dukuboy1 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2024 11:32 am
Vegas is not a great spot for holding College Championship events. No doubt they can support it and they have the hotel/entertainment/convection stuff dialed in to a smooth machine. Plus travel there is easy. With all that said, these events are just another "thing" and nothing special.
In my old job I went to Vegas once a month for over 2yrs to run long weekend events for my company. I'd get there WED afternoon and leave SUN morning. Got to experience a lot of neat things and saw the city change a lot in just those brief 2 plus years. But I was there and grabbed some tickets to when the PAC 12 held their Basketball Championships there. It was in the arena/concert hall space in MGM. It was an odd setup, especially with "luxury boxes" being basically roped off areas with curtains and couches. I found it funny. Point was, there was hardly anyone there to watch it and most of the fans I talked to were more interested in being in Vegas than going to the game. So yes it is a draw but it was not the focal point. No real chance to for the Conference to get their brand out there & garner any excitement. Plus there were 2 other basketball conference championships going on the same time. The only place you would see anything promoting Pac 12 was in the MGM.
Vegas is great and fun to visit. But it stinks, IMO for college sporting events. SB makes sense there, but the other things that are more regionally important events the town just rolls up into everything else going on. The Big 12 would be very unwise to think of Vegas as more of a permanent home for their events. Maybe try it out once, sure I'm down, but overall I think it would be a mistake.
But honestly who knows where college sports will be in 2-3 yrs from now. Could just be 3 "Mega Conferences" by region with like 18 teams per, more like the NFL model of divisions, and everything that people love about college sports like traditions and rivalries, etc. will be washed away by the all mighty dollar...
I am not a Vegas fan at all so I am pretty biased but the Big 12 basketball championship there would be kind of defeating. In KC, it is the big event. Fans from the various teams are gathered in one central place and the experience is about the game. That's not going to be the case in Vegas. While I'm sure it would be a welcome change to some, especially newer B12 members, it is more about the other stuff going on in the city than it is the basketball. You lose a lot of the college basketball experience in the process. Plus, it's further west than any B12 school by some distance. It would be geographically silly to have it there.
It would help if downtown KC had more to offer (another reason to get downtown baseball ASAP); more and better hotels, more retail, more restaurants but the tourney is an overall fun experience. It was great this year with March being so warm. The streetcar will make it even better as will downtown baseball - which will help support more downtown business overall.
The other concern is that with an expanding NCAA tourney, how long will the conference tourney's survive? The big conferences get the same number of teams in the NCAA regardless and are not a big factor (NCState being a big exception this year) and the smaller conferences would be wise to abandon their tourneys to ensure their best foot is put forward on an annual basis.
