Oakland Raiders

The Oakland Raiders were a professional American football team that played in Oakland from its founding in 1960 to 1981 and again from 1995 to 2019 before relocating to the Las Vegas metropolitan area where they now play as the Las Vegas Raiders. Between 1982 and 1994, the team played in Los Angeles as the Los Angeles Raiders. The team's first home game was at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, against the Houston Oilers on September 11, 1960, with a 37–22 loss. They played their last game as an Oakland-based club on December 29, 2019, a game which they lost 16–15 to make them finish 3rd in the AFC West, eliminate them from playoff contention, and suffer a late-season collapse after starting with a 6–4 record. Early years (1960–1962) A few months after the inaugural American Football League draft in 1959, the owners of the yet-unnamed Minneapolis franchise accepted an offer to join the established National Football League as an expansion team (now called the Minnesota Vikings) in 1961, sending the AFL scrambling for a replacement. At the time, Oakland seemed an unlikely venue for a professional football team. The city had not asked for a team, there was no ownership group and there was no stadium in Oakland suitable for pro football (the closest stadiums were in Berkeley and San Francisco) and there was already a successful NFL franchise in the Bay Area in the San Francisco 49ers. However, the AFL owners selected Oakland after Los Angeles Chargers owner Barron Hilton threatened to forfeit his franchise unless a second team was placed on the West Coast. Accordingly, the city of Oakland was awarded the eighth AFL franchise on January 30, 1960, and the team inherited the Minneapolis club's draft picks.