Raiders fans backing team despite pending Las Vegas move

Season tickets are sold out for this coming season. The team is coming off a playoff season and has legitimate Super Bowl aspirations. The quarterback has a new $25 million-a-year contract. The running back had the league’s top-selling jersey in May.

Sounds like a thriving franchise, huh?

Say hello to the 2017 Raiders.

The 2017 Oakland Raiders.

The Raiders are headed to Las Vegas for the 2019 or 2020 season, a relocation that was ratified by the NFL owners in March. When Raiders owner Mark Davis said at the annual league meeting in March in Phoenix - at which the vote on the Vegas move was taken - that he thought the franchise would be well-supported by fans during its remaining time in Oakland, it sounded unrealistic.

Weren’t the Raiders, after all, the definition of a lame-duck team? Wouldn’t fans revolt and take out their anger not only on Davis, as he implored them to do while asking that his coaches and players be spared, but also on Davis’ team?

There is much that remains to play out. But it appears there is at least a chance that Davis’ prediction will end up being on target.

Quarterback Derek Carr became one of the league’s most productive passers and among its most valuable players last season as the Raiders returned to the postseason. If Carr hadn’t been hurt for the AFC playoffs, the Raiders might have been an honest-to-goodness threat to the New England Patriots. With Carr back in the lineup, the Raiders should be a top AFC contender this coming season.

His status as an elite quarterback was affirmed by the Raiders with last week’s five-year, $125 million deal.

Carr could have more help on offense this season with the return from retirement of hometown favorite Marshawn Lynch, the bruising runner most recently with the Seattle Seahawks.

Perhaps the Raiders’ primary motivation for adding Lynch was to placate disgruntled Bay Area fans. Perhaps football considerations factored in significantly. Whatever the case, the fans do seem placated, at least for now, given their consumption of the available season tickets.

None of this is to say that Davis and the Raiders could have made things work long-term in Oakland. The league office and Davis’ fellow owners are abandoning the Oakland market for the Vegas market reluctantly. They would have preferred for the Raiders to have remained in the larger market. But league officials have said they did all they could and there was not a viable new-stadium deal made available in Oakland. It can be debated whether, by the end, those attempting to keep the team in Oakland had made an offer that, with further work, could have led to a deal. But it cannot be debated that the Raiders and the NFL put considerable time and effort into the deliberations.

This will be a fascinating season in Oakland, with a once-proud team highly competitive again. A Super Bowl push is not out of the question, even with the Patriots as imposing as ever. Raiders fans must figure out how to deal with their conflicting emotions.

It could be a story line as compelling as any league-wide in 2017.