The Pac-12 title game might play at the 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara for the last time at in 2019. On Friday, the conference told the Mercury News it has opted out of having the game there in 2020, the last year of the contract that’s had the game there since 2014.
The Pac-12 Championship leaving Levi’s Stadium is (obviously) a great idea
Santa Clara has been a bad setting for this title game. Now it can go elsewhere — after 2019.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
“The Pac-12 Conference and Levi’s Stadium have agreed to opt out of the final year (2020) of the agreement to hold the Pac-12 Championship Game at the venue,” the conference and 49ers said in a joint statement. They added they’d “continue to discuss the future of the game,” leaving a door cracked to the game eventually being there again.
The move makes a ton of sense.
From the abhorrent traffic to get there, to regular turf problems, to a giant wall of sealed luxury suits, to not being in a college football-obsessed area, Levi’s Stadium is not a good venue for college football. Along with that, attendance at the Pac-12 title game was a consistent issue for the game in Santa Clara. This photo from Washington-Utah in 2018 pretty much sums up how the crowd size it looked at kickoff every year:
So, now that the game is moving, where should its new home be?
There are a couple of intriguing options that the Pac-12 might consider. First and foremost, the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium, which is set to be complete in 2020, is a prime choice:
MANICA Architecture
As my colleague Steven Godfrey pointed out in 2017, the move would be smart for the Pac-12 for a lot of reasons:
“Vegas makes the distance between schools in the league much smaller because of the high volume of flights. From a culture standpoint, we could develop a sold-out energy like some of the other leagues. We have the fans for that, but we haven’t found a way to represent it,” one source told SB Nation.
This has already succeeded once. The league moved its men’s basketball tournament from L.A. to Vegas in 2013 after lackluster crowds prompted Scott to seek a new environment. The league reported over 86,000 attended the 2017 tournament at Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena, home of the NHL expansion Golden Knights.
A Vegas upgrade boosts one of the Pac-12’s bowl games ...
Chances are the postseason Las Vegas Bowl will increase its appeal, payout (currently at $1.3 million a team), Pac-12 selection status (it picks sixth), and potentially its other conference tie-in (currently the mid-major Mountain West) thanks to the Raiders’ stadium.
Las Vegas is enthusiastic about getting new events to the area with the stadium, too. Per the Mercury News, last April then-Nevada governor Brian Sandoval established a committee tasked with attracting major sporting events, called the Southern Nevada Sporting Event Committee.
But Vegas isn’t the only option. The Pac-12 could also move the game to the new NFL stadium near Los Angeles, which will also be completed in 2020.
MANICA Architecture
Now the Pac-12 has a chance to redeem itself after years of its title game being in a setting that didn’t work.
Vegas might be the conference’s favorite for the reasons listed above, but the Los Angeles stadium would make a lot of sense, too.
Wherever this game ends up, the Pac-12 having to choose between two brand-new stadiums in unique locations is a pretty good problem to have.
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