The Shanahan–Davis personal dispute traces to an unpaid-contract claim that Shanahan raised publicly after he left the Raiders organization and then resurfaced when Shanahan became Denver's head coach in 1995. Shanahan said Al Davis owed him roughly $250,000 and quoted Davis as telling him, "He told me that if I went to the Broncos, he wouldn't pay me the $250,000 he owed me" [15]. Once Shanahan joined Denver, he repeated that grievance in public remarks, saying he "hadn't had [Davis] over for dinner yet" and framing Oakland games as personally charged encounters [16]. The contractual matter involved league arbitration documents from the early 1990s that different parties read very differently; Raiders executives later circulated an arbitration note they said showed a much smaller amount owed and accused Shanahan of perjury, pushing the dispute from private arbitration into public recrimination by 1997–1998 [18][15].
The fight cooled after the February 1998 exchange in which Raiders executives threatened legal action and circulated arbitration paperwork; reporting shows the public escalation peaked in 1997–1998 but produced no widely reported courtroom resolution [18]. By the late 1990s the incidents receded from front-page coverage; later retrospectives treat the episodes as a combustible chapter in the Broncos–Raiders rivalry rather than an ongoing legal saga [17][15].
They expressed explicitly antagonistic public comments in the mid-1990s rooted in a contract/arbitration dispute and personal taunts: Shanahan said Davis "told me that if I went to the Broncos, he wouldn't pay me the $250,000 he owed me" and Raiders executives later accused Shanahan of perjury while threatening legal action in 1998 [15][18].
Shanahan's claim that the Raiders owed him roughly $250,000 (an issue tied to early-1990s arbitration) reemerged publicly after Shanahan joined the Broncos in 1995; the public repetition of that unpaid-contract claim and subsequent circulation of arbitration paperwork by Raiders executives in 1997–1998 are central triggers for the feud [15][18].
Contemporaneous reporting shows the dispute reached a peak of public recrimination and threatened litigation in 1997–1998 but there is no widely reported court judgment resolving the publicized conflict; the exchange faded from major coverage after 1998 and is treated in later accounts as a late-1990s personal chapter of the rivalry rather than an ongoing feud [18][17].