By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
It was the Triple Crown of sports demographics — the mix of locals and out-of-towners watching an NFL game at a $2 billion Allegiant Stadium at 1 PM; rural cowboy America packing Thomas & Mack Center to watch the Super Bowl of rodeos at 5:45 PM; and mostly locals watching Las Vegas’s first major league team play a pivotal NHL game at T-Mobile Arena at 7 PM.
The differences in the audiences were striking — the racially diverse crowd of 61,607 for the Raiders’ 17-15 loss to the Washington Football Club that came from towns from Washington, D.C. to the San Francisco Bay area, the mostly white crowd of 16,851 NFR fans from rural western United States; and the mostly local fans of the Vegas Golden Knights who watched the VGK vanquish division-leading Calgary, 3-2, before an announced crowd of 18,077.
The Raiders are the newcomers, playing before fans for the first time in Las Vegas this season after COVID-19 prompted owner Mark Davis to not allow any fans to watch games in person at T-Mobile Arena.
In contrast, the National Finals Rodeo has been staging its 10-day annual championship rodeo event in Las Vegas since 1985. The NFR moved its economic plum event to Texas last year because of COVID-19 attendance restrictions in Las Vegas in 2020.
And the Golden Knights are the pride and joy of Las Vegas, where the Knights have a deep emotional connection to the market and have an impressive attendance capacity percentage of 104 percent — tops in the NHL.
The Raiders have won six games and lost six games and have deep off-field problems, like former player Henry Ruggs III accused of DUI that led to the death of a woman last month. Raiders interim coach Rich Bisaccia mentioned the highs and lows after today’s loss.
“The highs have been pretty good and the lows have been really low. Humanistically, the lows have been really low and then professionally on the grass the lows have been low. But again, if you’re results oriented all the time then you’re just looking at the scoreboard spending your life up there.
“There’s a process to what we try and do and there’s a process to improving every day. Again, we lost the game. We have to come back tomorrow, figure out some of the reasons why and then get ourselves ready for Wednesday practice and see if we can correct those mistakes.”
The National Final Rodeo just completed its fourth night of its 10-day run in Las Vegas. The NFR do not have players or competitors. They’re called contestants and NFR is a way of life as much as it is a sporting event.
And the role of a non-human is an essential element of the competition — and prize money.
Of the three, the NFR and the NHL share something in common — cultural traditions that sometimes work against their abilities to market and promote their sports outside of their core audiences.
There’s a reason why the Summerlin community is a Vegas Golden Knights sponsor — its a suburban setting that explains why many NHL fans around the country are suburbanites from South Florida to Denver.
In reporting on the trio of big league sports events, LVSportsBiz.comw as able to cover the events at three venues via the bicycle.
It was an effective tool to go from stadium to UNLV arena to arena on the Strip.
Buy Alan Snel’s new book, Bicycle Man: Life of Journeys. It will help support LVSportsBiz.com.