Story by Alan Snel Photos by J. Tyge O’Donnell
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — It’s time to admit the truth, Las Vegas.
You’re not the sports capital of the world.
Not even the U.S.
It’s time to be real.
A couple of thousand of people were at at UNLV basketball game at Thomas & Mack Center on campus Saturday afternoon when the Runnin’ Rebels defeated Samford, 88-79.
A crowd that does not even come close to filling the lower bowl of Allegiant Stadium for a UNLV vs Wyoming football game later in the day at the 7:30 PM.
Wyoming ran the ball with ease against a weak UNLV defense as the Cowyboys were up by 20 points in the third quarter, 41-21.
The Rebs made a nice comeback to cut the Wyoming led to 41-35 and had the ball only 11 yards away from scoring a potential go-ahead TD.
But UNLV quarterback Alex Orji threw an interception in the end zone and that was the game.
The Rebels run defense was awful again, giving up 353 rushing yards to the 6-3 Wyoming team. UNLV dropped to 5-4 and 3-2 in the Mountain West Conference.
“Extremely disappointed with our performance, the first half especially,” Mullen said after the game.
The Vegas Golden Knights no longer sell out all their NHL games at T-Mobile Arena.
The Las Vegas Raiders games are NFL Experience games, with even owner Mark Davis acknowledging in a CNBC interview that the team has not won enough in Las Vegas to earn locals’ commitment to not sell their game tickets to opposing fans.
“We haven’t earned that yet,” Davis said a year after the Raiders finished with the worst record in the NFL in 2025.
Let’s be real here — Los Angeles has a dozen major professional teams and New York also has more than ten and they’re bigger sports centers than Las Vegas.
Las Vegas is a destination sports market for Super Bowls and an annual F1 car race, with a soccer team that can’t even tell the public where it’s playing next season, a women’s volleyball team that went away but now is back and a G League Ignite in Henderson was shut down by the NBA.
The A’s are building their stadium with 33,000 capacity on the Strip and the NBA is supposedly going to award an expansion team to this market that is the 40th biggest TV market.
What Las Vegas has are hype men like LVCVA head Steve Hill and his friend and consultant to the teams and events, Jeremy Aguero. Here’s a photo of Hill and Aguero hugging after Aguero’s last Las Vegas Stadium Board meeting.
Despite all the rhetoric of sports and events bringing in billions of dollars, the Las Vegas market and Nevada continue to rank in the bottom five in quality-of-life categories from a health care personnel shortage to weak public schools to a middle-of-the pack annual income rating.
Perhaps the money is coming in, but it’s being pocketed by the likes of Raiders owner Mark Davis and MGM Resorts International. Go ahead, tell us how the F1 race in November has improved your life. We’re waiting.
Four months of installing and dissembling a 3.8-mile race track in the Strip corridor have caused traffic jams, lost revenues for businesses and surging prices for hotel rooms on the Strip during race weekends in past years.
Las Vegas has grown as a sports hub. Is it the sports capital of the world? It might be the sports-compared-to-other economic-sectors in the market capital in the world.
PSA
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