Hello Vegas: Pac-12 picks Las Vegas for 2020 and 2021 title games
The Pac-12 has a new home for its conference championship game. At least for the next two seasons.
Commissioner Larry Scott said Wednesday at Pac-12 media day that the conference would host the Pac-12 Championship Game in Las Vegas in 2020 and 2021.
The game will be played that the Raiders’ new stadium currently under construction in Vegas. The NFL franchise is moving from Oakland to Las Vegas after the 2019 season. The 2019 game will be televised on ABC instead of Fox.
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The conference announced in January that it was declining its 2020 option to play the game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. The game has been played in Santa Clara since 2014 but has been plagued by attendance issues in recent years. Washington’s win over Utah in December 2018 had a perhaps-generously listed 35,000 fans in attendance.
Before Levi’s Stadium the game was played on campus sites for three seasons.
The move to Vegas gives the Pac-12 a place where fans would want to travel for a weekend — something Scott pointed out when he said that the conference hosts its conference basketball tournaments in the city.
That’s important for a conference that has schools from Colorado to the northern and southernmost reaches of the Pacific coastline. Outside of some in-state and in-city rivals, there aren’t many schools within reasonable driving distance of one another.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
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