Oakland blunders over Raiders proposal to jump ship

Like a deadbeat dad desperate to avoid alimony payments, the Oakland Raiders are contemplating fleeing their hometown and moving into what effectively amounts to a duplex with the San Diego Chargers. The tentative plan would involve joint stadium occupancy with the San Diego Chargers, who are also planning to relocate to Los Angeles. Such a move would be a bit strange, considering that both teams are in the AFC West, but then again, the Raiders are well-versed in strangeness.

From the standpoint of a 49er’s fan, the move doesn’t bother me too much. The Raiders are like that really loud, really bad family on the block. You hope and hope that something or someone will put them in their place, and then poof—you look out your window one day and they’re getting put in the back of a police car.

From a sentimental standpoint, things get a little stickier. I just don’t like it when teams get moved around. It’s not like the Raiders are the Expos or the Houston Astros. They have a rabid, mentally unstable fan base that cares deeply for their laughably awful team, the ones who look like watching Mad Max was a seminal moment in their lives. Worse still, it would be an awfully bleak turn of events for Oakland; the Warriors are leaving for San Francisco by 2018, and the A’s have been pondering a move to San Jose for a good while now. Oakland could potentially be in the middle of a mass sports exodus the likes of which few, if any towns, have seen.

However, this sentimentality is checked by the fact that the team in question is the Raiders. So, in light of this, I think the best thing would be to just let them go.

Like the aforementioned deadbeat dad, the Raiders probably won’t get that far before they’re wrangled back to Oakland. It’s not like this whole fiasco is without precedent. If the Raiders were to move, they would have taken more trips to LA than I have in my lifetime. They’ll probably just end up back in Oakland again. Moreover, for whatever reason, Los Angeles seems like it’s poorly suited to keeping a professional football team for an extended period of time. Granted, most of the teams that it lost were the Raiders and Chargers (the Chargers played for only one season in LA before settling in San Diego).

Besides, the Raiders are so bad it’s criminal, literally. They’ve always had a reputation for sleaze, but this was also underscored by the fact that they won games. Their “just win, baby” motto set a pretty low bar. It doesn’t matter if you and everyone you attract are astronomical jerks, so long as you win. Now they’re just astronomical jerks, and it’s really hard to tolerate such overt crappiness for any longer than a couple of seasons.

It’s a pretty bad indicator of the overall health of a team when their games are routinely blacked out on television. And that rabid fan base is obviously a double edged sword. Yes they care, enough to get stabby when they used to play the 49er’s. Although, to be fair, that last example was really a group effort.

Whatever the Raiders do, it really doesn’t matter. They’re just going to wind up back in Oakland. I’ve got nothing to base this off of other than the cyclical nature of history, but that’s usually pretty solid.