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The Raiders were expected to finish last in the A.F.C. West this season, and after losing three of their first five games, seemed out of the hunt. Then Plunkett, the former Heisman Trophy winner from Stanford who had watched his injury-studded professional career unravel on other teams, stepped in to replace injured Dan Pastorini. The Raiders began to roll. In an amazing late-season rush, they won twelve of 14 games, outscoring the high-powered San Diego Chargers in the A.F.C. championship game, 34-27.
But the drama on-field has been tame compared with Davis' off-field actions. He tried to shift his franchise last spring to the more commodious Los Angeles Coliseum, but N.F.L. owners refused to ap prove the move. Angry at being spurned after ten straight years of sell-out crowds, Oakland and then the N.F.L. sued in state court to make the Raiders stay and play by the bay. The Los Angeles Coliseum Commission and the Raiders then sued the N.F.L. in federal court for the right to take flight in the night.
Pretrial mudslinging has even reached the posh offices of Commissioner Pete Rozelle, whom Davis charged with scalping tickets to last year's Super Bowl. Rozelle vehemently denies this, though he admits selling a dozen tickets at face value to a travel-agency director who resold them as part of Super Bowl tour packages. The scalping charge is the latest round in a long-running feud between Davis and Rozelle, czar of the merged leagues. Rozelle has refused comment, but Davis is less restrained, saying: "I think he's corrupt."
Rozelle's admission has led to revelations that team owners, officials, coaches and players throughout the league have been selling their complimentary tickets to scalpers at huge profits. Each of the contending Super Bowl teams receives 22½% of the available tickets for its fans (a total of about 16,000 seats in New Orleans' 71,330-seat Superdome), while the remaining 26 teams split some 40% of the tickets (the rest go to corporate sponsors and TV networks). As much as six months before the game, scalpers will visit training camps to line up a "ticket captain," who serves as a clearinghouse for men with suitcases full of money who come to claim the coveted extra ducats. This year, such profit-taking has driven the price of a $40 seat up to as much as $400.
Will Super Bowl XV be worth $CD, or even $XL? To avid Philadelphia and Oakland fans, probably so. But to most N.F.L. observers, there is a ticket worth even more: a front-row seat when Al Davis and Pete Rozelle meet in court next month.
—By B.J. Phillips. Reported by Gordon Forbes/Philadelphia and Paul Witterman/Oakland