For Raiders to come to Las Vegas, NFL needs to evolve on gambling issue
Maybe we’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves with this speculation of the NFL coming to town. But in the NFL, getting ahead of oneself is a way of life.
It’s why Chris Berman predicts who will win while wearing a turban, why Bill Walsh scripted the first 15 plays for the Super Bowl 49ers after putting in the West Coast offense. Now most teams do it.
It’s why when word got out Thursday about a $1 billion football stadium being built on 42 acres near the UNLV campus — and that there would be a meeting between Oakland Raiders principals and new stadium principals on Friday — it did not come as a total surprise to the Las Vegas face of the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders, and whatever new hometown they ultimately may adopt.
David Humm is the former Bishop Gorman and Nebraska star who went on to play quarterback in the NFL for nine seasons, most with the Raiders as a backup to Ken Stabler. Humm said Raiders longtime owner Al Davis often spoke of Las Vegas with the sort of reverence reserved for Stabler and Daryle Lamonica and George Blanda. And for a lot of guys who didn’t play quarterback for him, and for John Madden.
Humm said Davis would have moved the Raiders here a long time ago, if Pete Rozelle would have allowed it.
Al Davis, the most maverick of the NFL owners (and it’s not even close), died in 2011. Pete Rozelle died in 1996. Mark Davis, Al’s son, is now calling the shots for the Silver and Black. Roger Goodell is now the caretaker of the NFL’s shield and the little stars representing its eight divisions.
The old shield had 25 stars, and a curly-cue thingie on the end of the L, and a football that looked like a hamburger. Nobody knew why. Which is remindful of the NFL’s Neanderthal view on betting lines and injury reports.
And why, when David Humm answered the phone at his Las Vegas home Thursday and was told about the new stadium, and of a meeting between Mark Davis and the men behind it, he said the NFL commissioner would never allow it to happen.
“Yes, in my gut,” he said about Goodell’s indignation toward legalized gambling, be it real or feigned, and whether it would preclude serious dialogue about the Raiders or any other NFL team moving to Southern Nevada. “He’s gonna fight this all the way.”
Others believe that times are changing.
Sometimes the football announcers even talk about the betting lines during telecasts.
Remember the last play of the 2014 Pro Bowl, when Antonio Cromartie of the Jets half-heartedly attempted to return a missed field goal at the end of the game for a touchdown, and Al Michaels tried to blow the play dead from the broadcast booth?
Of course you don’t. It was the Pro Bowl. But let me refresh your memory.
“And they’re going to let him go all the way … don’t tell me this is going to involve the spread here,” Michaels said on live TV with a nervous laugh, for having mentioned the possibility of money changing hands over a pro football game without meaning.
“Well, anyway, never mind.”
Granted, it was only the Pro Bowl. But Michaels was not put on double secret probation by Roger Goodell, pro football’s answer to Dean Wormer of “Animal House” fame, and just as humorless.
Do you believe in miracles? And/or a modern take on legalized gambling as it pertains to pro football?
Dave Humm does. I do. You do. Jimmy Vaccaro does. People at the Convention and Visitors Authority do.
John “Bluto” Blutarsky was elected a U.S. Senator, according to the epilogue of “Animal House.” It’s an evolving process.
Perhaps the NFL finally is starting to come out of its three-point stance on the gambling issue, or at least has come to the conclusion that a major motion picture about rampant concussions sustained by NFL players is a more pressing concern than the point spread at the Pro Bowl.
“Can you imagine the airport on weekends, and the cars coming down I-15?” David Humm said, imaging a long Silver and Black procession, and Toyota Priuses affixed with spikes and battering rams and eyepatches, and the kids working the counter at the In-N-Out Burger stand in Barstow getting really nervous on game day.
When Humm was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when he was 36, Al Davis built a studio in Humm’s Las Vegas home, so he and George Atkinson could continue to host the Raiders Roundtable on 95.7 The Game in the Bay Area.
It may very well be that talk of the Raiders moving to Las Vegas is nothing more than fodder for their listeners, nothing more than a leverage tool for a better deal somewhere else.
It could be that Roger Goodell will never evolve on the issue of gambling on pro football.
But I say if a guy such as David Humm wants to speculate on a long procession of Silver and Black, of fuel-efficient Toyotas affixed with spikes and battering rams and eyepatches, of a Commitment to Excellence and of a commitment to a $1 billion domed football stadium to be built on 42 acres on the edge of the UNLV campus, he’s certainly entitled.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski