It may be the first bowl of the season, which doesn't exactly make it the most preferred date on the holiday calendar, and the opponent may be a school no one was sure even played football, but Utah State football fans, undeterred, are flooding into town here like, well, like tourists.
Thirty-two years between bowl games does not create ho-hum apathy when it comes to postseason play. Thousands of Aggies, past and present, are making the trek to the Las Vegas Bowl to watch USU face Ball State of Indiana Friday night in the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl.By tonight, it's estimated that as many as 8,000 Aggies will be scattered around town, paying anywhere from $19 a room at Circus Circus to $25 at the Aladdin to $75 at The Mirage and up to $1,700 for the suites at Caesar's Palace. They won't be able to get into any of the 5,005 rooms at the fabulous new MGM Grand Hotel Casino & Theme Park, however, since the world's largest hotel won't officially open until Saturday, the morning after the big game. But they may be able to take in a victory breakfast there.
At 7:30 tonight the Aggies will congregate, most of them anyway, at the Sands Hotel and Casino for a pep rally featuring the Utah State Marching Band, cheerleaders, guest speakers and Las Vegas-style barbecue. As many as 6,000 will have come to town as part of the Aggie Caravan Bus that got a police escort to the Utah border early today, reassembled 30 miles later in Mesquite for a pep rally/luncheon, and then was scheduled to drive into Las Vegas just before sunset escorted by Nevada state trooper squad cars and helicopters.
Al Capone never hit town this way.
You can't say the Aggies don't know how to arrive.
Las Vegas Bowl officials are estimating that the influx of the Aggie fun buses will be the catalyst for a new bowl attendance record of more than 17,000 live spectators tomorrow night in the 32,000-seat Silver bowl, breaking last year's mark of just over 15,000 fans when the University of Nevada played Bowling Green in the bowl's inaugural game.
By the first of the week, the Aggies' Big West Conference ticket allotment of 5,000 had already been exhausted.
It isn't the biggest fan rush to hit Vegas this month. That honor goes to the 1 million people who flooded the phone lines two weeks ago when the fabulous new MGM Grand Hotel Casino & Theme Park opened its switchboard and began taking reservations for Barbra Streisand's New Year's Eve and New Year's Day shows. And runner-up honors go to the more than 1,000 credentialed media and more than 15,000 soccer fans who are expected to show up Sunday at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the official team draw for the 1994 World Cup Soccer competition.
But the Aggie fans are well ahead of Ball State fans, who are expected to number between only 2,000 and 3,000 by tomorrow night's 5 p.m. kickoff.
"The Aggies have exceeded everyone's expectations," said Dominic Clark, media relations director for Las Vegas Bowl II. "The Big West Conference is happy, the bowl is happy. This is very good support."
Clark said that last year's University of Nevada fan contingent was something of a disappointment. The total number of Wolfpack fans wasn't bad - about 7,000 showed up in the Silver Bowl - but their timing was awful. The majority drove in from Reno the day of the game, a situation that left the Aladdin Hotel, last year's host hotel for the Big West champion, stuck with a large block of unbooked rooms.
The Sands Hotel, this year's Big West champion host, noted that situation, according to Clark, and consequently blocked only a few rooms for this year's Big West representative, little realizing the demand that would be streaming down I-15 from Cache Valley and the Wasatch Front.
"So the Aggie fans have had to spread out all over town," said Clark. "Most of the Sands' rooms went to ESPN."
Still, finding rooms isn't a huge problem in a place that has 86,000 of them, and that's before the Siegfried & Roy show.
It's all adding up to a genuine bowl experience for the Aggies. Plenty of glitter, plenty of demand, plenty of attention, plenty of media and bright lights. Who cares if isn't all because of USU playing Ball State? Who cares if a lot of the visitors in town speak with Irish or Albanian accents and think football is a game you play without hands? The Aggies are here in force, ready for the school's first bowl game in 32 years. As long as the last person out of Cache Valley unplugged the iron, there's not a thing to worry about.