February 9, 2024

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I had dinner last night in Old Las Vegas, a 15-minute drive from the heart of Super Bowl central. The run-down version of the flashier Strip is known for its lower minimum bets and its kitschy capturing of Vegas history. (Example: The old courthouse is now the Mob Museum.) But what stood out to me was the lack of Super Bowl activity or imagery; as I noted earlier this week, you might not have known there was a game in town. Speaking of Super Bowl–related activity, today I look at the mix of other sports seeking to steal some of the limelight from the Big Game. I check in with the Chiefs, who aren’t forgetting their German friends. And I take a close look at AI and eyeballs as they pertain to the NFL.

— Dan Kaplan [[link removed]]

The Super Bowl of Super Bowls: All Sports All the Time in Vegas [[link removed]]

Lucas Peltier-USA TODAY Sports

Competing sporting events in the host city on Super Bowl week is not unusual—the local NBA or NHL team, for example, may have a game. In 2016, during Super Bowl weekend in San Francisco, tickets to a Golden State Warriors game were going for more in some cases than those for the Big Game itself. There is a PGA Tour stop outside Phoenix on the second weekend in February that is a big deal whenever the Super Bowl comes to town, like last year.

But Vegas being Vegas, and the number of rival sporting events that were scheduled in town during Super Bowl week is unprecedented. Last night Teofimo Lopez and Jamaine Ortiz fought at Mandalay Bay. LIV Golf has a tournament outside the city that started yesterday at the Las Vegas Country Club (above, featuring new addition Jon Rahm during Thursday’s first round). Dana White’s Power Slap competition has an event tonight at the Durango casino. UFC has a bout scheduled Saturday at its Apex. Even Formula One’s Red Bull Racing Team is getting in on the action with a livery unveiling. (O.K., so that doesn’t quite qualify as a sporting event, but you get the idea.)

“We’re taking advantage of all the sports people that are in town, and the demand for our events has been off the charts,” says UFC chief operating officer Lawrence Epstein. “I wish we would have had more capacity at the UFC Apex and at the Durango station, because the demand is not just from fans, but also from media. The credentials requested from the media for both of those events have been akin to a major pay-per-view event. We had like 400 requests for media between Power Slap and UFC.”

Does the NFL mind sharing the stage? Probably not, but as Super Bowl week keeps getting bigger, with hundreds of events and parties, it has no choice. Jamie Fritz, a partner in Interstate 15 Sports and Entertainment, says: Of course the NFL cares, because the raft of sporting events is, in his words, “guerrilla marketing.”

“It’s brilliant for all these [sports] to do it, whether or not the NFL likes it,” Fritz says. “We know they don’t, but look: It’s brilliant for all the brands to capitalize on it. It’s solely guerilla marketing, 1,000%.”

By a check of StubHub, no tickets are available for the UFC fight tomorrow night, an event that Elon Musk plans to attend [[link removed]]. The Power Slap event at Durango casino has seating for only 750. It’s the first time tickets are being sold for the Power Slap series, and Epstein says he wishes he had more to sell.

Meanwhile, LIV Golf is piggybacking off the Super Bowl, too. “To be in Las Vegas the week of the Super Bowl, that’s the demographic we are trying to hit,” Phil Mickelson said in a video provided by the circuit. LIV Golf even advertised at the Tuesday night Golden Knights game at T-Mobile Arena.

And then there’s Red Bull’s Visa Cash App RB team, which last night unveiled its new race suit [[link removed]], followed by a party headlined by Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. The team declined to comment on why it chose the Super Bowl for the event, but F1 does have a permanent presence in Las Vegas with its racing paddock built for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Could future Super Bowl host cities see a similar influx of sporting events? Unlikely, given Las Vegas’s unique status as a party town and its infrastructure of casinos, arenas, and sports venues.

“The infrastructure this city has to host major events is truly second to none,” says Epstein. Also, UFC is based in Vegas. “And it just shows you: The Las Vegas ecosystem is so synergistic. You get these one plus one equals five or six situations, where events leverage off other events, and it just makes the whole thing bigger. Vegas is one of the cities where you can go to UFC events one night, a hockey game another night, hit the Raiders game on Sunday, maybe even hit NASCAR, Formula One. You have these ultimate sports weekends that just can’t be replicated anywhere else.”

Other cities might beg to differ, but there is no denying this Super Bowl week had more sporting alternatives than any of the preceding 57.

The Chiefs: Big in Germany. (But Does It Matter?) [[link removed]]

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The two teams in the Super Bowl typically lose money, in part because of the costs of travel, bloated by giant entourages, often including all of a club’s employees. Money is made in future years by higher ticket and sponsorship prices driven by the success and exposure.

But that doesn’t mean clubs aren’t using Super Bowl week for business. The Chiefs, who have an ambitious international strategy, are hosting executives of three of their German partners in Las Vegas this week, according to Mark Donovan, Kansas City’s president, as the Midwestern club continues to be one of the most ambitious NFL franchises in mining overseas opportunities. (The three: Crave, a German pet food company; apparel maker Englebert Strauss; and an agency, Brands and Emotions.)

“We are always activating,” Donovan told a group of media earlier this week. “We are one of the most aggressive teams in growing internationally, because we see the value for a small market team to say, ‘There are no boundaries.’ We now have the world’s demographic, the world’s population, if we can just get the content in front of them.”

The Chiefs are putting millions of dollars toward their push into Germany, where the NFL allows the team to market under a program that assigns geographic commercial opportunities to clubs. But for the Chiefs, it is a long-term vision.

“I don’t think international is all upside,” Donovan said. “I think there’s a lot of investment; we’ve had to put a lot of money against it. … It is exponential upside.”

Asked whether the Chiefs were in the red or black overseas, Donovan said the team was right now losing money. “I project that we will be at break-even in the next 18 months. And that will be dramatically impacted by whether or not we play another game internationally. (The Chiefs played the Dolphins in Frankfurt this season.) Because what we saw from Germany is we were able to grow the business a bit just by putting forth effort and creating relationships. The game was pretty exponential for us in terms of growth through a partnership standpoint.”

The Panthers have been announced as the home team for a game in Munich next season, and Donovan has already made known that the Chiefs want to be the away team. But he is doubtful that will happen, as the Chiefs are a big road draw, and the Panthers won’t want to give that up.

“We’re in the top one or two of every social media [metric] you could have in terms of NFL-related entities in Germany,” Donovan said. “And that’s been a three-year effort to get there. We’ve had a lot of success on that front.”

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Eyeballs and AI

Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

The NFL’s decision to sell a playoff game to Peacock this season attracted great attention—and scorn, to the point that commissioner Roger Godell was asked at his Super Bowl press conference: How much money is too much money for the NFL?

One of his responses focused on the audience for that playoff game, a Chiefs victory over the Dolphins (above), which was reported as 23 million, higher than the same game a year earlier on broadcast TV. The 23 million figure, rated by Nielsen, also includes simulcasts in Miami and Kansas City, which contributed about 1.35 million viewers.

But the NFL offered another figure yesterday: 26 million viewers. Speaking on a panel at the Super Bowl about the use of data and artificial intelligence, the league’s executive vice president and chief operating officer of NFL Media, Hans Schroeder, gave the higher figure, basing it on first-party data, collected by the streamer itself. (Caveat: The Media Rating Council, an industry overseer that accredits audience measures, does not recognize the first-party data measurement, so in September Amazon stopped using it to report ratings for its Thursday Night Football broadcasts, after heavy criticism.)

Schroeder also disclosed that the NFL is not far away from using AI to develop its game schedule. To some extent, the NFL already does that, but it’s a more limited AI that is entirely reliant on human input. Adaptive AI—basically, a system that can learn—is the next step. Currently, the NFL taps into AWS to create millions of schedules, which are whittled down to roughly 50, from which humans choose the best option. That’s one of the reasons the league’s games are so competitive, Schroeder said. However, the system is only as good as the human input. Adaptive AI could correct input mistakes.

FRONT OFFICE SPORTS TODAY They Said What?

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

“Vegas is built for a Super Bowl, but … I think it’s a real dichotomy between what the casinos want, and what the NFL and other businesses want.”

—Senior writer Michael McCarthy on the tensions between casinos and the NFL during Super Bowl week in Las Vegas. To hear more about everything leading up to the Big Game, check out the latest episode of Front Office Sports Today.

🎧 Listen and subscribe on Apple [[link removed]], Google [[link removed]], and Spotify [[link removed]].

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