The Mountain West Conference’s Las Vegas move will allow the consolidation of operations and open cost-cutting opportunities around big events by having the league’s headquarters in the same city where many of the key happenings already occur.
After looking at a few other cities, the Mountain West landed in Las Vegas in office space located in the Town Square shopping mall, according to Commissioner Gloria Nevarez. The location had everything the conference wanted in a new HQ and was centered around the rest of the locations of the conference’s realigned membership makeup.
“The conference office needs to be near a major airport; we bring in people for meetings, so we need to have adequate meeting space, a hotel, and easy access by flight,” Nevarez said. “So if you look at the geographic center of our footprint, Vegas definitely makes the most sense.”
Conference consolidation
The office space is still being put together, but it will eventually house the conference’s replay center, command center and meeting and office space when it’s completed later this year. Nevarez is excited to have all aspects for the conference under one roof, after that wasn’t the case while headquartered in Colorado.
“So we do replay, which is the officiating piece, then we also do the command center, which is the game operations piece,” Nevarez said. “For the last couple years, our officiating replay has been in Pittsburgh, which is the home of DVSport. Imagine a 6 p.m. local Hawaii kickoff on east coast time. That’s just a tough monitor for a lot of folks that work in the league. So having our own replay center here on Pacific time, but also, we’re partnering with Conference USA. So that’s been a really great collaboration, maximizing the space, helping us reduce costs.”
The new offices will be where the future of the conference will be determined on multiple levels. Having a non-gaming hotel located within the footprint of Town Square is also a big plus for the conference when hosting various events.
“It’s the heartbeat of the conference,” Nevarez said. “We have big governance meetings three times a year. Then our coaches meetings, those happen on an annual basis in person. All of those were happening at hotels. So imagine, you know, flights in, audio-visual, catering, everything, those get expensive. So being able to host everything in this spot helps reduce costs, having an affordable non-gaming hotel option seconds away, transportation, everything. It just really helps us minimize expenses.”
Media day potential
The league will host its annual football and men’s and women’s basketball media days at their HQ, which includes the coaches and between two and four players per team and then all the media that attends. This past week, the Mountain West football media days were held at Palms, where everything had to be built from scratch, as is the case for the conference’s other media days.
“You can imagine that’s a lot to build in a (hotel) conference center,” Nevarez said. “So hopefully in the future, we’re going to move those in here and be able to support all of that tremendous cost savings, but also all the branding and the look and feel of Mountain West being in the background.”
New schools
The 27-year-old league now features 10 schools for football, down from the previous 12, after former members Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Utah State left for the rebuilding Pac-12. In return, the MW added North Dakota State, Northern Illinois and UTEP for football, joining returning schools UNLV, Air Force, Hawaii, New Mexico, San Jose State and New Mexico.
The new member schools are excited to travel to the different cities in the conference, with North Dakota State in Fargo, North Dakota, primed to be among the best-traveled fan bases, Nevarez said.
“One of the things that’s really unique about the Mountain West is the travel opportunities,” Nevarez said. “I mean, every school is a vacation destination in its own way, depending on what you like to do for your vacations. So, we’ve heard from our friends at North Dakota State that their fans are very excited to come to all the new venues and all the new cities and Vegas being one of them. I think (North Dakota State’s) AD told Erik Harper, ‘Get ready, we’re coming.’”
With the Mountain West already hosting its men’s and women’s basketball, tennis and volleyball championships in Las Vegas, now being located in Southern Nevada could see other conference sports tournaments land in Las Vegas.
“We have three championships right now that are slated for here (Las Vegas) and then we’ll see where in the future, we’ve looked at a few others potentially that could come to Las Vegas,” Nevarez said.
Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.
