good dolphin wrote:
Does LV have a sufficiently interested population to support a team? Tourism is lower in the summer so travelers are not going to pay the bills.
The 51s (the Blue Jays minor league affiliate in Vegas) were able to sell out for times last year, and once posted an attendance of 11k+... that sounds like a decent total for a minor league game.
I'd think the success rate of a NFL team in Vegas would be pretty good -- you'd have eight home games a year -- you could easily sell them out as fans of the visiting team could schedule vacations around it. The obvious problem is that the NFL would never authorize a team to move there because of the gambling issues.
Another issue for any sport is stadium funding -- there are no first class (or even second class) stadiums available, other than those for indoor sports within some of the hotels. Now even if you convinced the league to hold all of that team's home games within a casino, you would still have to convince the casino itself that it would be profitable to host the team rather than continue with the usual rotation of musical acts, performance art groups, etc.
I think the only way in the near future that Las Vegas is going to get a sports team will be to have a new league form and use Las Vegas as one of their home cities. They are a ripe target simply because of the lack of non-collegiate sports in the area, and as a new league, they can form their gambling policy around this.
NASCAR should continue to thrive there, however.