Raiders LA rejection turned into a Vegas jackpot
The Raiders should send the Rams a thank-you card.Nothing extravagant.Certainly nothing that suggests they intend to be gracious hosts Sunday at Allegiant Stadium.Just a little acknowledgment that sometimes the people who stand in the way of what you want inadvertently help you find exactly what you need.In the Raiders’ case, that turned out to be Las Vegas.
And a magnificent stadium that looks like someone took the franchise’s personality, poured it into an architectural drawing and built it just off the Strip.Their home.Their identity.
Their town, at least when it comes to the NFL.Getting here required swallowing a bitter pill.But with the Rams arriving Sunday for their first game at Allegiant Stadium, preseason or regular season, the Raiders can appreciate how that disappointment helped change their future.They wanted Los Angeles.They might have gotten something better.To understand how, rewind to 2015, when three NFL franchises were searching for stadium solutions and Los Angeles was the biggest prize on the board.The Rams had an escape hatch in St.
Louis.The Edward Jones Dome had failed to satisfy the first-tier stadium requirements in their lease, allowing them to shift to a year-to-year arrangement and pursue a return to Southern California.Rams owner Stan Kroenke, a land developer at heart, had his eye on 298 acres in Inglewood, on which he would build a state-of-the-art stadium and surround it with a massive mixed-use master-planned district.The Raiders were stuck trying to make an increasingly untenable stadium situation work in Oakland.
The Chargers were fighting their own seemingly endless battle to secure a new home in San Diego.Eventually, the Raiders and Chargers joined forces on a proposed shared stadium in Carson.Two AFC West rivals, united by necessity.What followed was a yearlong soap opera of competing proposals, shifting alliances and powerful owners trying to determine who would get access to the country’s second-largest market.Kroenk...