They even played each other here, on this same floor, on Nov. Both UCLA and Gonzaga play their conference tournaments here annually.
“Not somewhere I’d want to live.”įor two of the teams here this weekend, this is nothing new. While at UNLV, Livengood said he learned that there was a much closer eye on their athletes in the community than anything he had experienced in his previous stops.Īnd pragmatically, for all those years the NCAA was keeping Vegas at arm’s length, the wider basketball world was ingratiating itself more and more here through USA Basketball training camps, the NBA summer league, the Pac-12 moving more of its biggest events here and several youth travel tournaments coming every summer where college coaches evaluate prospects.Īrkansas freshman Jordan Walsh said he had played in Las Vegas “four or five times” in high school before returning with the Razorbacks for the Sweet 16. If anything, that ugly incident - which helped lead to coach Jerry Tarkanian's resignation in 1992 - helped the industry modernize and become more vigilant about potential problems. The days of UNLV basketball players being photographed in a hot tub with the infamous Richard “The Fixer” Perry, who had been implicated in multiple point-shaving scandals, were long in the past. A rule prohibiting NCAA championships being played in states where sports gambling was legal meant that there was no conceivable way for Vegas to host an NCAA basketball tournament. And with the NHL and NFL moving into town, sports venues were on the way that could compete with any in the country.īut the NCAA, as usual, was behind the times. In his view, Vegas had everything you’d want for a Final Four or college football national championship game: Lots of flights in and out, plentiful hotel space and endless options for food and entertainment. “There were so many people (in college sports) who hadn’t been to Vegas in 25 years,” Livengood said.
Over time, he began to see that the NCAA was making a mistake by eschewing Sin City as a place to plant its flag with championship-level events. The longtime athletics director at Washington State, Arizona and UNLV, Livengood had been living in Las Vegas since his retirement in 2013. LAS VEGAS - Jim Livengood had a big idea.
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