The rumors about Marshawn Lynch playing for the Oakland Raiders always felt a little bit like a pipe dream. Even with interest between the two sides, the financial issues, plus the Seahawks still having his contract, was too much to overcome.
But maybe it’s real after all. Peter King of TheMMQB.com writes Monday that a “West Coast source” tells him that Marshawn “really wants” to play for Oakland.
“He [Lynch] really wants to play for the Raiders,” the source told King. “He also wants to do good things for his foundation in the area. This is a great chance to accomplish both things.”
A cryptic tweet from Lynch on Sunday certainly didn’t help extinguish the possibility of Lynch wanting to play for Oakland.
The Raiders are badly in need of a running back after letting Latavius Murray walk in free agency. Murray signed with the Vikings, making Adrian Peterson a possible fit for Oakland, but the Raiders haven’t shown much interest in inking Peterson, who apparently hasn’t figured out what his market value really is at this point.
Oakland was initially “strongly considering” trying to lure Lynch out of retirement; Lynch announced he was walking away from football in the middle of Super Bowl 50 with a now-famous tweet.
But even if they were interested, there are still some issues. They need Lynch to want to come out (which might be handled now) and they need the Seahawks to facilitate a Lynch-to-Oakland deal.
Seattle isn’t believed to be interested in releasing Lynch and would obviously prefer to get something back for him in a trade. But, King makes a good point on this too, because if Seattle held steady on demands for a trade, things could get ugly inside their own locker room.
“...[T]here’s no way the club would stand in his way and risk the rancor of the locker room, seeing that Lynch has so many close friends still in there,” King writes. “It’s a complicated dynamic, but in the end Seattle’s probably going to have to release him.”
The concept here would be Seattle releasing Lynch “as a favor” to the running back, who was always a handful but is one of the more memorable characters and players in the franchise’s history.
And the reason Oakland would work is they’re not in the same conference as Seattle, and Lynch is an Oakland guy through and through. Returning and playing for the Raiders would help benefit his foundation and if the Raiders signed him in the middle of picking up and moving from Oakland to Las Vegas, it would at least be a nice little bit of light balm on a pretty painful wound for Raiders fans.
