Common Sense Costs the Raiders

A failure in the courtroom, this latest round of Raiders vs. the NFL was a rousing success as a nostalgia tour, reminding us all of what we’ve been missing these last half-dozen years.

A flawed offense that couldn’t break down the opposition defense.

People in the seats losing interest, nodding off, bored to tears for weeks on end.

Al Davis talking the talk, Los Angeles advising him to walk.

Raiders gearing up for the big one and losing, 9-3.

Funny how adjudication imitates real life.

Back in Los Angeles for a fateful 9 1/2 weeks, these were the Raiders exactly as we remembered them, right down to the living-off-the-fat-

of-glory-days-long-gone bit.

Once, the Raiders were invincible in front of a jury, undefeated against the NFL, the Team of the Decades and Federal District Court. But past triumphs were of no consequence here, as a jury of Los Angeles-area residents listened again to the gospel according to Al and determined this time, by majority vote, not to buy any of it.

To cut through the legalese and put Monday’s verdict into lay terms, Tony Siragusa just sat on Rich Gannon again. Only this time, the stakes were higher. In January, the Raiders had ambitions on the Super Bowl, only to have them squashed by a 340-pound Baltimore Raven defensive lineman. In May, the prize was more than $1 billion and a legal claim to the market the team vacated in 1995.

If they couldn’t be champions of the NFL, the Raiders figured they could settle for wagging the tails of two cities, being crowned kings of both Oakland and Los Angeles. It was the ultimate Al Davis power-grab fantasy: To be master of his domain, and ours, at the same time.

Had he defeated the NFL here, Davis would have had the unprecedented opportunity to hold two cities hostage at once. It would have ranked as his greatest victory. With the rights to the Los Angeles market, Davis could have kept a gun perpetually pressed to Oakland’s head while making sure everyone else steered clear of L.A.

Davis’ strategy was to argue that the NFL forced him out of Los Angeles by pushing for a second team to play in a proposed football stadium to be built at Hollywood Park. With another team in town to siphon away fans from the Raiders, Davis claimed he had no choice but to escape from Los Angeles.

In the end, it came down to Davis’ word against the NFL’s. On paper, that might appear to be a no-win push, but in a downtown jury room, after three long weeks of deliberation, Davis’ word was deemed the weakest link.

“I don’t believe Al Davis was telling the truth,” jury foreperson Kimberly Hamilton said, referring to Davis’ testimony about a June 9, 1995, telephone conversation with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to discuss the deal with Hollywood Park.

“I don’t believe the conversation with Commissioner Tagliabue was an angry conversation, where [Davis] said, ‘You’re killing the deal,’ ” Hamilton said. “I believe that what [Davis] was doing was going to weigh both deals, the Oakland deal with the Hollywood Park deal . . . to see what he could get, so he could continue to weigh which deal was better.”

The jury also held that you can’t go home again once you’ve left that home in order to go home again. To put it in somewhat less-confusing terms: Once you’ve left Oakland for Los Angeles and then left Los Angeles to go back to Oakland, it’s pretty much time to make up your mind.

“Once the Raiders left, they forfeited their rights to the L.A. market,” Hamilton said.

Which sounds like pretty simple common sense, which sounds like we all just wasted two months of our valuable time, but that is how lawyers pay the mortgage.

So the Raiders aren’t coming back to Los Angeles, at least not until 2011, when their lease with the city of Oakland expires. The NFL, in any other shape or form, isn’t coming back, either, a point coldly hammered home in the aftermath of Monday’s verdict.

“Ironically, the league is meeting [today] in Chicago to take the historical step of realignment with 32 teams,” NFL Vice President Joe Browne said. “Los Angeles was awarded that 32nd team back in 1998 on a provisional basis. But unfortunately, Los Angeles could not come up with a suitable stadium, and so Houston won the 32nd team, which will kickoff [in 2002].

“Right now, we’re very satisfied with 32 teams. This is the largest sports league, in terms of the number of teams, there is. And there are no plans to expand beyond that.”

And Los Angeles is left to troll to see if any existing NFL team is interested in relocation.

“That’s the easy part,” Browne said. “The tougher part is: Where do they play?

“We heard evidence in this case from the Raiders that the Coliseum is not suitable [for an NFL team] and we know that there are no other 21st-century [football] stadiums in this area.

“The easy part would be finding which team would play here. The much more difficult question is where would they play.”

Which is where the Raiders came in before fading away. L.A., with still no place to play. Easier to realign 32 teams with 32 conflicts of self-interest than to realign that situation.