Seven conference basketball tournaments are being contested in Las Vegas this week — four men's and three women's — and five of those will take place just steps from casinos, once considered forbidden territory for college athletics. All are being played along a three-mile stretch of Tropicana.
At the MGM Grand, amid advertisements for Barry Manilow and David Copperfield, the iconic gold lion statue in the lobby is wearing a basketball jersey, surrounded by banners of Pacific-12 teams, whose men's tournament began here Wednesday. The Orleans Hotel and Casino quickly changed out its signage, bidding adieu to the West Coast Conference, which wrapped up play Tuesday, and welcoming the Western Athletic Conference, which moves into the same space Thursday. And at the Thomas & Mack Center on the UNLV campus, the Mountain West Conference again will crown both its men's and women's champs this weekend.
That Las Vegas has become something of a mecca for conference tournaments — the winners of which receive automatic berths in the NCAA tournament — is an uncomfortable development for the NCAA, which has long tried to keep the city at arm's length. According to the FBI, an estimated $2.5 billion is wagered each year during the national tournament, more than even the Super Bowl, and one of the epicenters of that gambling mania will be right here.
The concern has been that if Las Vegas is at the center of sports wagering, it might also be at the root of corruption: unscrupulous gamblers soliciting inside information from players or coaches or offering bribes to influence the outcome of games. It's no coincidence that none of the four major professional sports has a franchise in the city.
As the United States wrestles with the proliferation of sports wagering — legally here and illegally through websites based offshore — it's not easy to gauge whether that risk is greater in Las Vegas than anywhere else. Nonetheless, the NCAA has remained steadfast.
"The NCAA opposes all forms of gambling — legal and illegal — on college sports," Emily James, the NCAA's associate director of media relations, said in an email. "The spread of legalized sports wagering is a threat to student-athlete well-being and the integrity of athletic competition."
Though it has no authority over where conferences hold their postseason events, the NCAA has rules in place that prevent any NCAA tournament games from being played in a state that offers legal wagering on their outcomes.
Conference commissioners say moving their tournaments here has breathed new life into postseason play — not to mention adding revenue to the league coffers and providing a tantalizing allure for fans. With world-class restaurants, night life, golf courses and beautiful weather, even fans of losing teams go home happy.
"They might be mad and sad for 10 minutes, but then they go, 'What the hell, I'm in Vegas until Sunday. Let's have some fun,' " Mountain West Commissioner Craig Thompson said.
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The Mountain West is staging its 16th conference tournament this week, and all but three have been in Las Vegas. The league took a three-year break in the mid-2000s, moving its tournament to Denver, but returned in 2007. In Las Vegas, the Mountain West averages 5,000 more fans than it did in Denver and tournament revenue has more than doubled, Thompson said.
"There's only one Las Vegas in the world, and it's not downtown Denver," Thompson said.
The Pac-12 held its tournament at the Staples Center in Los Angeles from 2002-12 before moving to the MGM Grand in 2013. Larry Scott, the conference commissioner, rattles off the positives: better atmosphere, bigger crowds, more memorable experience for athletes, increased visibility for conference and sponsors.
"We did a lot of due diligence," Scott said. "I had a high degree of confidence after talking to our fans, our schools, to the other conferences that have played tournaments there."
Pac-12 games were scheduled to begin Wednesday in MGM's 13,500-seat arena that usually hosts championship boxing and UFC fights. Scott said the buzz surrounding the tournament is inescapable, from the signage around the MGM to the fans filling the casino to the arena itself. Before games and at halftimes, Vegas acts are scheduled to perform, including the cast of Jersey Boys, Cirque du Soleil and the dance crew Jabbawockeez.
"It's a great festival atmosphere," he said.
City officials expect 20,000-25,000 people to visit for the basketball games, according to Jeremy Handel, a spokesman for Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which could produce an economic impact of $15 million-$20 million.
Scott said conference officials debated the risks at length before committing to Vegas but said Pac-12 schools haven't reported any nefarious incidents involving student-athletes. NCAA bylaws prohibit not just players and coaches from placing any form of sports bets but also any athletic department or conference employee, plus any other school official with responsibilities connected with athletics (school president, chancellor or academic advisor, for example).
When the Mountain West first staged its tournament in Las Vegas in 2000, betting on UNLV games was still outlawed. That was overturned, and at sports books across the Strip, gamblers can now lay money down on just about anything.
"There's not been one bit of difference," Thompson said, noting that no other conference stages its postseason tournament in a state that monitors wagering and betting lines as aggressively as the Nevada Gaming Commission.
Thompson has become accustomed to pious thinking from some NCAA circles. The league, which also participates in the Las Vegas Bowl each year, had to overcome some initial internal reservations, of course, but he also remembers a more recent subcommittee meeting on bowl licensing.
"They were saying, 'Boy, this is not right. There's a casino involved and it's spray-painted right on the field,'" he recalled. "I said, 'You know, first of all , there's so many basketball facilities and other arenas and hosts for NCAA tournaments that are within an hour's drive, if not in the same city, as a casino. . . . If you have 125 kids who have to walk peripherally around the edge of the casino and can hear the bells and the machines going, that's not going to hinder their development."
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Perhaps nowhere are the conflicted feelings between college sports and Las Vegas more noticeable than the WCC tournament. At the Orleans sports book, 47 flat-screen televisions wrap around the room, but on Tuesday evening most eyes were cast on the giant digital board where teams and games and dreams were all reduced to red, green and orange LED lights. The screen listed odds for a variety of conference tournament games — ACC, Summit, Horizon, among them — but not the contest that was about to tip just a short walk away.
The WCC agreed to come to Vegas in 2009 with caveats: Its tournament games were off-limits at the Orleans sports book and in the arena itself there could be no beer or alcohol sales. (The other conference tournaments in town have no such restrictions.) Even though the area was filled with basketball fans earlier this week, no one seemed to mind the restriction.
"If we wanted to bet on the games, there are plenty of other places we could go to," said Paul Meseberg, a fan who has traveled to Vegas for the WCC tournament the past seven years.
In the weeks before the WCC tournament, players from all 10 schools undergo gambling education — more stringent than what's required by the NCAA, WCC Commissioner Lynn Holzman said — and the conference must certify each player has learned about sports wagering and the associated perils before taking the court.
A 2012 NCAA study surveyed 23,000 student-athletes and found that 57 percent of men and 39 percent of women had gambled for money in the previous 12 months, slightly fewer than the NCAA's previous study four years earlier. The 2012 report found that about two percent of Division I basketball players and one percent of football players said they'd been approached to influence the outcome of games.
Most WCC teams stay at the Orleans, though at least one opts for a nearby Marriott hotel that does not have an attached casino. Fans flock here from schools such as BYU and Saint Mary's, lured by hoops, not slots.
The Orleans' arena seats just 8,500, which means sellouts are the norm and the intimate space crackles with energy. On Tuesday night, Gonzaga won its fifth conference title in the seven years the tournament has been staged here.
"We were the ones pushing for Vegas for a long, long time — Gonzaga was — for a neutral court," said Bulldog Coach Mark Few. "It was ridiculous the way we were doing it before on homecourts. . . . It's been great. We love it. It's been a huge positive step for the league."
