Columnist Dean Juipe: Local bowl works as advertising device

Dean Juipe

Friday, Dec. 26, 2003 | 10:12 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

When it comes to the Las Vegas Bowl, measuring or quantifying its success is a tricky, subjective endeavor.

The annual game, we can conclude after all these years, is never going to be an overwhelming affair. It is never going to be part of the Bowl Championship Series rotation and it is never going to host the national championship game or anything close to it.

It sort of is what it is: A nice game between two better than average teams that are usually happy to be invited to conclude their seasons in a great tourist city.

Sometimes the game itself is exciting -- UNLV's 31-14 victory over Arkansas in 2000 is my personal favorite of the 12 that have been played -- and sometimes it turns into a rout, as was the case Wednesday at Sam Boyd Stadium when Oregon State mauled New Mexico 55-14.

Sometimes attendance is good -- there were 29,000 people at the UNLV-Arkansas game -- and sometimes it is disappointing, as was the case when only 18,031 turned up to watch the Beavers and Lobos.

There are those who say the Las Vegas Bowl is just one more idiotic game in a postseason littered with 28 bowl games, most of which simply have no real need to be played. A 7-5 North Carolina State vs. a 6-6 Kansas game, as was the case in the Tangerine Bowl, is an example of bowl madness having gone a little too mad.

Same thing with the upcoming Silicon Valley Bowl between 6-6 UCLA and 8-5 Fresno State, as well as several others.

With 56 Division-I teams playing in bowl games this season, the notion that earning a bowl bid is a reward or some great achievement has lost much of its (b)luster. Only the most demented of college football fans could possibly care about all these games and all these more or less meaningless results.

Along those lines, if the Las Vegas Bowl and about 15 of its cohorts were exiled to the scrap heap or became so interchangeable that they moved from site to site each and every year, few would care.

So, by that definition, the Las Vegas Bowl hardly rates as a success. If it ceased to be and no one beyond those who make their livings off it shed a tear, then it doesn't really serve much of a purpose, does it?

And yet, I would offer, the Las Vegas Bowl is successful from an entirely different perspective. It achieves what it sets out to achieve, even if the game itself is largely irrelevant.

I don't think the bowls in cities such as Mobile, El Paso and Shreveport (to name just three) can make the same claim, but Las Vegas uses its bowl game as an effective marketing tool that builds interest in the city. As was proven again in the Christmas Eve telecast on ESPN, the Las Vegas Bowl is, in effect, a three-hour infomercial for the city itself.

With no other sports on TV and no NBA or NHL games being played to divert attention, the Las Vegas Bowl was the sole sporting event available to the nation's television-watching public. If you watched any live, televised sports on Dec. 24, you watched the Las Vegas Bowl and nothing else.

And if you did, you saw Las Vegas showcased in a most interesting way. Not only was "Las Vegas" splashed across midfield as a permanent subtlety, the ingress and egress to and from every TV commercial break featured panoramic views of the city and strip.

Factor in the "what happens here, stays here" commercial themes that were part of seemingly every break, and viewers stuck in the snow drifts of New England and feeling the freezing winds of the Midwest had no choice but to take notice.

They saw Las Vegas, saw part of its appeal and maybe gave some thought to coming out.

Las Vegas needs to do these things and has the money to do them. That's why I feel as strongly as ever that Las Vegas (via its Convention and Visitors Authority) should not only continue paying the bills for the Las Vegas Bowl but should come to the rescue of the city's annual PGA Tour stop.

Anytime the city has the opportunity to use a sports event -- particularly one in prime time or one with the appeal of men's pro golf -- as a way to promote itself, it should do it without hesitation.

The telecasts are a device and they work for Las Vegas. They show the city and its attractions in an appealing light.

The expenses are worthwhile. I'd give away all the tickets for the Las Vegas Bowl (and quit leaning on locals to support it, as some habitually do) and fund the game and the golf tournament as investments in the future and commercials for what we have to offer.

To see it any other way fails to take into account that Las Vegas, for all of its siren ways, has to advertise itself just as any competitive product is obliged to do.