Mark Davis explains stance on ‘TNF’ flexing with dig at Chargers

Raiders owner Mark Davis, as expected, cast a dissenting vote Monday on flexible scheduling for late-season “Thursday Night Football” games.

It didn’t matter, though. NFL owners, convening in Minneapolis for their spring meetings, approved a modified proposal by a 24-8 count.

As a result, the NFL will allow for the possibility of a maximum of two games to be flexed from Sunday to Amazon’s Thursday window from Weeks 13 to 17. Doing so will require the league to give teams 28 days notice of the schedule change.

“It didn’t work out the way I had hoped, but now it’s time to move on and make the best of it,” Davis said.

Davis’ argument was that making significant schedule changes — in this case from Sunday to Thursday for two teams and Thursday to Sunday for two others — puts an incredible amount of burden on fans who make travel plans months in advance.

“If you have a Raiders-Chargers game in Las Vegas scheduled for a Thursday,” Davis told USA Today before the vote, “and all of the fans driving from Los Angeles — the Raiders fans and all three Chargers fans — buy their tickets and book their hotels, how in the hell do you schedule it and now say, ‘Sorry, it’s now on Sunday?’ ”

The thinly veiled dig at the Chargers keeps with the longtime rivalry between the clubs, especially now that the Chargers call Los Angeles home. The Raiders played in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994 and maintain an incredible foothold there. Raiders fans are routinely the dominant crowd when the Raiders play the Chargers in Los Angeles.

Davis’ comments also follow the recent troll job the Chargers’ social media team did on the Raiders and their fans in a video they released after the NFL schedule was announced.

Contact Vincent Bonsignore at vbonsignore@reviewjournal.com. Follow @VinnyBonsignore on Twitter.