As a Raiders season ticket holder, I can assure you that their division games (Chargers, Chiefs, Broncos) don't draw well. The visitors that draw, when you get them, are Steelers, Pats, Cowboys, maybe Chicago if their uptrend continues. But being Vegas is a wild card; there will be an attraction to Vegas, though not necessarily the stadium, on game weekends.

That's why I was saying my model was over simplified.

Obviously those people will spend a lot of money, but even if they ALL fly here Airport visitation stats won't go up 1%.

If we wanted to bring more visitors to Las Vegas pretty much any other way to spend a Billion dollars would have been more productive. The politicians never even tried to make that argument, at least to a sophisticated audience.

It's all about legacy, and home town spirit. Apparently a lot of people can't really be proud of a city that doesn't have an NFL team to root for.

Bottom line is we spent more to get an NFL team than any other city, and we are getting less out it than most cities, because we already have to many things to compete for a tourist's dollar and we didn't need a "star attraction" to revitalize an aging downtown or some of the other rationalizations other cities have used.