Miami Heat’s first publicly financed arena was recently demolished. The team moved about 5 blocks east to the American Airlines Arena because the old arena (I don’t think it was even 10 years-old at that time) wasn’t viable for them. The old arena promised great local redevelopment. It didn’t happen.
I can’t blame team owners for looking for ‘sweetheart’ deals however.
Joe Robbie, the Dolphins original team owner, fought with the city to refurbish or rebuild the Orange Bowl for many years. Finally, he said ‘eff’ it, I’ll build it myself. He did and it left him broke, forced to sell the stadium and the team, and probably contributed to his demise.
I guess his experience was a lesson for future owners: If they’re gonna throw money at you, you’d be a fool not to take it. OR… Never give a sucker an even break!
I did not know that. Thanks, I had thought they were more magnanimous (and perhaps Baltimore did not want to inherit the legacy of the Browns for obvious reasons ;) )
To be fair “Browns” is kind of a lame name. If their name was “Unicorn Commandos” I think they would have fought tooth and nail to keep that name.
Yeah, it is a pretty lame name. I guess it could’ve been lamer – Paul Brown might’ve been named Paul Gray or Paul Doe.
I knew a girl with the last name of Longbottom. That would have been interesting for Cleveland. So, Paul Longbottom, Paul Land, or many more. The hilarious possibilities are almost limitless.
I give the NFL ten more years: TV ratings are down; a lot of parents won’t let their kids play for fear of concussions, etc.; the league’s brand of red-white-and-blue machismo has had a target on its back for years; plus, there are now two NFL teams in nearby LA that will probably stink up the joint, but not before tainting all pro football in the Southwest. Further, people who live in Vegas bring their allegiances with them. Half the stadium will be filled with fans of the opposing teams.
I’m surprised that a town full of wiseguys and sharps would go “all in” on what to me looks like a sure loser!…Actually, I’m not surprised: Taxpayers (and tourists) will be footing the bill.
To be sure, the ‘Cleveland Does’ would be pretty appropriate since the resurrection of the franchise.
Yeah, they’ve been down and out about as long as I can remember.
(I live in a suburb of Cleveland, and though I am a Redskins fan I would like the Browns to not be so awful. People get pretty surly around here from September through January.)
Nothing new there, there’ve been plenty of seats at the Coliseum for decades. In recent years the Raiders have followed the lead of the A’s and placed tarps over entire sections. This allows them to pretend those seats don’t exist and claim a “sellout” for broadcast purposes, before that all Raiders home games were blacked out here in the local market.