Raiders/Aces owner Mark Davis

 

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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Like the annual monarch butterfly migration from Mexico and California, Raiders owner Mark Davis has a new annual head coach and quarterback once again for the 2025 season.

The Raiders are coming off a season of winning four of 17 games. And no matter whether the head coach is Jon Gruden or Josh McDaniels or Antonio Pierce or the current one, the affable and glib Pete Carroll, the value of the Raiders franchise keeps on appreciating.

It’s one of the financial wonders of owning a National Football League franchise and getting most of the revenue of a publicly-subsidized stadium: the Raiders are worth more than $7 billion. And perhaps even more after the Los Angeles Lakers sold for a cool $10 billion.

Raiders/Aces owner Mark Davis

 

Fan has her hand signed by Mark Davis before a Raiders preseason game in 2022.

Carroll is a pro. He coached a college football national champion at USC and won a Super Bowl as the former Seattle Seahawks coach.

And he’s expecting to win at the Raiders. In Carroll’s own words: “Oh, we are going to win a ton. We are going to win a bunch of games. I can’t even imagine anything else. I’ve been winning 10 games a year for 20 years or something, you know? I mean, what are my expectations? We are going to win a bunch, and I don’t care who hears that. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It ain’t about what anybody hears. It’s about what we do. And so, that’s why expectations are really high.
The standards need to be, so that the expectations can be met. We’ll see what happens. I wish I could
guarantee it to you, but I can’t even think of what else it could be, other than being really successful.”

The Raiders’ stay in Las Vegas has been bizarre. Led by a very friendly team president, Sandra Douglass Morgan, the Raiders have tried to help the community, from handing out equipment to high school football teams to supporting girls flag football.

Info on the publicly-owned Green Bay Packers revealed that each of the 32 NFL teams, including the Raiders, received a stunning $432.6 million in annual NFL revenue sharing. Most of that money comes from the NFL’s lucrative TV and media rights deals.

With that type of money flowing into NFL teams’ bank accounts, you wonder why the Raiders and teams in Buffalo and Nashville needed hundreds of millions of dollars to help build their stadiums. Southern Nevada still has to generate more than $1 billion in hotel room tax revenues to pay off the debt on the $750 million the public contributed to the $1.4 billion Raiders stadium construction project. The entire Raiders stadium project was about $2 billion.

The Raiders started play in 2020 during the Covid pandemic. And here we are in 2025 with the Raiders still trying to fashion an identity in Las Vegas after this franchise was one of the league’s cornerstone brand teams known for their blue-collar fans packing gritty Oakland Coliseum off an interstate.

Much has been documented about the out-of-town fans filling seats at Allegiant Stadium to cheer on the Raiders’ visiting foes as tourists easily find Raiders home game tickets on secondary ticket websites. Local Las Vegas residents paid for personal seat licenses and season ticket deals with the goal of making a profit on the resell market.

After McDaniels arrived, the Raiders had an established quarterback, Derek Carr. But Carr was not McDaniels’ man and the Raiders have burned through starting quarterbacks Jimmy Garappolo, Gardner Minshew and Aidan O’Connell, with Carroll’s QB — Geno Smith — entrenched as the offensive leader.

The Raiders did make the playoffs one season under interim head coach Rich Bisaccia, but Bisaccia was replaced by McDaniels who lasted about a year and a half.

Raiders owner Mark Davis and his coach, Josh McDaniels, before the Raiders-Steelers home-owner for the Raiders in Las Vegas.

Sadly, for most people in Las Vegas who are not Raiders fans, the franchise is known in Las Vegas as the team who had the player, Henry Ruggs, who drove his car 156 miles per hour while intoxicated and killed a young woman and her dog in a predawn crash Nov. 2, 2021. In August 2023, Ruggs was sentenced to three to ten years in prison for the DUI crash that resulted in the death of Tina Tintor and her dog, Max.

Henry Ruggs III Photo credit: Raiders

For the devoted fans, many of whom live in both Southern and Northern California, they have accepted the Raiders as a way of life and as a losing team.

The Raiders will stage an open practice at Allegiant Stadium Aug. 2 at 1 PM, with all tickets costing $5 each. The money will go to the Raiders Foundation. The Raiders are even inviting people to watch their regular daily practices at their Henderson training facility for free.

Davis has generated incredible amounts of revenue, from selling shares of the Raiders to the likes of Tom Brady to renting Allegiant Stadium to the UNLV’s football team for more than $2 million a year.

As far as NFL owners go, he’s a friendly personality who signs autographs at Las Vegas Aces games and doesn’t shy away from fans.

He just doesn’t have the winning legacy of his father, Al Davis, and the Raiders’ 2025 projected win total is 6.5.

Raiders owner Mark Davis

 

PSA

 

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Buy a book. You’ll be happy you did.

 

 

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