The contrast between the Raiders’ traditional “bad boy” image (and the stereotypical fans in the “Black Hole”) with SLC’s squeaky-clean stereotype is pretty jarring.
San Francisco needs a team ever since the 49ers moved to Santa Clara. Perhaps the Raiders can move across the bay.
No stadium.
The stadium is everything; you must have a huge, modern stadium funded by the taxpayer. It’s a requirement. It’s why LA, obviously a huge market, went without a team for twenty years; no taxpayer-funded new stadium.
If I could prevail upon the government of Boise to build a huge new NFL stadium at taxpayer expense, you could move an NFL team there.
I saw you make this statement about a taxpayer funded stadium requirement before and I can’t find a source. Much has been said about the fact that the Rams’ new stadium will be privately financed.
Certainly a taxpayer funded stadium in move-in condition would be nice, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. Remember, San Antonio built the Alamodome in 1993. They’re still waiting for their team.
Of course, now San Antonio will be the threat owners use to [del]blackmail[/del] induce their current cities to fund stadium improvements, just like L.A. has been.
The Raiders moving to San Diego would be a grotesque outcome. It would be like the New York Red Sox or the Boston Yankees. But it is more than the fact that the Chargers and Raiders are traditional rivals. The Raiders and the City of San Diego both have cultivated an image around themselves, and those two images just are not compatible.
The San Diego Raiders might still “work” in the sense that their are probably enough Raiders fans in southern California who are willing to make the trek to San Diego every other week to ensure a consistently full stadium. But I just don’t see how the Raiders could ever truly be San Diego’s team.
strangely enough, there was a Boston Yanks team in the NFL that played at Fenway in the 1940s — Boston Yanks - Wikipedia
Well, Utah isn’t exactly known for it’s “Jazz” scene, either. As a matter of fact, its refereed to as “the Devil’s music”.
Same flawed logic as the Raiders getting a new stadium in San Diego; if San Diego and San Francisco weren’t willing to build new stadiums for their own teams, why would they do so to attract the Raiders?
To be clear, it wasn’t a serious suggestion. But my understanding was that SF was working with the 49ers to replace Candlestick, but the Niners pulled out when they got a better deal from Santa Clara.
I’m guessing they’d advertise heavily in Austin as well, which is nearby, upwards of a million people, and also does not have an NFL team.
I’d think the biggest question would be whether or not ANY pro football franchise could put a dent in the Cowboys’ fan base outside of the SE Texas area surrounding Houston (they’re all Texans fans). For whatever reason, the Cowboys seem to have a stranglehold on everywhere else in the state, and I suspect that the San Antonio Raiders would have a hard time winning fans.
Totally agreed. I would bet that most football fans in San Antonio and Austin are currently either rabid Cowboys fans, and/or rabid fans of a college team.
It’s rather like the issue that Jacksonville faces (in addition to not being a terribly large city) – they planted a new team there in '95, in between the market areas of three established teams (Atlanta, Miami, and Tampa Bay), and in a region with very strong ties to college teams. You were asking them to tear fans away from long-established loyalties, which simply may not happen.
I was going to point out that Jacksonville has also never been particularly good, but then I checked. They won 14 games in 1999? They’ve won 5 postseason games, for a postseason record of 5-6? Amazing what facts my mind chooses to jettison over time.
In only their second year of existence (1996), they made it to the AFC Championship Game, losing to the Patriots, 20-6. Interestingly, their fellow 1995 expansion team, the Panthers, made it to the NFC Championship Game in that same year (losing to the Packers).
I’m sure Giants fans appreciate that the Jags gave up on Tom Coughlin. The organization mismanaged their salary cap and they’ve never really recovered.
Speaking of San Antonio (I’m a transplant), there was a fan survey done once in the not too distant past that San Antonio has the highest percentage of Cowboys fans of any city in Texas. We do get Texans games on the radio here, but local NFL sports talk radio chatter is almost exclusively Cowboys-centric. I would expect that Jerry Jones has enough juice as an owner to block the needed 24 owner votes for a Raider move to San Antonio/Austin if it ever came to that.
Austin DOES have more of a corporate base than San Antonio, but Austin taxpayers would never she’ll out money for a stadium (voters rejected a referendum on a minor league baseball park; no way they’d cough up $400 million for an NFL stadium).
Part of the problem in ANY Sun Belt city is that so many residents are transplants who are still loyal to the teams they rooted for back home.
I suspect that Austin’s issue is two-fold. First, they’re pretty much in the Houston pro sports orbit (albeit, a very distant orbit), which means that most people there, and their media tend to follow the Houston teams foremost
Second, and most important, UT (University of Texas) pretty much takes the place of professional sports (or IS professional sports, depending on who you ask). in Austin. The Austin-American Statesman covers UT sports in exhausting detail every day of the year- UT football is king during the fall- pro sports don’t hold a candle.
San Antonio is less college-centric, with the only colleges being Incarnate Word and Trinity, both of which are less than athletic powerhouses. It’s pretty much the Spurs and the Missions, with no real local football presence other than high school.
So San Antonio makes sense, although the Cowboys still have a lock on the area.
There’s another good-sized city with a domed stadium available - St. Louis 
No, there will never be another NFL team there in the lifetime of anybody reading this.
[It could be the Las Vegas Raiders.
Well, if the NFL begged really, really hard, we might let them come back.