Football, Anyone?

every Sunday. Sec. 111, Row 28, Seat 7.

That is, unless said people are football fans first, baseball fans second.

I follow it almost as much I do baseball, and I love to play fantasy football so my favorite team was always which team I had the most fantasy players on. But being from San Mateo, my friends are converting me from just an NFL fan to a Niners fan. My allegiance isn’t strong yet, but hopefully it will be soon cuz it feels great to have a connection with a pro sports franchise, at least with the A’s it does.

God help us all 67 Marquez. I feel you on this one, man. It’s just in my blood I guess…….but the A’s are now my first love because of the amount of games I have been to. Next season my brother in law and I might buy a season ticket package or at least get a couple of single game tickets. Nice post.

And ,yes, the Raiders did indeed break my heart when they moved to Botox, CA. :(

let it be basketball, baseball, football or hockey. bayarea teams always comes first for me.
altho i have to say it has been hard to watch some of our teams play in recent years.
i just hope one day we can claim all 4 major championship in the same year

I wasn’t sad to see them go back to Oakland.

But they should have found their own stadium, both in LA and in Oakland.

Niners all the way! And Cardinals next week!

it’s the Warriors. Maddening, I tell you…..

…and that makes me happy. I HATE them for coming back and especially for ruining my baseball park. I hope they continue to lose and lose…

You should check out more of 67MARQUEZ’s work over at the “silver and black pride” SB Nation site.

Saint, 67MARQUEZ and others do a fine job over there.

That’s what she said…LOL!

Gigantic football fan here, both NFL and college, although a strong lean to NFL is forced to pick between them. 49ers fan from Day 1 and still diehard even through all these tough years. Don’t hate the Raiders, but don’t care about them either.

I mean is there anyone here who seriously thinks that they will remain in the Coliseum once their lease expires in a couple of years?

Tear down Mt Davis and redo the Coliseum the way the Angels did when the Rams left?

I was eighteen when the Raiders moved to Los Angeles. My aunt, who has a uniform embroidery shop on Castro Valley blvd used to embroider the logos on those big full length coats that the players used to wear on the sidelines and she also used to make the Raiderette uniforms. My cousin met Freddy Biltetnikof (sp), and the Raiders used to hang out where my grandmother worked – the Blue Dolphin in San Leandro.

The Raiders were a part of our community. It really hasnt been that way since they returned, but that is not so much the Raiders but rather the way pro sports has changed with athletes making what they make today.

Anyway, I’ve never really felt they have made much of a committment with the relatively short lease they signed since they returned, and I believe they will be back in the LA Coliseum within four years, awaiting completion of the privately financed stadium in the City of Industry that Ed Roski (who is also responsible in part for the construction of the Staples Center in LA) is going to build.

winter = Sharks
summer = Athletics

I was a teenager in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. Those were some battles the Steelers and Raiders had back then.

 I LOVE baseball, but I only like football. After I watch a football game, which is rare these days, I always feel like I ate too much red meat.

Any A’s fan could be a fan of any football team but the Raiders. Get the whackjob, drugged out hippes and their short memories off Athletics Nation please. It’s bad enough we have the the rest of the states (besides Massachusets the only place crazier) laughing at the head shaking absurdities that pass as SF politics and but now we have to deal with their bandwagon fanbase.

*This post is sarcasm and the way Raider fans are supposed to talk to whiner fans…Go A’s!

In that I a) love football, and b) I’m not a Raiders fan. Actually, in fact, I’m from Colorado. Which means…ah yeah. I also kind of loosely follow the Colts and the Patriots, mostly because they’re really good. Mostly I just like watching it. It’s my top sport after baseball ends (because I usually can’t care less about baseball in the offseason…I have no idea why this is), and then I don’t care less about football when baseball starts.

No, no idea how this all works in my head. But it does. Somehow.

I’m more of a college football fan, though.

I can’t claim that I’m a fan of the Raiders of Old because for one, I was born in ‘81. 2nd, they were my father’s team before Al moved them. My dad hates the man and wants nothing more than for him to kick the bucket. But even then, who’s to say his son will do any better? But growing up in the bay and watching the Niners, it was fun but they just were not my team. Black and Sliver looked bad ass to me and they were from Oakland! So when they returned, I jumped aboard. I didn’t say out loud cause my brothers are Niner fans but I am truly a fan of Oakland teams plus the San Jose Sharks. I hope and pray the Raiders win and win big. That’s all I ask and if Al dies soon, I can hopefully enjoy the Raiders with my father.

Baseball could sure learn more than a few things from the NFL, its unbelievable how far behind the MLB is from the NFL, we need a new commissioner and some new intelligent owners that put some goals on what they want the MLB to achieve and do everything they can to reach this.

Pete Rozelle could convince the crazy ego maniac named Jerry Jones, there must be someone out there that can convince the Yankees front office.

We had raiders season tix in the 70’s, plus we’d go to 5 – 10 A’s games a year.

My favorite Raiders memory was when I was with my mom & dad at a Rams game (Q1 score, 28-0 raiders) when the guy behind us let out a stream of profanity. My mom turned to my dad and said, " can’t you say something to stop him." My dad – an ex-Marine – pointed out “no, not with you wearing that shirt.”

Mom had what’s still my favorite raiders shirt on – “If you ain’t a raiders fan, then you ain’t sh*t!”

I can remember every painful playoff loss and every glorious playoff win from the incredibly 1974 win over the Dolphins (<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIc343_E4rU”Kenny Stabler, nearly sacked, passing to Clarence Davis of all people) to the Super Bowl win over the Eagles.

Then they left for hated Los Angeles and I became I Niner fan. I’ve never looked back. The Raiders coming back, building Mt. Davis and ruining by ballpark just cemented things.

Watched one of those great NFL Films shows a week or two ago which retold the Sea of Hands story (Raiders over Dolphins, Stabler to Clarence Davis per Sooner above). Remembered each play like it was yesterday. Best part of the show? Almost all the voiced-over play-by-play was from Bill King’s radio call.

I’m stuck with the Raiders like it or not. Brokeback Mount Davis: “Al Davis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you!”

My dad was a huge fan of the San Francisco teams, and the Raiders were in LA when I was growing up. For me, all I knew was the ‘Niners. I memorized their rosters, played the old NES and Sega Genesis football games to death (Jerry Rice as a running back, anybody?), and watched all the pre/post-game shows (and stayed up to watch Dave Lloyd and Jim Crandall on Fox 40). I imagined I was Jerry Rice as my brother, neighbors, and I tore up the back lawn in the rain and mud. As the team got worse and worse, I still followed them closely. Then, I moved to a country where I couldn’t get any info on the 49ers (for two years), and when I came back (‘03), I had lost almost all interest in football. I check the box scores every week to see if the ’Niners won, but I honestly care so little about football now that I don’t even know who 90% of the players are these days.

Put it this way: there is no recovering from an 8-game losing streak in the NFL.

I like that too but I like it just as much that in baseball you CAN recover from an 8 game losing streak. The ’51 NY Giants lost 11 games in a row and still won the pennant. That had to be damn exciting for fans of that team. I guess I do agree with you though that…football is all about the passion of the moment because of the urgency to win …baseball is about tradition for me and enduring love.

I’m not a Bay Area native. I was born on the north side of Chicago, and grew up a Cubs/Bears/Bulls fan. With regards to the baseball/football dichotomy, I was a baseball guy. The Cubs beat the Bears, Little League beat Pop Warner, and the crack of the bat beat the crunch of 22 bodies. It’s for that reason that I became an A’s fan.

It took a while, though. I moved here in 1989, a month before the Giants beat the Cubs in the NLCS. That alone put the Giants on my list of “hated teams” (I still hold a grudge against the Padres for 1984, and I was four at the time!) which meant that becoming a fan of the Giants was just out of the question. For the next decade, I followed the Cubs from afar.

In the spring of 2000, I obtained a few coupons for free plaza-level tickets at the Coliseum from work. Getting out to the ballpark got me into…you’re thinking the A’s, but no, that comes later. What it got me into was fantasy baseball. And doing the research on that got me interested in the new wave of statistical analysis, which eventually led to Billy Beane.

In 2001, I had the opportunity to get more of those free coupons, and I obtained-slash-scammed a passel of them. I must’ve seen like 20 games that summer, and from that point on I was an A’s fan. It kind of surprised me that in 2004 (I think) when the A’s played an interleague series at Wrigley, that I was rooting for Oakland.

Anyway, I became a fan of a Bay Area baseball team because, in the end, I was too much of a baseball guy not to have a local team to follow. But for football, and all other sports, I remain a fan of Chicago teams.

GO BEARS!

I will say that I will gladly follow the Raiders someday when Al Davis isn’t there any more. He turns me off more than any other owner and it isn’t because of his fabled jump suits, those they don’t help. It was two things. First he had the audacity to destroy the Coliseum and then he sued the A’s a while ago for advertising revenues. I just can’t stand that guy.

that team is my religion

The first broncos fan here yay me

first robin williams, now the raiders, i liked the AN front page a lot more when it wasn’t all the things i despise most.

When I moved out here in ‘86 and started going to A’s games it was a great place to watch a game. I’d sit in section 317 or 318 and enjoy the sunshine, East Bay Hills, and the Bash Bros. knocking them into the ice plants beyond left field. But when Da Rai-duhs moved back, well…It’s the ONLY stadium whose renovations have made it MUCH worse than improved. Now in mid-August we have Mark Ellis running down a pop fly near the outfield…he’s to the 20, to the 10…And The Tarp…what an embarassment. The Coliseum used to draw big crowds on those sunny days and everyone seemed to be happy with the ballpark. I still believe that it’s the main reason the A’s don’t draw big numbers even when they’re playing well. Someone PLEASE smother Al Davis with a pillow and get it over with!

Sad panda has a sad.

I lived in Hawaii from ‘71-’79. Out there, we did not get a lot of baseball on TV – usually only the NBC Game of the Week and Monday Night Baseball, which ABC ran for a time (I do remember an A’s win over the Red Sux in ‘77). We did, however, get all the NFL action (“satellite live!”) every week. Normally we’d get the Raiders on NBC and the farking LA Rams on CBS (we hardly ever saw the 69ers because they SUCKED in those days). I was one of maybe two or three Raiders fans at my school – most everyone else liked the Rams, or whichever team was good that season, like the Steelers or Dolphins. Watching Raiders games back then made me a nervous wreck, mainly because I didn’t want to catch any grief from my Ram-fan friends. It seemed to me that every game came down to the last two minutes (of course this wasn’t true, it just seemed that way), and between plays, they’d always show shots of John Madden going nuts on the sideline, which just did not help my nervous state. In fact, we had a pool table in our living room, and I used to burn off nervous energy by running laps around it between plays and during timeouts. To this day, if the Raiders are actually in a game (very rare, I know), Mrs doctorK will ask me if I need the pool table (of course, now if I tried running laps around anything, I’d probably drop dead of a heart attack).

When the Raiders moved south, my initial inclination was to say “OK – so now I’ll root for the Niners” (after all, they had just won their first Superbowl). My conversion lasted maybe 5 minutes into the Raiders-Niners pre-season game that year. When both teams took the field, and they gave the starting lineups, I realized there was no way I could root against Kick-em, Lester, Plunkett, Cliff, Guy, etc, plus this new guy, Marcus Allen, looked like something special. After just a few plays the Raiders had ascended to their rightful place in my heart (and the Niners descended to their rightful place as well), and nothing has changed since.

All that being said, it sure has been tough to be a Raider over the last 15 years. I was excited when they came back from LALA-land at first, but then I saw the bungling by both the Raiders and the City and County (Oakland Football Marketing Association? PSLs?). I often fantasize about an earthquake that would level Mt Davis and leave the rest of the Coliseum intact – that structure is an abomination. And don’t get me started on the level of “play” we’ve seen most of the time since they returned to Oakland. The biggest problem I see now is spelled A-L D-A-V-I-S. At some point, he needs to realize he can’t run this team the same way as during the ’70’s, but he is still doing it today by hiring a coaching staff without a head coach or a GM. Until big Al either sees the light by passing on the torch to someone else, or sees the light by simply passing on, I don’t see a lot of hope for this team.

I moved to Seattle when I was nine so I only stayed a fan of the bay area teams I knew were truly unique — The A’s.

born sf. raised and lived in oakland for 16 years. currently sf.

al davis has lost his damn mind. raiders dont love oakland. raiders dont love a’s. go 9ers.