BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Call it posturing, flirting or a transparent attempt for leverage, the Oakland Raiders' talks with Las Vegas as a potential future home have not been squashed by the NFL.
At least, not yet.
In what could be interpreted as a sign for Raiders owner Mark Davis to continue a Sin City dalliance -- Davis recently met with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval -- NFL commissioner essentially gave him the green light to continue talks.
While waiting for Oakland city and Alameda county entities to finalize the Raiders'... https://t.co/L5ViA4LNbD pic.twitter.com/VrDJditH9j
— Paul Gutierrez (@PGutierrezESPN) March 21, 2016
"Mark Davis is appropriately looking at all his alternatives," commissioner Roger Goodell said at the close of the NFL owners meetings on Wednesday.
"They need to evaluate those alternatives. I think their ultimate decision is a long ways off. There are several cities that have a tremendous interest in the Raiders. I'm hopeful also that Oakland will be one of those and that we can avoid any relocation to start with. Those are ultimately decisions about where they go and the impact that the potential gambling that we'd have to deal with."
The NFL has looked down upon the gambling capital in the past but the stance seems to have softened.
"We'd have to understand it, we'd have to understand what the impact is on us and ultimately each owner would have a vote on that," Goodell said.
The Raiders, meanwhile, finished third in a three-team race for Los Angeles, behind the Rams and San Diego Chargers, in January and could relocate to share the Rams' Inglewood stadium, which is scheduled to open in 2019, if the Chargers stay in San Diego.
Davis has said Oakland is his primary goal, that he wants and needs a new stadium there to stay in the Bay Area as the team has already agreed in principal to a one-year lease to play there this season, with a pair of one-year options to follow.
But the lease has yet to be signed by the city and county and it is scheduled to be reviewed by the Joint Powers Authority, which operates the Coliseum complex, on Friday.
"Relocations are always, as you know and we experienced it this January: one, painful, but two, subject to 32 teams' view about it," Goodell said. "They each make their own decision on that. That would be a factor that I think many owners would have to balance, the league would have to balance, but until we got a hard proposal that really put that in front of us, we'd have to understand what the ramifications of that are."