This was always going to be Mark Davis’ lasting legacy as the Raiders’ owner and the one, ultimate crusade that his father left for him.
Get the stadium. Guarantee the fiscal health of this family franchise into the decades. Just do that. Get the stadium.
And Mark Davis just did it. However the Las Vegas move turns out for the Raiders, whatever problems arise… he got this deal, and got it through the NFL voting, when so many presumed he couldn’t.
Which is exactly what his father needed him to do.
Al Davis was a giant, a football immortal, and the first and last of his kind, but he could never quite crack the code to get his beloved franchise a new, state-of-the-art stadium that would lift the Raiders and the Davis family into the loftier end of the NFL financial hierarchy.
Al Davis didn’t accumulate extra millions–he would always pour most of it back into his roster.
Al Davis didn’t train his son in finance–Al just didn’t care enough about that.
But Al Davis knew the Raiders needed a stadium and all those exotic revenue streams.
Until the Raiders got that, no matter how many games and titles they won, the Raiders would always in some way look up at the Maras and the New York Giants, the Rooneys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Hunts and the Kansas Chiefs, and Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys.
And Al Davis did not want to look up to anybody, for any reason.
Al Davis tried in Oakland, then tried in Los Angeles, then tried in Oakland again, and never could get the formula right and never could diagram the political playbook the way he could see the football field.
There is something admirable about that blind spot, I think–Al Davis’ soul was too bound to the game for him to ever commit his mind and focus to the trite complications and frustrations of NFL high-finance and construction.
There were always players to scout or coaches to hire or schemes to devise.
Al Davis had the ruthlessness to move his team twice… but not the business sense to make sure the moves were worth it.
And neglecting the business side left a hole in this franchise that Al recognized and that Al knew had to be filled, at some point.
Al Davis could’ve joined as a full partner in the 49ers’ construction of Levi’s Stadium–and guaranteed some large portion of the hundreds of millions in profit that the 49ers are now taking in–but Al just wasn’t ready to make a deal like that.
He lost himself in the team, and pushed back the stadium decisions to another time, then another time, then another time… still, Al knew it had to be done.
Finally, in his later years, Al knew that it would have to be done by somebody other than him.
It had to be Al’s only child, who was given tacit authority to start looking around for stadium options about a decade ago, and then when Al died in 2011, Mark Davis was thrust into two emergency situations.
The first was the state of the football team, of course the football always had to come first for Al Davis’ franchise, and Mark Davis took a few years to straighten things out, but he stuck with Reggie McKenzie, who kept to it, and now the Raiders have this powerful playoff roster.
But the second crisis was the one Al kept putting off, and was the one Mark had been facing for years: How would the Raiders get a new stadium and remove themselves from the bottom-rung of the NFL revenue list?
There had been plans suggested, locations scouted, some dollars invested here or there… but when Mark Davis took over, there was nothing firm and no strong sense other than… they could not stay in the Coliseum for much longer.
I believed Mark Davis at the time and believe him now–he wanted to remain in Oakland, if that was possible. And if Oakland didn’t work, he wanted to build in Los Angeles, where he had spent those 13 years with his father when the Raiders had played there.
But he needed something. Relatively quickly.
And as the Oakland discussions continued to go nowhere, then Mark Davis made his play for LA with the Chargers, and that got blocked by the NFL….
I think Mark Davis continued to be simultaneously under-estimated (because he’s savvier than most give him credit for) and correctly-estimated (because he didn’t have the power to overwhelm anybody and never really tried).
He certainly isn’t a powerful owner. At some points, the NFL elite have wondered if they could get rid of him and install somebody else with the Raiders… but that never was possible, and Mark Davis wasn’t going anywhere.
To fulfill his father’s last incomplete mission, Mark Davis needed a solution. He needed an escape valve. He needed more money. And he needed a mentor.
All of those things came in one package, once LA was blocked by the NFL: Jerry Jones, who had guided the Rams and Chargers to LA, who turned the Cowboys and their new stadium into one of the great cash machines of the modern age, and who idolized Al Davis, to complete the family circle for Mark.
The Las Vegas effort wasn’t all Jones–Mark Davis partnered with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to tap into the public money, Davis off-loaded Adelson when a segment of NFL owners were uncomfortable with Adelson, and then Jones brokered the Bank of America loan that replaced Adelson’s commitment.
Jerry Jones loved Al Davis, and he was helping Al’s son get that stadium, at last.
Mark Davis also, I believe, needed an enemy to drive him to be a little Machiavellian, and he found that in the Oakland political system, which can be confusing and condescending even when it is dealing with a power player, and the Oakland politicians never really believed that Mark Davis was a power player.
It was not up to the Oakland officials to bribe Mark Davis to keep the Raiders in town, but once Las Vegas started discussing a $750M offering… Mark Davis had a reason to thumb his nose at the Oakland officials.
These are the issues that blocked any Raiders/Oakland stadium project…
-Mark Davis didn’t have enough cash to do this himself in Oakland;
-He could’ve accessed more cash by taking in a major investor, but all such investors would’ve wanted eventual control of the franchise, and Mark wasn’t interested in that;
-He wasn’t going to cede a percentage of this deal to a third party developer, and the NFL absolutely backed him on this;
-He wasn’t going to bide his time at Levi’s Stadium until an East Bay deal could be put together, even though the NFL at times wished he would.
-The A’s were under lease for many more years and would have to be dealt with in any Raiders deal with the Coliseum.
-And finally, Mark Davis wasn’t too interested in going deep into debt, but if he was going to do it, it was going to be with the security of the NFL behind him.
Jones lined up the Bank of America loan in Las Vegas… and I would guess that Jones is the one who assured Mark Davis that even if he has trouble with the debt-service payments, the NFL isn’t going to move to take over the team.
We will see about that part, of course, but for now, Mark Davis has his deal.
If you want to ask, how did the Raiders end up leaving their ancestral home of Oakland (again) for a smaller city that the NFL has, until now, try to avoid in almost every way?
It happened because Al Davis couldn’t figure it out, then left it all to his son.
Las Vegas is not at all the perfect solution–it’s probably the wrong city, with too much debt, it harms Oakland yet again, and it possibly stretches out the Raiders’ far-flung fan base a bit too far.
But the deal is there, warts and all, and Mark Davis just assured his own legacy by finishing off what his father never quite could.
