Somebody ought to buy the 49ers a beer. And yes, that goes for the guy in the old Kenny Stabler jersey who’s spent most of his life rooting for them to lose.
When the NFL was putting together its 2026 schedule, it gave serious thought to moving the 49ers’ home game against the Raiders to Mexico City. The 49ers put their foot down, according to multiple sources. They wanted this one in Santa Clara.
Hell yes, they did. And for anybody who ever walked across the BART bridge on a Sunday morning, caught a whiff of what was cooking in the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum parking lot and figured they’d be making that walk for the rest of their life, what a shame it would have been to play this game anywhere else.
For the first time since leaving Oakland for Las Vegas after the 2019 season, the Raiders are coming back to the Bay Area for a game that counts.
But not only does it count, it is a crucial game.
The Raiders’ season stands in flux. Are they playing for a playoff spot and making some real noise? Or are they playing for the future, with #1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza taking the reins?
Vegas is 4-4, coming off their thrilling 38-33 victory at the Meadowlands against the New York Jets. A fifth straight loss would have likely pushed the team closer to the future. Instead, they are firmly in the Wild Card mix midway through the season.
Beyond that, there is so much history steeped with both franchises up by the bay.
Raiders going back home
They made a preseason visit here in 2021, but try finding a Raiders’ fan who remembers the score. Then ask where they were when Stabler floated one into a sea of Miami Dolphins hands and somehow found the two that belonged to Clarence Davis.
Better give yourself some time.
For 47 seasons, split around the Raiders’ 13-year detour to Los Angeles, Bay Area football fans had two teams to choose from and roughly half the people they knew to tell them they’d chosen wrong.
In the 1960s, Daryle Lamonica was throwing the ball about as far as Al Davis could have wished. Across the bay, the 49ers had John Brodie, who, just to complicate everybody’s allegiances, played his high school ball at Oakland Tech before moving onto Stanford.
How spoiled was the Bay Area? John Madden and Bill Walsh coached your local football teams. You saw Willie Brown look over his shoulder for Vikings who had no chance of catching him, clinching the Bay Area’s first-ever Super Bowl championship.
A few years later, you saw Joe Montana throw a ball you could’ve sworn was headed out of the end zone until Dwight Clark went up and got it to beat the Cowboys. A few weeks later the 49ers were hoisting their first Lombardi Trophy.
A kid could’ve gone from elementary school to junior high thinking that was how things worked around here.
Montana, Ronnie Lott and Jerry Rice helped turn the 49ers into a dynasty. Steve Young threw six touchdown passes to deliver San Francisco’s fifth championship. And for the Oakland fan who spent years insisting Rice owed his success to the guys throwing him the ball, along came the 2002 season. Suddenly that was your guy catching passes from Rich Gannon, with Tim Brown on the other side and Charles Woodson playing defense.
Funny how quickly a man can come around on Jerry Rice.
All that history, and sadly neither team could get a stadium built in the city where they made those memories.
Lord knows there were enough plans. The 49ers and Raiders spent years putting ideas in front of local leaders, looking for a partner who could help get a stadium built. Mayors came and went. City councils and county supervisors fought over what the public ought to contribute.
Finding a suitable piece of land was hard enough in California. Getting everybody to agree on who’d pay for what went on it was harder.
In Oakland, even the obvious piece of land came with a catch. The A’s had a lease at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and every right to keep playing baseball there. Good luck figuring out where to put a new football stadium when the folks who held the longer lease still need a place to put second base.
The 49ers finally found willing partners in Santa Clara, about 45 miles south of San Francisco. The NFL liked the idea of the Raiders joining them at Levi’s Stadium. But Mark Davis figured his team had spent enough Sundays playing in somebody else’s infield to know how he felt about moving into somebody else’s stadium.
He wanted a football home of his own. Nevada put up $750 million through a hotel-room tax to help him build one. The rest is history.
It’s a shame the Raiders had to leave Oakland to get it. It’s also fair to say they’ve built a future in Las Vegas they might never have been able to secure in Oakland. There are kids growing up in Southern Nevada who’ll someday take their own kids to Allegiant Stadium. Sitting alongside them are plenty of folks from Oakland and Southern California who decided long ago that wherever the Raiders went, they’d follow.
For once, though, the Raiders are the ones making the trip. And somewhere in the East Bay, a dad who grew up making that walk across the BART bridge gets to ask his kid a question that used to be the easiest thing in the world to ask on a Sunday morning.
Want to go see the Raiders?
