USC and Alabama made their assumed collision official on Wednesday, confirming they will meet in AT&T Stadium to start the 2020 season.
It’s not only a rematch of their 2016 opener. The showdown will also mark the fourth Week One intersectional duel in a five-year span for the Pac-12:
Washington and Oregon take their shots at Auburn in ’18 and ’19, respectively, then the Trojans get another shot at Bama.
All four games are in Atlanta or Arlington, provide the Pac-12 participants with tremendous exposure in first-class venues, and guarantee multi-million dollar paychecks.
And yet: The events are a few thousand miles east of ideal for the conference.
What Pac-12 football needs … what it must secure in coming years … is to create a mammoth football presence in Las Vegas, starting with an annual Labor Day weekend showcase game at the Raiders’ stadium (completion date: 2020) against marquee programs in the Big Ten.
“We can do for football what we’ve done for basketball,” said Pat Christenson, the president of Las Vegas Events. “In the past, the problem was we didn’t have the facility.”
Were the Hotline named czar of Pac-12 football, the first move would be to overhaul the schedule: End the outsourcing, bring it in house, and eliminate all instances of competitive disadvantages.
Out second move? Make Vegas the conference’s home-away-from-home, to an even greater extent than it is for men’s basketball.
The Hotline has been mulling the Las Vegas concept for months, seeking out naysayers both inside the conference and within the world of college football event planning.
None exist.
“It would be great, but it’s not a Pac-12 decision,” Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens said during a conversation last month about football scheduling. “It would be great for TV. But the entities that host would have to replace the home gate.”
Ah, yes: The cash outlay. We’ll get to that in a moment. First, the broader view:
Playing a marquee opponent in Las Vegas on Labor Day weekend is only half of the Hotline’s master plan for Pac-12 football.
The other half, which has been discussed publicly with commissioner Larry Scott, is to move the conference championship game to Las Vegas — make Sin City the regular-season bookends
The Pac-12 is under contract to stage the title game in Levi’s Stadium through the 2019 season, with an option for 2020.
Beyond that?
“As we get closer,” Scott said during a press conference in December, “we’ll talk to the 49ers and Levi’s and consider all the options.”
Three facilities could be in play:
1. Levi’s
2. Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park (i.e., the new home of the Rams and Chargers)
3. Las Vegas Stadium (i.e., the new home of the Raiders)
The Pac-12 could create a neutral-site rotation for the game, or it could pick a long-term home.
We’ve seen the atmosphere in Levi’s for four years, and it’s perfectly acceptable.
L.A. Stadium would make a great site for the first edition of the championship, but the event could quickly grow tired in the L.A> marketplace (think: basketball tournament in Staples Center), especially when USC and UCLA aren’t involved.
Additionally, playing in Hollywood Park one month before the Rose Bowl feels like too much Southern California in too condensed a timeframe. Would fans pay to travel for the conference championship if they’re anticipating a date in the Granddaddy?
Las Vegas Stadium, on a permanent basis, is the answer, but not merely because of the success of the men’s basketball tournament. They’re different events, after all: Football involves three hours of competition between two teams whose identity isn’t determined until mid- or late November; basketball unfolds over four days and is guaranteed to involved all 12 schools.
But the Pac-12 tournament’s success is clearly an indicator of the potential for football, which would no doubt draw a sizable number of fans from southern Nevada in addition to the traveling contingent from the participating schools.
And here’s a Hotline suggestion (free of charge):
The conference could buff up fan and media interest in the Friday night football game by staging a high-profile men’s basketball game in T-Mobile Arena on Saturday.
That component would require buy-in from the schools, because they control the non-conference schedules, but finding a blueblood opponent shouldn’t be difficult for event organizers given the potential for recruiting exposure. (Findlay Prep and Bishop Gorman are stocked with 4- and 5-star prospects.)
Heck, you could make it a doubleheader with UNLV involved.
Imagine Washington or Oregon facing USC for the football championship on Friday night, with Arizona or UCLA playing Kansas or Kentucky on Saturday afternoon, followed by UNLV vs. Gonzaga — and maybe you package the tickets to all three events.
If that isn’t a high-profile weekend for the Pac-12, nothing is.
But again, the football championship weekend is only half of the Hotline’s master plan — and probably the easier half to organize and produce.
The Week One showdown … a western version of the Atlanta and Arlington games … is more difficult to execute, and it’s more difficult for one reason: The money.
The Pac-12 could help to identify a participant — the inaugural game would be years away, because many of the non-conference schedules are set through the early 2020s — but the conference would not be part of the financing plan, just like the SEC isn’t involved in the financing of games in AT&T Stadium and Mercedes Benz Stadium.
The money comes from the event organizers and TV partners and must be enough to convince both teams to give up a home game.
Sure, USC, Oregon and Washington will benefit from the exposure and competition that comes with playing in Atlanta and Arlington, but they can’t lose money on the experience. (The Ducks, for example, will receive $3.5 million for the Auburn game next season.)
Which brings us to the best opponent for the Week One showcase.
Despite all the pomp that would come from a duel with the SEC powers, that might not be the most realistic approach.
For one thing, they already have Week One options in Arlington and Atlanta, which are easy trips for their fans. For another, the SEC schools don’t have significant alumni bases in the west — at least, not like those of the Big Ten.
The way to make the Week One showcase work financially is to lean on the Big Ten and create a mini-Rose Bowl, if you will: Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Penn State would be the top targets in a rotation, possibly with Iowa and Nebraska involved, depending on states of those programs.
The game would be four months before the actual Rose Bowl, enough distance that fans coming from Ann Arbor or Columbus or Madison or State College wouldn’t hesitate to lay their money down twice.
Plus, many of those schools have huge followings on the west coast — Michigan reportedly has 41,000 alums in California alone — and would undoubtedly love to stage a holiday weekend fundraiser … err, football extravaganza … in Las Vegas.
Would the event have to involve the Big Ten? Not necessarily. Maybe you’d mix in Texas or Oklahoma, maybe you’d grab an SEC team once every four or five years. But the Big Ten would be the primary opponent.
As for the cash outlay, well, that would come from an entity that didn’t exist until last month.
In April, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval established, through executive order 2018-7, the Southern Nevada Sporting Event Committee, whose task is to implement a system for attracting major events to Las Vegas, whether it’s the NFL Draft, the Super Bowl or the college football championship.
The Pac-12 title game and an annual Week One intersectional showcase would seem to fit the model.
“Additional opportunities to attract major sporting events and associated activities to our state are arising, especially with the addition of the new stadium,” Sandoval said in a statement accompanying the unveiling of the committee.
“As such, I believe it is prudent for the Sporting Event Committee to examine the possibilities and report back to me and the Legislature on what’s possible and how Nevada might secure new and bigger sporting events.”
Essentially, the committee’s charge is to recommend “a system to secure the events and a funding mechanism for the event,” said Christenson, whose group, Las Vegas Events, will be represented on the committee.
“We’ve got a good relationship with the Pac-12 through basketball,” he added. “And we can do a neutral-site football game now that we have a stadium capable of hosting the event.”
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