The Oakland Raiders are having another tough season, but with some young players looking like they have talent and salary coming off the books, the team is ready to remain in the city after rumors that they may leave for Los Angeles, as news came out that the Raiders and the Athletics reached lease agreements with O.co Coliseum.
According to the Associated Press, the teams extended short term leases for the Coliseum, which has been in the news multiple times over the past year for issues related to sewage and other problems. The Raiders and the Athletics are the only teams to share a stadium when it comes to the NFL and Major League Baseball and now the Raiders are in through the end of the 2014-2015 season, while the A's are in through December 2015 and now the city has those teams locked in until then.
This gives both sides more time to work out stadium issues, including finding sites and possibly building new complexes, something that the Athletics and the Raiders would like to do. The Athletics have been trying to move to San Jose for years, while the Raiders have been a team that has been mentioned as possibly moving to Los Angeles. Now that the lease agreements have been agreed to, they will need to be looked at by Oakland and Alameda County officials and the AP reports that for 2014 the Raiders will pay $400,000, while the Athletics will have $1.75 million over the next two years and that keeps the teams local until then. Plans are in motion to keep both teams long term as well.
The Raiders were mentioned as a team that could move into the LA Hollywood Park site, but this deal puts somewhat of a damper on that. Here is a look back to news on that site:
The league wants to bring a team back to one of the biggest media markets in the country and after looking like they were getting close with a proposal with Anschutz Entertainment Group for a downtown stadium, it appears a new plan is on the move. According to National Football Post, the league is looking into a new site at Hollywood Park, as it has the size to have a billion-dollar, state of the art stadium and also could house NFL offices and other facilities for the team and the league.
In the report, sources said that the league has spoken with a number of teams about possibly buying the area site and build a stadium on it, but obviously that won't happen anytime soon. The report says that four teams could be in the running since they can get out of their stadium leases after 2014, including the Chargers, Raiders, Jaguars and Rams. Obviously the Rams and Raiders previously were in LA and the Chargers move would not be as crazy as others, as they are in Southern California as well.
The report also says that the NFL could build a west coast office, NFL Network studio as well as a possible branch of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but all of that would have to come after a team agreed to buy the area or move. The report says that NFL teams had previously looked at the site and the Raiders had looked at it with Al Davis as a possible option, but instead after that broke apart, the team moved back to Oakland.
The NFL desperately wants a foothold in LA and it almost seems ridiculous that a team is not there now. The report says that the company selling the site could sell it to a team, but that they rather would build something more commercial and that "Terry Fancher, the executive managing director for Stockbridge Capital," isn't interested in getting involved in all that and would rather build another project there.