Question of the Day - 31 October 2021

To answer your second question first, Allegiant Stadium is now the venue for postseason, as well as regular-season, football. As for Sam Boyd, thereby hangs a tale.

Built in 1971, the 50-year-old facility was probably nearing the end of its lifespan when Allegiant Stadium came along. Also, at 36,800 seats, it is overshadowed by its much bigger much newer Strip stadium sibling. Las Vegas Review-Journal sportswriter Ron Kantowski uses terms like “quaint” to describe the pocket-sized stadium on the marshy outskirts of southeast Las Vegas.
 
Meanwhile, Sam Boyd was essentially doomed to darkness by a no-compete clause in the grand bargain that brought the then-Oakland Raiders to Sin City. Sports? Ixnay. Concerts? Nada.

“That is the requirement; that was the deal among all the parties when the stadium legislation was drafted,” Applied Analysis economist Jeremy Aguero told Kantowski. “UNLV, I suppose, could certainly keep Sam Boyd open, but it would put in jeopardy the revenues it would receive.”
 
The revenues Aguero is referring to are the $3.5 million a year for 10 years the university collects to keep “the Slammer” (as the Extreme Football League called it) padlocked. University of Nevada-Las Vegas Athletic Director Desirée Reed-Francois booked schools like San Jose State into Sam Boyd during the pandemic, while insisting, “Candidly we kind of put Sam Boyd to rest in 2019, and we’re going to return to no events.
 
“Sam Boyd Stadium is a great asset and our campus is evaluating how it fits into the master plan,” she added of an ongoing analysis of the stadium’s future. It was renovated as recently as 2015, when a press tower and luxury suites were added.

However, Las Vegas Events President Pat Christenson told the R-J, "The cost of maintaining it and firing it up would make no sense, especially if you're doing smaller-attended events."

One exception, according to UNLV’s Fatima Hernandez, was the May 2021 commencement ceremony, held at Sam Boyd for social-distancing purposes.

"It also goes counter to the agreement with the Raiders. Every time you try to do something there, you have to jump through hoops. Anything that’s competitive, anything of substance that is going to draw fans … the Raiders are going to do,” Christenson added.
 
Assuming UNLV doesn’t demolish Sam Boyd (which seems unlikely), a couple of might prospects present themselves for its future.

The first would be selling the land in order to accumulate more acreage closer to the campus. Who would buy it? Perhaps a Major League Baseball team. Perhaps a major master-planned-community or industrial developer. 

Clark County School District Athletic Director Tim Jackson covets it as what Kantowski describes as “a public high school football facility for games of the week or marquee matchups against out-of-state teams that would be worthy of television coverage.”
 
Jackson said, “Two years ago, we had some [football] fields under construction and what we ended up doing is having three or four games on a Saturday out there. It was hugely successful. The kids loved it, we loved it, we would love to continue that.”

And high school football hardly seems like something Allegiant Stadium would dib, either.

More radical conversion ideas include reconfiguring Sam Boyd for youth baseball diamonds or soccer pitches. As Kantowski puts it, “The ideas for how to utilize Sam Boyd Stadium are almost as limitless as the views from the roof of the press-box tower.”

(Our special thanks to David Schoen of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who came through with vital information after the UNLV press office whiffed at this story pitch.)