Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Sun editorial:

Don’t blame Las Vegas for poor attendance at MWC tournament

The Mountain West Conference has a legitimate problem with its annual basketball tournament, but the solution it’s exploring isn’t the right answer.

As a result, Las Vegas could be unfairly affected.

At issue is the tournament’s attendance, which is sagging. The four-day event drew an average of 7,220 fans to the Thomas & Mack Center this year for the five sessions on the men’s side, according to attendance figures from official box scores. That’s less than half the capacity of the arena, so it’s understandable that conference officials are concerned.

But officials have gone awry in suggesting that attendance can be turned around by moving the tournament out of Las Vegas. They say increased competition for fans in Las Vegas has siphoned off attendance for the Mountain West event.

In that, they’re not entirely wrong. The MWC has been upstaged in recent years by the Pac-12 conference tournament, which has been played in Las Vegas since 2013 during the same week as the MWC tourney. Over the past three seasons, the Pac-12 final has drawn an average of 16,114 fans compared with an average of 7,396 for the MWC’s championship game. Attendance for the Pac-12 games has been so strong that the conference moved the event from the MGM Grand Garden Arena to T-Mobile Arena.

Meanwhile, the Western Athletic Conference also plays its postseason tourney in Las Vegas.

But the real culprit for the MWC isn’t an oversupply of tournaments, it’s the quality of play among the league’s teams. Overall, the MWC has sunk into mediocrity in recent years, with its teams failing to get beyond the second round of the NCAA March Madness tournament since 2014.

Some of the teams with the most passionate fan bases in the league — such as UNLV, San Diego State and New Mexico — have endured disappointing seasons in recent years, which has also hurt tournament attendance.

So until there’s a turnaround in the league’s level of play, it’s unlikely that attendance will rebound regardless of where the tournament is staged. Right now, the MWC simply isn’t putting a very good product on the floor overall on the men’s side, which drives the most attendance. And fans are registering their lack of passion by spending their money elsewhere.

Plus, the argument about Las Vegas having an overcrowded tournament calendar doesn’t hold water. We have plenty of hotel rooms to accommodate fans from several conferences, and we’re one of the world’s most attractive tourist destinations, so there’s no reason to think there are too few fans to go around.

Granted, the Mountain West could get some benefit from moving the tournament to another place where it would be the only show in town. It certainly stands to reason that in Las Vegas, a fan of a Mountain West team that lost in an early round might migrate to the higher-profile Pac-12 tourney.

But the gains of shifting to another site like San Diego or Phoenix aren’t likely to be significant. San Diego suffers from not being a central location, and there are no MWC teams in Phoenix and thus no built-in fan base.

So the MWC would be well-advised to stay put while its schools work on improving their teams. The good news is that UNLV has been on a gradual upswing over the past couple of years, and San Diego State returned to the NCAA Tournament after winning the MWC title game Saturday against New Mexico.

The tournament is scheduled to be played in Las Vegas through 2020, by which time the quality of the league may well improve enough that the attendance problem solves itself.

Las Vegas officials could likely find another conference to replace the MWC on the March calendar, but here’s hoping they don’t have to go looking.