Las Vegas Raiders

Inaugural season: 1960

Home field: Allegiant Stadium, Paradise, Nevada

Owner: Mark Davis

Team colors: Silver and black

Overview

The Las Vegas Raiders are an American football team that plays in the West division of the American Football Conference (AFC) of the National Football League (NFL). The Raiders are one of the iconic franchises of the NFL with a loud, distinctive fan base known as Raider Nation. This unique collection of fans is famous for their energetic displays, outrageous black and silver costumes, metallic face paint, and loud demonstrations during games. This happily over-the-top subculture has endured and even grown despite several relocations: the team began in Oakland, California; moved to Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994; returned to Oakland; and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2020.

Since their founding in 1960 the Raiders have registered a mixed record of success on the field, most notably winning three Super Bowl championships in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The team’s glory years came under the leadership of head coach John Madden, who took the club to the NFC Championship game seven times and helped them win Super Bowl XI in 1977. Over the course of his decade-long tenure with the team, Madden eventually earned a 112–39–7 record—good for a .742 winning percentage overall.

The Raiders' success under Madden helped build the team's avid fan base, as did the development of some of the more notable rivalries in the NFL. For many years the Raiders were one of two teams—alongside the San Francisco 49ers—that made the San Francisco Bay area their primary home. As a result, even though the two teams played in separate conferences in the NFL and only played each other every four years, the teams became bitter rivals. Generally, the teams’ fan bases liked to view themselves as representing the stereotypical spirit associated with their respective cities: The Raiders were loud with working-class roots, while 49ers fans were characterized as more urbane and cultured. The Raiders also developed a bitter rivalry with division rival Kansas City Chiefs that arose in part due to the controversial move of Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Kansas City Athletics to Oakland in 1969 and a series of high-octane and penalty-ridden games in the two teams’ shared 60-plus year history. Other longstanding divisional rivals include the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Chargers.

Thanks to the loyalty of its fan base, its rich on-field history, and the potential revenue gains associated with becoming Las Vegas’s second professional sports team, Forbes magazine estimated the net worth of the Raiders at $2.42 billion in 2019. Overall, the Raiders were rated as the twenty-sixth most valuable professional sports franchise in the world, and the twelfth most valuable NFL franchise, in 2020.

History

The Oakland Raiders were one of the original teams of the American Football League (AFL), a league formed by potential professional football team owners who had been unable to secure their own NFL franchises. Seeking to challenge the dominance of the NFL, the AFL was established as an eight-team league, with franchises located in markets on both US coasts. The Raiders franchise was originally intended to be located in Minneapolis. However, the NFL tried to undermine the nascent AFL’s strength by making appeals to several AFL investment teams in which they offered a chance to join the NFL as expansion teams. Although only the Minnesota franchise accepted the NFL’s overtures, the AFL was nonetheless left scrambling for a replacement team.

Oakland was not the AFL’s first choice. In fact, there was no ownership team in place in the city, no professional football stadium, and little civic demand for a team in comparison to many other communities in search of a professional football team they hoped could help establish a city’s identity on a national basis. However, the owner of the Los Angeles Chargers threatened to abandon his franchise unless the AFL selected a second West Coast-based team for its eighth team that would limit the travel requirements for the Chargers and offer them a natural rival. Thus, as opposed to almost every other professional sports franchises, the city of Oakland was chosen first, with the details regarding how to incorporate the team into the city’s existing infrastructure being pushed into the background. Eventually, the city was able to cobble together an ownership team headed by F. Wayne Valley, a successful home-builder in California.

The new franchise held a contest to select the team’s name. The Oakland ownership committee ultimately chose the Oakland Señors as the winning entry in honor of the region’s original Spanish settlers. However, the name was immediately the source of widespread jokes and protests from media figures who warned the team’s management that newspaper printers lacked the ability to place a Spanish tilde accent mark over the letter “n” in Señors. The owners returned to their original list of candidate names and quickly chose the Raiders over their back-up option of the Lakers. A logo featuring a helmeted pirate (or raider) was soon unveiled to coincide with the new team name.

Little research had been done regarding whether Oakland had any interest in a football team. As a result, attendance over the franchise’s first three years was poor, with the team averaging fewer than 11,000 people per game. The Raiders’ on-field results were equally underwhelming, in part because the team had three different coaches in its first three years, a period during which the Raiders went 9–33 before Al Davis took over as coach in 1963. Under Davis’s direction, the team slowly began to improve. Davis would eventually go on to become part of the Raiders’ ownership team in 1966 and principal owner in 1972.

As part of the team’s management, Davis chose John Rauch as his successor. Rauch went 25–3 in two years, including taking the team to its first Super Bowl appearance, a 33–14 loss to the Green Bay Packers in 1968. Rauch quickly tired of Davis’s intense micromanaging and resigned to become the head coach of the Buffalo Bills. In his stead, Davis selected John Madden as coach. Madden subsequently led the Raiders to ten consecutive winning seasons, seven division titles, and a win over the Minnesota Vikings at Super Bowl XI. Following the 1979 season, Madden joined the broadcast booth on a permanent basis. His replacement was Tom Flores, who continued Madden’s run of success, winning Super Bowls in 1981 and 1984. After Flores fell to 5–10 in 1987, he was replaced with Mike Shanahan, who lasted only two seasons. Although Art Shell took the Raiders to the playoffs in the 1990, 1991, and 1993 seasons, his lack of division titles and playoff successes led to his firing in 1994.

Between 1967 and 1993, the Oakland Raiders ruled as one of the NFL’s elite teams. By contrast, the team struggled to maintain an equivalent level of success and stability in the years that followed. After Shell’s departure in 1994, the Raiders endured a long postseason drought. The team experienced a resurgence of sorts in the early twenty-first century, reaching the playoffs in 2000, 2001, and 2002 and even making an appearance at Super Bowl XXXVII in early 2003, where they lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. After that Super Bowl appearance, however, the Raiders again declined, missing the playoffs every year until 2016, when they entered as a wild card team and lost to the Houston Texans. Part of the team’s difficulties were the result of a string of coaching changes that played out between 1995 and 2018. During that period, thirteen different men coached the Raiders, with the average tenure of each new coach lasting just over two years. After firing Jack Del Rio following the 2017 season, the Raiders again turned to Jon Gruden to change the team’s fortunes. Gruden previously coached the team from 1998 to 2001, acquiring a 40–28 record in the process. In both the 2018 and 2019 seasons, however, they did not make the playoffs.

The move of the Raiders to Las Vegas was partially driven by the limited seating capacity of the Raider’s RingCentral Coliseum, an aged facility formerly known as the Oakland Coliseum. Capable of sitting 56,057 people for football games, the Coliseum was the second smallest stadium in the NFL, bigger only than Dignity Health Sports Park, the temporary home of the Los Angeles Chargers until their new stadium was completed in 2020. For the 2018 season, the Raiders averaged 57,919 fans per game, the fourth lowest attendance in the NFL. By comparison, the new stadium constructed for the team in Las Vegas, also completed in 2020, had a seating capacity of 65,000, with more luxury boxes and premium seating options.

Though the team remained in Oakland and played at the Coliseum through the 2019 season, the announcement was made that their name had officially been changed to the Las Vegas Raiders in early 2020. By September of that year, the Raiders had played their very first game on their new home field at Las Vegas's recently finished Allegiant Stadium, securing a win against the New Orleans Saints, though fans were not allowed to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The team started strong in their first season in Las Vegas, but ultimately finished with an 8–8 record and missed the playoffs once more. The following year the Raiders again got off to a good start, winning their first three games. However, the franchise was rocked by a scandal when it was revealed that Gruden had consistently used racist, homophobic, and misogynistic language in email exchanges. Gruden resigned as head coach in October 2021, and the Raiders and the NFL as a whole grappled with heightened scrutiny of workplace culture and leadership.

Notable Players

By the early 2020s, twenty-six Raiders players had been enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including several who played all or most of their careers with the team. Most of their Hall of Fame players are associated with the team’s heyday between 1967 and 1985. Among the players in the Hall from this period are quarterbacks George Blanda (played for the Raiders between 1967–1975) and Ken Stabler (1970–1979); wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff (1965–1978); tight end Dave Casper (1974–1980, 1984); offensive linemen Jim Otto (1960–1974), Gene Upshaw (1967–1981), and Art Shell (1968–1982); cornerback Willie Brown (1967–1978); defensive end Howie Long (1981–1993); linebacker Ted Hendricks (1975–1983); and punter Ray Guy (1973–1986).

Other key players for the Raiders have included quarterbacks Jim Plunkett (1979–1986) and Rich Gannon (1999–2004); running backs Marcus Allen (1982–1992) and Bo Jackson (1987–1990); wide receivers Tim Brown (1988–2003) and Cliff Branch (1972–1985); safety Jack Tatum (1971–1979); cornerback Lester Hayes (1977–1986); guard Steve Wisniewski (1989–2001), linebacker Rod Martin (1977–1988); kicker Sebastian Janikowski (2000–2017); and quarterback Derek Carr (2014– ). In 2021, linebacker Carl Nassib made history as the first openly gay player on an active NFL roster.

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