Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Q+A Neal Smatresk:

Taking a new look at athletics

UNLV president says schools are ‘building a conference that is good going into the future’

UNLV Town Hall

Leila Navidi

UNLV president Neal Smatresk speaks to basketball coach Dave Rice before a town hall meeting regarding budget cuts at UNLV Wednesday, June 8, 2011.

Name that conference

When we talked to UNLV President Neal Smatresk, he noted that the athletic conference being formed from the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA doesn’t have a name yet. He asked that we ask you what you would call the new transcontinental league. So, what do you think? Send your ideas to [email protected] and put “conference name” in the subject line. We’ll pass them along and publish some of the best, as well.

UNLV President Neal Smatresk talked with the Sun’s Matt Hufman recently about the athletics program, the proposed stadium and the NCAA. Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation.

In the discussion to form a new conference, how big a piece was the TV contract?

Believe it or not, it wasn’t the main driver, although it’s clearly an important piece. ... Our first concern was that we stabilized ourselves. Putting ourselves into a bigger conference means we didn’t have to continuously worry about being FBS (Football Bowl Series) eligible. We needed to first make sure that we had, we’ll say, a 16-20 team conference and then we kind of got excited about the ideas that could generate. When we looked at the map, we realized we were coast to coast, including Hawaii. We realized that we were in every U.S. time zone. And, of course, especially if you build something like a tiered playoff system, that generates a lot of interest and potentially improves our market value significantly.

So you’re not playing at midnight East Coast time on a Tuesday to get on TV.

Right, but there’s other cool elements to this. The idea that we could have our games shown coast to coast is really good for the universities. ... Expanding our presence on national TV broadcasts is something that isn’t just good for a monetary and athletics viewpoint, it’s something that’s good for the university’s brand and image and reputation.

What is the bottom line for the university in college athletics?

I don’t want college athletics to cost the university a tremendous amount of money. There are a handful of universities that make money or break even on college athletics, and we’re pretty close to that. We’re blessed because of the Thomas & Mack. The Thomas & Mack is the most profitable college arena in the country.

The revenues that we generate out of the Thomas & Mack subsidize our athletics program. ...

If I could make us more profitable, I could de-obligate those funds that we’ve traditionally spent and that could benefit the academic side of the house. And that’s got to be the target.

The Bowl Championship Series and the payouts from it caused some fireworks at the Board of Regents’ meeting, understandably. There’s talk about changing it.

The BCS system has been an unfair system for years. The club gets to keep the lion’s share of revenues and the tier 2 conferences like the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA get the scraps that are left. So it is not a good deal for us unless one of our teams makes it into a BCS tournament at a high level, and then those revenues enrich the entire conference.

A growing belief is that the BCS system will dissolve ... and that a playoff system is a likely replacement.

We don’t think the big conferences are opposed to it. It’s the Big Easts of the world that would lose, the weak conferences, because they lose their AQ (automatic qualifier) status.

If you ask me, look at the revenues March Madness generates. It’s huge. And the interest and the fan base because it’s fair and it’s a good contest. Clearly you couldn’t put as many (football) teams into a tournament schedule. But if you had a decent tournament schedule, it would generate a lot of interest. We think if we’re competing in a 20-team conference — and we have an east and a west divisional playoff and a final playoff — that the winner, especially if we do our job and we improve football, the winner of that conference would have a good chance to play for a national title someday.

We think that we’re building a conference that is good going into the future. We’re positioning ourselves the right way.

Regarding the proposed stadium at UNLV, the last time we talked, it looked like they could do it without any kind of taxpayer help — or that was the hope — and now it sounds like it needs some taxpayer financing to work.

We haven’t been 100 percent accurately quoted, all right? If someone gives us $500 million, we could do it tomorrow. OK? (Laughter)

So let’s start off by saying we believe that there are a lot of people who recognize that a stadium of the type we’re talking about is tremendous business for this city and that it really helps our friends on the Strip generate brand new revenue.

We don’t have final numbers on this. We’re looking at the economics of this. But the Thomas & Mack generates about $250 million of raw dollars for the Strip. A venue that could bring in mega-events that could seat 50,000, a Madonna world tour or a World Cup soccer match or neutral site football games or rugby 7s ... those all generate huge amounts of tourism and generate a lot of money for the Strip, and we don’t think the $500 million number (for construction) is unrealistic.

So you ask us how we’re going to finance this thing. ... Between gifts, potential naming rights, a tax revenue zone and a business plan that generates money from events in the stadium, we need to get $35 million a year (for 20 years). Unless the gifting is very generous, we’re going to need a lot of our friends whose businesses would benefit from this to step forward.

Are they?

I will tell you there’s strong support for this project from the private sector. ...

We’re trying to put up a facility that will benefit our campus, build a campus community, create this university village that we think is the next step in our evolution toward become a tier 1 major institution. ... Our commitment is we’re willing to say the university will step up to support this vision if the community wants it. ...

This facility doesn’t compete with any arena in town. What we’re trying to do is help this city grow the pie. We would hope that folks here would recognize that this is an opportunity and that they would be excited about it.

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