Don’t feel too bad if you’d forgotten all about the Oakland Raiders, because the once-fearsome franchise owned by the brusque Brooklynite Al Davis had pretty much fallen into, well, a black hole.
Nearly 14 years have passed since the Raiders last made the play-offs – and lost the Super Bowl, 48-21, to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose coach, Jon Gruden, had been traded to Tampa Bay from Oakland 11 months earlier for four high draft picks and $8m.
Between 2003 and 2015, the Raiders failed to make the play-offs, or even win more games than they lost. Interest dwindled to the point that a block of 11,000 seats in a stadium expansion to lure the Raiders back from Los Angeles in 1995 have been closed for four years.
That expansion came to be known as Mount Davis, after the brash owner who died in 2011, because it loomed over the 50-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum like a enormous white elephant, undesirable to fans of the Raiders or the Oakland A’s, the baseball team.
Even though the Raiders have undergone a stunning turnaround this season, winning 10 of their first 12 games and closing in quickly on a play-off berth, the upper tier of Mount Davis will remain covered by black tarpaulins, by league rule, unless the Raiders host the AFC title game.
The Coliseum, four sections of which is referred to as the Black Hole because creative fans wear dark-side black-and-silver costumes that often include face paint and plastic skulls, has as the result of the tarping the smallest seating capacity of an NFL stadium: 56,063.
The Raiders tarped off the seats in 2013 to ensure that at least 85% of seats would be sold within 72 hours of kick-off, enabling their games to be telecast locally (after more than half of their home games between 1995 and 2012 were blacked out).
The blackout rule was suspended last year, but the tarps have stayed on for Raiders’ games. The Raiders have been looking elsewhere for a new stadium; a $1.9bn domed, 65,000-seat stadium in Las Vegas has become the Raiders’ most viable option. (Money would come from the Raiders, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a hotel-room tax.)
The Goth denizens of the Black Hole hold placards at home games that read “Las Vegas: if you build it, we won’t come.” You can’t really blame them: Las Vegas is 550 miles from the Coliseum, and the Raiders have been in Oakland for all but 13 of their 57 seasons.
The NFL won’t hide that it would love to keep the Raiders in Oakland or the San Francisco Bay Area. Mark Davis, Al’s son and now the principal owner of the Raiders, would need to get 24 votes from the league’s 32 owners to move to Vegas – a sizable number.
The Raiders did not return several requests for comment from the Guardian about the short-term and long-term future of Mount Davis, tarped or untarped, and the Coliseum at large.
Stadium access via freeways and railways has long been regarded as superb. The Golden State Warriors of the NBA announced Monday they have sold out 200 consecutive home games at the 19,596-seat Oracle Arena, which is literally next to the Coliseum.
Despite having a winning team that is fun to watch, for a change, fans are hardly storming the gates. The Raiders are averaging 54,532 at the Coliseum – lower than last year’s average of 54,613, when the Raiders finished 7-9. In 2012, the last year with the open seats in the third tier of Mount Davis, the Raiders averaged 54,216, when they were 4-12.
(Oakland, designated as the home team, played Houston on 21 November at Mexico City, drawing 76,473.)
The Raiders’ thrilling 38-24 victory last Sunday at home over Buffalo drew a mere 54,759. Per the NFL Ticket Exchange, several hundred tickets are on sale, albeit at much higher than face value, for the Raiders’ final regular-season home game on 24 December against Indianapolis.
The Raiders, who share the AFC’s best record with New England and Tom Brady, very well could be in a position heading into that game on Christmas Eve, with a chance to hammer down home-field advantage through the AFC playoffs. The Raiders seem to know that their fans deserve as many treats as they can get.
At a news conference after the Raiders rallied to win 35-32 over Carolina at home on 27 November to assure a winning season, Derek Carr, the Raiders’ fourth-year quarterback from Fresno State, said of Oakland’s fans: “I know the heartache that they’ve had. Trust me, I’ve been a part of that heartache. I’ve given them heartaches during games in my short three years, but hopefully we’ve given them a lot of happy moments.
“I said when we won the championship in Fresno, I was part of a 4-9 team, got the head coach fired, all those things – when we won that championship the first time, I said the thing that makes my day is watching the fans celebrate, to be honest with you. Winning nine games, having a winning record for the first time in 14 years, I’m so happy for our fans because I know how much joy that brings to our city, I know how much life that brings to the city of Oakland. And that’s what I’m about. You guys know me, I love to make other people’s day and I’m glad they get to go home happy.”
If Mark Davis can dredge up enough support from owners to approve a shift to Las Vegas, the Raiders will move on, although it sounds like the team would have to recruit new people to recreate a Black Hole in Sin City.
And they would leave behind a boondoggle in the 21 sections of upper-deck seats covered by black tarps, with the Raiders’ familiar brand smack-dab in the middle – a shield with pirate wearing an eyepatch and a silver helmet with two swords in the background.
The Raiders may have a rich tradition, die-hard fans and a promising future on the field, but if they can’t whip up a ticket demand at a dumpy old stadium, they will leave town again, and this time they probably won’t come back.
