The Oakland Raiders have tonight's game against the Kansas City Chiefs, then two more home games on the docket at O.co Coliseum before the end of the season and, quite possibly, the end of their time in Oakland.
The lease for the Raiders stadium expires, and a subsequently monumental decision about where the team will call home in the future comes, after the final regular season game this year.
"What I don't want to do is get caught up in an endless cycle of one-year extensions," Raiders owner Mark Davis said, according to Ian Rapoport of NFL.com. "Those lease extensions, they tend to give comfort."
Among the possible options Davis is facing, signing another one-year lease extension seems the least palatable. The team could stay in Oakland with a new stadium, or Davis could even choose to move the team to a new location - perhaps Los Angeles or San Antonio, both of which have been touted as possible landing destinations should the Raiders be forced to relocate.
His preference is to stay in Oakland and get a new stadium, despite recently telling Vincent Bonsignore of the Los Angeles Daily News that, "Los Angeles is a great option."
"We are trying everything possible to get something done in Oakland right on the same exact site we're on right now," Davis said. "And I'd say 99 percent of my interests and energy are going towards getting something done there. That's really the crux of it right now. People want to know about the other sites and there are always options. But we want to get something done in Oakland."
But the stadium deal is complex from a political standpoint, and could cause Davis enough of a headache that he may simply choose to move the team elsewhere for newer digs and a bigger payout.
"We want to stay here in Oakland," Davis said. "There's other opportunities that would be much more lucrative for us, to be real honest. But we are really trying to get something done in Oakland. We want a stadium the fans and the team can be proud of."
Davis' mention of money and his comment about Los Angeles' viability may just be posturing on his part aimed at getting the city to pony up the dough for a new stadium. But it could also be the precursor to a move that Davis and the fans were surely hoping they'd never live to see.
