Raiders lawsuit remains a unicorn looking for pasture in Oakland

It’s the non-story that keeps on giving, this Raiders-might-leave-early tale. It may end up being a story, but it isn’t yet.
 
Phil Matier and Andy Ross, the accomplished San Francisco Chronicle political busybodies who have re-told the story of how the football team might leave the city before 2020 if the city sues the football team, and based on what they have been told, it is very much a legitimately writeable thing. We have no issue with them, because if nothing else, they have actually committed more to paper than the Oakland politicals threatening the lawsuit have.
 
But what’s been told is different than what’s been done, and what’s been done is essentially nothing. Those same Oakland pols who threatened to sue the team last month haven’t filed as much as a single Post-it note, and the Raiders haven’t done anything but shake their fists at a lawsuit that doesn’t yet exist.
 
In other words, this smells like doubling down on the original posturing, and unless the city government is ready to strike out against the Coliseum’s second tenant without the support of Mayor Libby Schaaf, posturing it remains.
 
The issue of where the Raiders might go in 2019 is faithfully repeated, with the one clear and consistent takeaway being that nobody here wants or has to take them as tenants. Not Cal, not Stanford, not San Jose State, not the 49ers, nobody. The Raiders have no leverage with any of those parties, so there will be no parties in any of those places.
 
The only other possibilities, then, are Las Vegas, where Sam Boyd Stadium would need massive and swift improvements to be up to standards, or Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, where the locals have no particular reason to support a team they have been trained to hate almost as much as they now hate the Chargers for leaving.
 
The gamble here is that the largest of the four lawsuits against the Rams for relocating from St. Louis, the one filed by the city and county against the Rams, the NFL and its other 31 owners for breach of contract, fraud, illegal enrichment and interference in business, will prevail. That suit is 15 months into what is expected to be years of legal wrangling, with the potential of a nine-figure settlement.
 
But getting a case heard and getting it won are two entirely different things, and barring a united front by the city’s power brokers for a team whose announced departure still hasn’t raised Oakland’s collective ire, the support for such an undertaking is nebulous to the point of questioning its very existence.
 
And in any event the suit remains conversational rather than litigable. If there was a real taste for this in Oakland, the subject would have at least been raised when the Raiders gained permission from the NFL to move to Las Vegas.
 
That’s the real head-scratcher, then. Nobody in town, neither the common fan nor the common power broker, seems very outraged that the Raiders are leaving, or that they might even leave a year earlier than originally planned. The threat of a lawsuit lashing out at the departing football team energized St. Louis; it has enervated Oakland.
 
But the story keeps popping up, like a game of Whack-a-mole at an abandoned carnival. When such a suit is actually filed, we promise to be interested. Until then, though, assume business remains as it has been, with the Raiders staying in Oakland in 2019 and maybe 2020, depending solely on how quickly Las Vegas can finish The House That Mark Got The Nevada Legislature And The Bank Of America To Build.