The Oakland Athletics and the Oakland Raiders are the only NFL and MLB teams left to share a stadium these days and since the A's are pretty good, the Raiders will have to suffer for it, as their game on Sunday against the San Diego Chargers has been moved to accommodate the Athletics and Detroit Tigers series starting Saturday night.
According to SI.com and ESPN.com, the Athletics will be starting their American League Divisional Series against the Detroit Tigers this week and into the weekend and with the game coming on Saturday night, the league was forced to push the game back since it takes too long to change over O.co Coliseum for football. The game for the Raiders was originally slated for one of the late afternoon, but since it takes at least 20 hours to change over the stadium, the game was forced back.
The NFL announced that the game will be on the NFL Network and nationally broadcast after the move and now will be at 8:35 p.m. PT instead of the original time. The Athletics won the American League West and will face off against the Tigers again after playing them in the postseason last year as well. The game was originally set to be broadcast on CBS, but now will be a national game except for local markets and head coach Dennis Allen said the team schedule would be changed to reflect the new time of the game.
ESPN.com reports that the stadium has to be inspected and also needs to go through a number of changes to get the field in place and with Game 2 coming past 9 pm, there wouldn't be enough time to do it for the game to go on Sunday when it was originally scheduled. The Raiders knew that it was a possibility the game could be moved when the series were announced and now that has become a reality for the Raiders.
Oakland is coming off of a tough loss to the Washington Redskins and the team has now lost two in a row and three of four games, winning only against the Jaguars. The Broncos defeated the Raiders in Week 2 and now the team will play a stretch of three division games in four weeks, as the Chargers and the Chiefs are next on the schedule before a bye week in Week 7.
