Raiding The Raiders

When I was a kid I didn’t follow football until about the fourth grade. That was when I signed up for flag football and I was a wide receiver and assigned the number 21. After being given that number I watched Monday Night Football and there was Cliff Branch, #21, playing his butt off for the Oakland Raiders. So I became a Cliff Branch and Oakland Raiders fan.

And then I went on with my life and didn’t follow football for many years. When I came back to it I became a Saints fan, as I was in Louisiana and that’s who all my friends liked. It enabled me to praise and complain about the same stuff my friends were talking about, other than beer, cops hassling us, the newest Def Leppard album, and parking on the levee. I’ll always be a Saints fan as it’s home, but I still have a soft spot for the Raiders.

I think one thing that burned me off from the Raiders was that by the time I came back to football the Raiders were moving to Los Angeles. Then I moved to L.A. and I was following the Saints (who were having their first really good year as they were going to the playoffs for the first time in their existence…where they lost to the Vikings in the first round. I think it was the Vikings. Stupid Vikings). A few years later the Raiders moved back to Oakland. Now they’re moving to Las Vegas.

This is what NFL teams do. They milk their fan base and community for all the money they can get. They expect loyalty while exhibiting none. The Raiders will remain in Oakland for three more seasons and will expect the city to support them while waiting for their shiny new stadium to be constructed in the desert.

Just about every team in the NFL, except the Packers (which is the NFL’s only publicly owned team), has threatened to move. Usually they scare their local communities and hold them hostage until they buy a millionaire/billionaire football team owner a new stadium. If they don’t then that team moves to another city hungry for the NFL and eager to be taken for a ride.

For years the NFL was afraid of Las Vegas. Professional football players have an easy enough time getting in trouble without being in Nevada where gambling and Prostitution is legal. But with gambling available online and in other locations in the country, Vegas doesn’t seem as scary. Besides, can players for the Raiders get into more trouble in Vegas than players for the Cowboys find in Dallas? Granted, there is more trouble to get into in those two cities than say, Green Bay. I haven’t heard of any cow-tipping scandals occurring with Packers.

But since we’re going to Vegas, wanna bet?

Creative notes and stuff: My first idea was to draw a person labeled “Oakland” playing the slots and getting nothing but lemons. What would be more accurate would be the owner Mark Davis giving them the finger. But I decided against the slots idea as I know another cartoonist(s) will end up drawing it. So instead of slots I inserted a slut.

That will probably keep this cartoon out of USA Today and several other family-friendly newspapers.

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