Goodman told ESPN Radio's "Capital Games" podcast on Tuesday that she expects the Raiders to move to her city unless the state botches the deal.
"The Raiders will come if Nevada handles this properly," Goodman said.
For years, there have been a few firmly held principles in NFL relocation discussions. One is the assumption that the NFL would never allow a team to go to America's Playground, where gambling — which the NFL historically has treated as verboten — is legal. Another is that NFL franchises routinely use one city's promises to drive up the bidding elsewhere.
Now both might be in some doubt. The newly moved Los Angeles Rams escaped St. Louis after a long fight, and Mark Davis' Raiders seemed to be left with little leverage in his desire to get funding for a new stadium in the Bay Area or move to a place that will help him do so.
Davis already has met with the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee, saying he'd front $500 million toward building a 65,000-seat domed stadium at a total cost of $1.4 billion. With casino backing added, nearly half the project would be accounted for but it would leave $750 million for taxpayers to fund, although that could change if the Nevada Legislature is allowed to reroute some room-tax funds to support the stadium. Goodman also said there were out-of-town investors who had expressed interest in helping fund the project if relocation was approved.
Even with the question marks and unknowns, Goodman says that the two sides are far enough along that there's no turning back.
"Mark Davis has assured us that Las Vegas is not getting played in a Raiders stadium deal," Goodman said. "I know we will have a team."
This might be true: Davis might really want to move there and has no designs on pulling a switcheroo and heading to Portland, San Antonio or some other location, or going back to Oakland with Vegas' offer as his leverage to stick around.
But would the NFL allow such a move? Even with the slow thaw of some NFL executives' views on Vegas in recent years, there still remains a prevailing old-school thinking in the upper circles that bringing the league to Sin City invites questions about whether games are being played under the full auspice of fairness.
Relocation requires three-quarters of the membership approval — in this case, 24 of the remaining 31 parent clubs — to green light such a move. As we saw with the musical-chairs-meets-dirty-politics case of the Rams winning an L.A. bid over the Raiders and San Diego Chargers, votes can swing in a hurry but also cause some deep-seeded resentment among the Billionaire Boys Club.
Here at the Shutdown Corner, we're in the we'll-believe-it-when-we-see-it camp, although it appears more likely now than it did when the Raiders had the rug pulled out from underneath them in February at the owners' meeting in Houston that granted Los Angeles to the Rams instead.
But don't make a futures bet on this happening just yet.
http://www.yahoo.com/sports/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/mayor--vegas--not-getting-played--by-raiders--expects-them-to-move-183103675.html
Edited by
mightymoe
on Tue 05/10/16 05:10 PM
* On the left *
* On the left *
Just kiddin lol
