The Mighty O’Ba Sports Report: Las Vegas As a Super Bowl City

By Pat Freeman, The Mighty O’Ba

Pat Freeman, The Mighty O’Ba

Super Bowl LVIII took place for the first time in a city that is built around gambling and sports betting. There was a time the NFL frowned at being a part of the gambling world, but once the owners realized how much money they were losing, let us say it was a rap.

Las Vegas might go down as the best Super Bowl city ever – that includes New Orleans, because the stadium is connected to the Las Vegas Strip. So, all the energy from everything that Vegas has to offer is connected to the NFL franchise home of the Raiders. This is what we tried to explain to Western New York and our franchise ownership group, but they decided to go against the grain by creating their own eventual destination in Orchard Park, New York.

The weekend of Super Bowl LVIII grossed more than 1.1 billion dollars with an influx of people of more than 400,000. Super Bowl week in Vegas honestly would be hard to trace its total fiscal impact on Las Vegas, but I believe it will go down as the largest grossing Super Bowl in history.

This momentous week, I announced my newest book Maximizing the Big Game, and had the honor to appear on several broadcasts during the week thanks to my publicist, Saida Ali, who did an outstanding job promoting me on radio row. The energy had returned to radio row, which was briefly hampered by the pandemic, but seemed to be back again. Las Vegas only beat New Orleans because of the proximity of the stadium to the media staging grounds, which were located at Mandalay Bay and lays directly across to the stadium.

Every person I ran into familiar with Western New York asked the same question of why are they building an open-air stadium away from the energy of downtown Buffalo in a snow belt? My answer has been the same – that I truly do not understand the owner or our elected officials, who just never began the proper planning back in 2013. If I have any disappointments in life, it is not accomplishing bringing a multi-use sports and entertainment complex to the region where I grew up.

Finally, the Las Vegas Super Bowl will go down as the absolute best city to accommodate the big game – better than New Orleans, which is now on the clock.