In Oakland v Raiders Anti-Trust Lawsuit, Judge Joe Spero's Granting Motion To Dismiss Is Stupid

In Oakland v Raiders Anti-Trust Lawsuit, Judge Joe Spero's Granting Motion To Dismiss Is Stupid

If the City of Oakland can get a new judge to hear its anti-trust lawsuit against the Oakland Raiders, it should do so with all deliberate speed. The current head of the court, the esteemed Magestrate Judge Joseph Spero, is proving he doesn't know anything about the business of pro football, let alone how the NFL works.

Because of that, to believe Judge Joe Spero's going to come into the realities of how the NFL works is a pipe dream – Judge Spero remains stuck on stupid. That's the only way anyone can explain his decision to grant the Raiders and NFL lawyers motion to dismiss the case.

Reading the 33 page motion is tatimount to a trip down a rabbit hole to a never-never land where NFL teams are free agents, capable of negotiating their own game schedules separate and apart from each other.

In reality, such behavior not only goes against the team of rivals under one whip that the late NFL Commission Pete Rozelle so carefully established, it purely and simply leads to an economic outcome such that the NFL itself could not survive. With that trueism, why the hell would the Raiders and NFL Lawyers even come up with such an argument?

Simple.

They obviously believed that Judge Joe Spero's knew very little if anything about how the NFL works, and therefore believed they could literally throw up the legal equivalent of a badly tossed salad and the judge would eat it with relish - and whatever dressing he likes.

The Oakland Raiders lawyers, lead by the legendary Ken Hausman, played the “we know this guy” approach, and so what seemed like a snake-eyes dice roll of a legal argument, turned out to be anything but a gamble. They knew Judge Joe Spero was out of his intellectual league in NFL business matters, and so they could manipulate him anyway they wanted to – and they did.

How else to explain Judge Joe buying the idea that Oakland would not be harmed by losing the chance to build not just a state-of-the-art stadium, but a mixed use development called “Coliseum City” around it. But, the judge, Judge Joe , working off some cosmic logic that doesn't apply on Earth, or for that matter The Planet Vulcan, but certainly works on Alpha Centauri, believes that Oakland fairs better with no multi-billion-dollar facility that employs thousands of people, rather than with one.

Wow.

Or how about the idea expressed on page 12 of the 'Motion to Dismiss' that the City of Oakland would have to prove that all NFL teams collectively agreed that all teams would not play their home games in Oakland? The entry “But a boycott or refusal to deal claim requires allegations and proof that multiple entities refused to transact with the plaintiff,” is the intellectual equivalent of glue-sniffing. For that to make any sense would require an alternative universe where the City of Oakland, which was itself following the same NFL Relocation Policy as the Raiders claimed to have done, was directed to seek a new NFL home team to replace the Raiders.

What we have, instead, is the NFL coercing Oakland to jump through its hoops to form a plan to build a stadium to keep the Raiders. If Judge Joe wants proof, all he has to do is read the NFL Relocation Policy that the St. Louis courts have said is a contract between the league and, in this case, Oakland.

There's a giant part of me that wonders if Judge Joe's managed to live in the San Francisco Bay Area all of these years and never set foot into either the Oakland Coliseum or the 49ers Stadiums to watch a football game? That's the only way to explain that hot garbage of a decision. The only way.

Oakland needs to save itself from any further legal damage from Judge Joe Spero. Indeed, for Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker to allow this to happen is as ridculous as Judge Joe Spero's stupid decision. You'd figure she'd have this wired, being the home team lawyer and all, right?

It's clear Judge Joe Spero is like Baby Huey here, playing around with sports business forces he's not well-versed enough to understand. Oakland needs to put distance between itself and Judge Joe Spero – before its too late.

Stay tuned.

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