Pioneer’s title sponsorship re-energizes Las Vegas Bowl

Steve Guiremand

Thursday, Aug. 12, 2004 | 9:19 a.m.

The 13th annual Las Vegas Bowl this year will have a new date, a new time and, perhaps most important, a new name.

The game, which pits the Mountain West Conference runner-up against the Pac-10 Conference's No. 5 team, has struggled recent years with local attendance due to Christmas Day and Christmas Eve kickoffs. It will instead kick off at 6:45 p.m. on Dec. 23 on ESPN. And it will now be known as the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas Bowl after the Long Beach, Calif.-based Pioneer Electronics firm agreed to become the game's title sponsor.

"It's absolutely imperative in this day and age to have a title sponsor for a bowl game," Tina Kunzer-Murphy, the executive director of the game, said Wednesday after a news conference at the ESPNZone. "They're Southern California people who are very aware of the Pac-10 and the Mountain West. It's a good relationship for us."

Financial terms of the deal weren't released. It's a one-year contract with a two-year option believed to be worth close to a half-million dollars per year.

"All I can say is that it's in the six-figure range," Kunzer-Murphy said.

The Las Vegas Bowl has been searching for a title sponsor since SEGA Sports ended a two-year relationship with the bowl after the 2002 game. ESPN Regional Television, a subsidary of ESPN Inc., which acquired the game in May 2001, helped broker the arrangement.

"I entered into a partnership with ESPN and ABC," Russ Johnston, senior vice president of marketing for the home entertainment division of Pioneer Electronics, said. "We have an integrated kind of marketing campaign for our plasma business in the fall. Part of our discussions in building the TV programs with ESPN is that we have a relationship with this bowl. It was a real good opportunity for us to tie everything together during a critical time for us, which is the Christmas selling season."

Johnston estimated the price tag for the Las Vegas Bowl sponsorship is "in the mid-six figures."

He also said he expected Pioneer Electronics to be involved for more than just one year.

"I wouldn't be alarmed (by the one-year contract) because we have a history of having long-term relationships," he said. "We have two IRL racecars we've been on for eight years and our NHRA sponsorship lasted 12. And we've been with the PGA for six."

Kunzer-Murphy said the Las Vegas Bowl, which quietly reduced its per-team payout from $800,000 to $575,000 before last year's game, was "never in jeopardy thanks to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. They've been kind of a backbone for the bowl for 13 years. But obviously in this day and age it's so important to have a title sponsor."

Kunzer-Murphy said the lower payout was a mutual decision between the Pac-10 and Mountain West.

"When we paid out $800,000 to each team, we used to require the teams to buy 12,500 tickets, which added up to $625,000," Kunzer-Murphy explained. "That meant teams actually got $175,000 plus the tickets. But last year we agreed to a $575,000 payout with each school buying 8,000 tickets worth $400,000. So now they have less tickets to sell and they still get the same $175,000 they'd get under the old plan."

Now with the title sponsorship out of the way, Kunzer-Murphy will turn her attention to locking up the Mountain West Conference representative for at least another year through 2005. The bowl's deal with the MWC runs out after this year's game but still has another year after that with the Pac-10.