Mayor Believes its Viva Las Vegas for Raiders

Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, is confident that the Oakland Raiders will move to her city – providing the prospective relocation is handled properly.

The Raiders inched closer to a move to Las Vegas last month, after owner Mark Davis met Nevada officials and pledged $500m towards the construction of a new $1.4bn, 65,000-seat domed stadium. He said the Raiders would give Las Vegas and the NFL “an offer they can’t refuse” and would turn “the Silver State into the Silver-and-Black State”.

“Mark Davis has assured us that Las Vegas is not getting played in a Raiders stadium deal,” Goodman said on Tuesday. “I think they from what I understand, if truth is truth, they will come if Nevada can go ahead and do this properly. I know we will have a team.” She said that the stadium site could also host an MLS team and UNLV football.

Davis, who inherited the Raiders after the death of his father Al in 2011, wants the team to leave the Coliseum for a football-specific stadium, and is open to staying in the Bay Area, but has not been able to strike a deal with Oakland officials. The Raiders have two one-year leases at the Coliseum that take them through 2018.

Goodman said she told Sheldon Adelson, the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation and one of the stadium project’s major backers, “to get us a team two years ago.” She said it seemed more likely at the time that Vegas would look to court the Chargers, because of the city’s connection with the Spanos family, which owns the team.

The Chargers, however, are more inclined to stay in San Diego if a deal can’t be struck to move the team to Los Angeles.

Goodman said she doesn’t see funding for the stadium as a major issue. “We are getting calls from outside the region offering to help with funding for stadium in Las Vegas,” she said.

“I think we’re certainly mature enough and ready enough for a major league any sport and have been for some years – because we’ve grown to over 2.1 million in resident population and have over 42 million visitors,” she said.

Goodman also said Las Vegas would be a destination for fans from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and all over the west.

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Raiders Looking to Las Vegas

Mark Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, is set for another round of talks with officials in Las Vegas as plans to relocate his team there appear to have gathered momentum.

Davis is scheduled to appear at the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee meeting at 11am on Thursday, and under discussion will be the $1.3bn project being proposed by billionaire casino mogul and longtime Republican donor Sheldon Adelson.

Speculation has grown in recent days that Davis could be ready make a commitment to relocate his team to Las Vegas if financing is approved on Thursday.

The Raiders are staying at the Coliseum for one more year at least, but Davis, who inherited the team after the death of his father Al in 2011, wants his team to play in a football-specific stadium, and is prepared to move his team out of Oakland to get one. Officials in Oakland are reluctant to use public money to create a new football stadium; the Athletics also want a new ballpark of their own.

Davis has been in negotiations with Adelson over the move to Vegas for some months now, and toured UNLV’s Sam Boyd Stadium as a potential temporary home. The location for the proposed 65,000-seat Las Vegas stadium is a 42-acre lot on Tropicana Avenue near the university, a few blocks east of the strip.

Davis declined to speak to ESPN about Thursday’s meeting – which comes on the same day as the NFL draft.

Davis believes that the Raiders can expand their appeal beyond California with a move to Vegas – and that Raiders fans from across America would be keen to visit Vegas to catch a game as part of a weekend trip.

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NFL Official Acknowledges CTE Link

An NFL official has acknowledged a link between football and a degenerative brain disease for the first time.

Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice-president for health and safety, spoke about the connection during an appearance Monday at a congressional committee’s roundtable discussion about concussions.

Democratic representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois asked Miller: “Do you think there is a link between football and degenerative brain disorders like CTE?”

Miller, who was referring to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), began by discussing the work of Boston University neuropathologist Dr Ann McKee, who has found CTE in the brains of 90 out of 94 former pro football players.

“Well, certainly, Dr McKee’s research shows that a number of retired NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, so the answer to that question is certainly yes, but there are also a number of questions that come with that,” Miller said.

Schakowsky repeated the question: “Is there a link?”

“Yes. Sure,” Miller responded.

The NFL has not previously linked playing football to CTE, a disease tied to repeated brain trauma and associated with symptoms such as memory loss, depression and progressive dementia. It can only be detected after death. Among the players found to have CTE in their brains were Hall of Famers Junior Seau and Ken Stabler.

During Super Bowl week, Dr Mitch Berger, a member of the NFL’s head, neck and spine committee, would not draw a direct line from football to CTE.

Miller appeared at the discussion of concussions before the House committee on energy and commerce. ESPN first reported Miller’s appearance before the committee.

Last month, Berger, chair of the department of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, repeatedly said that while the types of degenerative changes to the brain associated with CTE have been found in late football players, such signs have also been found “in all spectrums of life”.

Tao, a protein that indicates the presence of CTE, “is found in brains that have traumatic injuries”, Berger said. “Whether it’s from football, whether it’s from car accidents, whether it’s from gunshot wounds, domestic violence – it remains to be seen.”

Miller said he was “not going to speak for Dr Berger” when asked by Schakowsky about those comments.

Just before Miller spoke, McKee was asked the same question about the link between hits in football and CTE. She responded “unequivocally” that there is, and went into details about her research findings.

Miller told the committee that the entire scope of the issue needs to be addressed.

“You asked the question whether I thought there was a link,” he said. “Certainly based on Dr McKee’s research, there’s a link, because she’s found CTE in a number of retired football players. I think that the broader point, and the one that your question gets to, is what that necessarily means and where do we go from here with that information.”

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Watt Not Shocked about NFL Head Trauma

Houston Texans defensive end JJ Watt says he’s not shocked by the recent clamour around head trauma – because he knew the risks going into the NFL.

Watt said he takes all the precautions he can when it comes to safety, but admitted: “I don’t think any of us got into this game thinking we were not going to get hit on our heads.”

The conversation about head trauma has intensified in recent weeks, thanks in part to the film Concussion, which details how many former players suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head. Fresh research into the deaths of Giants safety Tyler Sash and Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler found both players had CTE when they died.

Watt, a dominant defensive player who holds the Texans franchise records for sacks and forced fumbles, said he expects to get hit when he goes out on the field. “I know for a fact that every time I go out to practice I am going to hit my head. It’s just like a fire-fighter knows he may have to go into a fire at some point, or a soldier knows he may get shot at some point.”

He said: “While we are all learning a lot about and do understand there are serious implications that come with it, I don’t think any of us got into this game thinking we were not going to get hit on our heads.”

He added: “You do everything you can to make sure that you are safe and that you are sound, but I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t know that was a possibility.”

Boston University, a leader in researching CTE, has found the disease in 90 of 94 former NFL players it has examined. About 6,000 of 20,000 retired players are expected to eventually suffer from Alzheimer’s or moderate dementia. 

The list of NFL greats who have been found to suffer from the CTE include Junior Seau, Frank Gifford and Mike Webster.

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Cardinals Escape Packers in Overtime

Larry Fitzgerald’s brief but brilliant overtime heroics trumped another Aaron Rodgers Hail Mary and the Arizona Cardinals escaped with a 26-20 victory over the Green Bay Packers on Saturday night to advance to the NFC championship.

Fitzgerald turned a short pass into a 75-yard gain on the first play of overtime to set up his five-yard shovel pass reception for the winning score as the crowd chanted “Larry, Larry.”

The Cardinals (14-3), the No2 seed in the NFC West, plays the winner of Sunday’s Seattle-Carolina game for the title.

It can’t be as crazy as this one, which unfolded on the same field where the Cardinals beat the Packers in overtime 51-45 in a wildcard game in the 2009 season and where Arizona routed Green Bay 38-8 three weeks ago.

Rodgers, in a play reminiscent of his final-play heave against Detroit this season, took the snap with five seconds to go in regulation, scrambled around and heaved it 41 yards to the end zone.

Jeff Janis, a 6ft 3in receiver pressed into extended duty because Green Bay’s top two receivers were hurt, outjumped defenders Patrick Peterson and Rashad Johnson and clutched the ball to his chest as he fell to the turf in the silence of University of Phoenix Stadium.

Arizona won the overtime coin toss — after the referees declared the first toss hadn’t flipped — and on the first play, no one was covering Fitzgerald, who caught and ran through defenders to the five-yard line.

A strange play had given Arizona a 20-13 lead with 3:44 to play in the fourth quarter. Damarious Randall, who moments earlier had made a key interception in the end zone, deflected a pass intended for Fitzgerald inside the five-yard line and the ball sailed into the end zone into the hands of Michael Floyd for a nine-yard TD catch. Floyd also had an eight-yard touchdown catch in the first quarter.

The Packers (11-7) took the kickoff but went nowhere and turned the ball over on downs, setting up Chandler Catanzaro’s 38-yard field goal that put Arizona up 20-13.

With 55 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, Green Bay were pushed back into a fourth-and-20 situation at their four-yard line when Rodgers scrambled and threw 60 yards to Janis at the 36. A penalty pushed it back to the 41 and Rodgers threw incomplete before getting off his last, great completion.

Janis, who caught seven passes for 145 yards after having just two receptions all year, was hurt on his big catch and was helped out of the end zone.

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Rams Stan Kroenke Loves LA

Two decades after they left the Los Angeles area, the Rams are coming back. On Tuesday night the NFL’s owners voted 30-2 to let Rams owner Stan Kroenke move the team from St. Louis to the nation’s second-largest market – a region that has been without a team since 1994.

In approving Kroenke’s request to transfer the Rams for the 2016 season, the owners also gave the San Diego Chargers a one-year option to join Kroenke at the stadium he wishes to build in Inglewood, near Los Angeles International Airport. This allows Chargers owner Dean Spanos a final chance to get a stadium built in San Diego. If the Chargers do not move to L.A. in that year, the option will go to the Oakland Raiders who will also have 12 months to work a deal with Kroenke.

“Relocation is a painful process,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in announcing the decision at a special owner’s meeting in Houston. “It’s painful for the fans, for the communities, for the league in general. In some ways it’s a bittersweet moment because we were unable to get the kind of facilities done we wanted in their markets.”

Tuesday’s vote resolved a 21-year quandary of figuring out which team would fill the vacant Los Angeles market. The final resolution involved three teams and two stadium proposals: Kroenke’s bid to build a stadium in Inglewood and the Chargers and Oakland Raiders teaming up to build a stadium in Carson a few miles to the south.

While the owners’ committee on Los Angeles recommended the Carson project before voting on Tuesday, momentum had already started to back Kroenke’s proposal and urge the Chargers to join him. By Tuesday evening, Raiders owner Mark Davis had backed out of his partnership with Spanos and agreed to stay in Oakland, foregoing – for now – a return to the city where the team played from 1982-1994. That provided the opening for Kroenke to move.

Kroenke, a Missouri native, has been looking at the Los Angeles market for a few years. Two years ago he bought a plot of land in Inglewood near the former Hollywood Park racetrack and arranged to partner with the Stockbridge Capital Group to build a privately-financed stadium there. In his application to move to Los Angeles, Kroenke said the stadium will be ready for the 2019 season.

“This is the hardest undertaking I’ve faced in my professional career,” Kroenke said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Kroenke, the majority stockholder of English Premier League club Arsenal as well as the owner of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets and NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, faced pointed questions from St. Louis radio and television reporters, demanding to know why he is abandoning his onetime home city. Several times he talked about the need to build a “first class” stadium in Los Angeles saying it was what the Rams, their fans and other NFL teams deserved. “The stadia have to be of a certain quality,” he said.

Until the stadium is built, the Rams will play at the Memorial Coliseum in downtown Los Angeles, a stadium that was their home from 1946-1979 when they moved to nearby Anaheim after failing to secure a stadium renovation. Reports said the Coliseum has given the league permission to host a second team for the next three seasons. Both the Raiders and Chargers have played in the Coliseum in their histories. It was the Raiders’ home for 13 seasons in the 1980s and 1990s and the Chargers played there in 1960, the franchise’s first season, before moving to San Diego.

Goodell said the league will give $100 million each to the Raiders and Chargers to go toward the building of a new stadium in their cities if they can arrange for one to be constructed. The one-year window gives Spanos leverage against San Diego politicians and voters. San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer has promised a city-wide vote on a proposed $1.1 billion stadium near the team’s current one in Mission Valley. The vote would be to approve $350m in public financing for the project.

Spanos said he was going to take a day off before assessing his options. He would not commit to campaigning for a new stadium. “This is not a win for the Raiders,” Oakland owner Mark Davis said before adding, “we’ll see where Raider Nation ends up.”

Kroenke, who left behind an offer of $150m of public money from Missouri to be dedicated to a $1.1bn stadium in St. Louis, will presumably build the NFL’s most-expensive stadium in Inglewood – a facility that one owner described as “an NFL campus” – for roughly $2bn. But the lucrative potential of the Los Angeles market could yet make the new stadium and the extreme relocation fee of several million dollars worth it.

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St Louis Rams Kroenke Loves LA

The NFL would benefit most by moving the Rams to Los Angeles, leaving behind a St Louis market that lags economically and a stadium proposal doomed for failure, the team said in their relocation application provided to the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke, a real estate billionaire who still lives in Missouri, has proposed building a $1.8bn stadium in Inglewood, California, with plans to put the Rams back in the market they left to move to St Louis in 1995. The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders want to move to the Los Angeles area, too, proposing to share a stadium that would be built in Carson, California. All three teams submitted applications last week and owners meeting January 12-13 in Houston could make a decision on relocation.

The Rams’ 29-page application, first obtained by the St Louis Post-Dispatch, lauds the Inglewood site, saying it has already been approved by the league as a potential stadium location and would offer far more than just a home for a sports team.

“The stadium serves as the epicentre for a NFL retail and entertainment district that includes a 6,000 seat theatre and up to 8.5m sq ft of office space, hotel retail and dining options,” the Rams said.

The team also explained in a withering assessment why St Louis is no longer worth staying for.

The application said Kroenke has made “significant investments” since taking control of the Rams in 2010, yet attendance is well below average. The team sold out every home game in St Louis from its arrival until 2006, but has rarely sold out in recent years in part because of on-the-field performance. The Rams have not had a winning season since 2003, and finished 7-9 this season.

Taxpayers funded construction of the Edward Jones Dome, which opened the year the Rams arrived. The unusual agreement between the dome authority and the team requires that the dome remain among the top tier of all NFL stadiums. Instead, it is generally considered among the worst, the Rams said, and 12 years of lease negotiations to rectify that were unsuccessful.

Last year, a taskforce appointed by Governor Jay Nixon developed plans for a $1bn stadium along the Mississippi river near the Gateway Arch. Aldermen have already agreed to contribute $150m toward the project, which also calls for state funding, money from personal seat licenses and funding from the league and the owner.

The Rams, though, said the stadium is doomed to failure. For one thing, it notes that the “rent and operating structure are 20 times what the Rams pay now.”

“Any NFL club that signs on to this proposal in St Louis will be well on the road to financial ruin, and the League will be harmed,” the Rams’ application said.

In a statement, the stadium taskforce said it has offered “a spectacular stadium proposal” that is everything the league has asked for.

“The Rams’ assessment of their experience in St Louis after 21 seasons of remarkable support by fans, businesses and the community is inaccurate and extremely disappointing,” the taskforce said.

The Rams raised doubts that the St Louis market, which also has baseball’s Cardinals and hockey’s Blues, can even support an NFL team.

The application cited two NFL-commissioned studies of the Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland and St Louis markets. It says one study characterized the California markets as vibrant and growing, but said St Louis “lags, and will continue to lag, far behind in the economic drivers that are necessary for sustained success of an NFL franchise.”

Those studies “demonstrate that Los Angeles is a strong market with great opportunity, while St Louis is a market that will in all likelihood be unable to sustain three professional sports teams,” the application said.

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Cardinals Overcome Ravens

Chris Johnson rolled to victory. His Arizona Cardinals had to hold on to win.

Johnson rushed for 122 yards, 62 on a play where he rolled over the belly of a big defender and kept on running to set up a field goal, and the Cardinals held on to beat the luckless Baltimore Ravens 26-18 on Monday night.

Baltimore (1-6) drove to the 4 in the final seconds before Tony Jefferson’s interception deep in the end zone clinched the victory for NFC West-leading Arizona (5-2).

“A lot of things happened during the game,” Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said. “Good, bad and one ugly one, but we finished and made a great play at the end.”

Arizona led 26-10 before Asa Jackson’s blocked a punt to set up Joe Flacco’s 1-yard touchdown pass to Kyle Juszczyk. The 2-point conversion pass to Nick Boyle made it an eight-point game with 4:26 to play.

Baltimore got the ball back and Flacco quickly moved the team downfield before the final ill-fated throw.

“The punt block and all of a sudden you let them in,” Arizona’s Carson Palmer said, “but that’s what you want on ‘Monday Night Football.’ We made it a game at the end.”

Coach John Harbaugh said the Ravens had trouble with the communications system throughout the game, particularly in the final drive.

“The phones were going out so he couldn’t hear (offensive coordinator) Marc (Trestman),” Harbaugh said. “I don’t know why the phones were going out on that drive but they went out on that drive. Mark had to yell, we couldn’t get the personnel groups, all those things are really challenging when the phones are out.”

Baltimore moved the ball just fine despite those issues, just not enough. The eight-point loss was the most one-sided of the season for the Ravens.

“Any time you lose it hits you in the gut,” Baltimore’s Justin Forsett said. “But we’ve been fighting. We just have to keep fighting.”

Johnson also ran 26 yards for a touchdown. The 30-year-old running back, signed late in training camp after recovering from a gunshot wound during the offseason, topped 100 yards for the third time this season and didn’t even play in the fourth quarter. The last Arizona player to do that was Edgerrin James in 2007.

Palmer completed 20 of 29 passes for 275 yards and two touchdowns. Flacco was 26 for 40 for 252 yards, with a touchdown and that one interception. Forsett had a 14-yard touchdown run, but finished with only 36 yards in 12 carries.

A 26-10 lead seemed comfortable before Bryant burst up the middle to block Drew Butler’s punt to set up the final Ravens touchdown.

The play of the night came in the third quarter, when Johnson hit the line and was pulled down, but he came to rest on the belly of 6ft 1in, 335lb Brandon Williams. Johnson’s knee or elbow didn’t touch, so he alertly got up and kept running to the 4. Johnson said he’d never been part of a play like that.

“Basically, you just keep playing until the whistle,” Johnson said. “That is something Arians teaches us, we always have to play to the whistle and have to finish. That is something you learn coming up from little league: Keep playing until the whistle blows.”

The play set up Chandler Catanzaro’s second 21-yard field goal, making it a two-possession game at 20-10.

After Arizona scored again, Catanzaro’s try for the conversion bounced off the right upright and was no good, setting the stage for the tight finish.

The only turnover of night, before Jefferson’s interception, led to a touchdown that put the Cardinals up 14-10 at the half and Arizona never trailed again.

Justin Bethel, a Pro Bowl player on special teams the last two years, stripped the ball from punt returner Jeremy Ross’ hands and recovered at the Ravens 25. Penalties gave Arizona a series of chances inside the 5 and, finally, Palmer threw 3 yards to Michael Floyd for the score to put Arizona up 10-7 with 1:01 left in the half.

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