The path for many sports radio hosts is not a straight line. It sometimes resembles the Telestrator scribblings of former NFL broadcaster John Madden. Although the journey for Steve Cofield isn’t as jagged as a Madden drawing, it certainly hasn’t been a beeline either.
Cofield has been a radio host at ESPN Las Vegas since 2007. He’s originally from New Jersey. Before landing in Vegas, Cofield covered prep and college sports for a local newspaper. When one of his friends from Rutgers, Ryan Williams, got a gig at Sports Fan Radio Network in Vegas back in ’96, Cofield drove out to Sin City with him.
After meeting with the PD, Cofield was offered a job at the same network three months later. He worked there until the company folded in 2001. Cofield had a cup of coffee at WBT in Charlotte and then made his way back to Vegas where he bought a two-hour block to broadcast his show from 2004-07.
That’s dedication in my book. Cofield was able to make a lot more money than he was spending while also building his brand and refining his chops. It led to an opportunity at ESPN Las Vegas, a place he’s called home for the past 16 years.
That’s a cool story.
In our chat below, Cofield talks about how the perception of Vegas has done a complete 180 in multiple ways. He also describes the town’s interest level regarding the potential relocation of the Oakland A’s, adding to the Strip, and being featured next to a stripper pole in Sports Illustrated.
Vegas, baby. Enjoy!
BN: It’s obvious how much it’s changed, but how would you put it into words what sports radio was like when you started in the ‘90s, to what it is now in Vegas?
SC: Yeah, it’s completely changed. Obviously, the professional sports teams coming here changes what we do on a daily basis. I think it’s also changed the image of the market. When I first got here in ‘96, and I was doing that national network, we were absolutely a pariah, outlaws out here. I’m not saying the shows were, but anything based here sports-wise was just thought to be all gambling talk. And obviously, the Sin City moniker – like what’s wrong with people who are doing radio in Vegas and live in Vegas?
Vegas is totally different now. Slowly but surely things changed.
The funny thing is, there was actually an SI writer named Ian Thomsen, who came out to Vegas and wanted to do a piece on the future of major league professional sports in Vegas, like when were we going to get it. Myself and my co-host at the time were partly featured in the story. They actually did a little photo shoot. That guy got a kick out of the fact that back in the day we were doing brokered, and even the station, did a lot of business with strip clubs. We would take their money. We actually did a photo shoot at a strip club. It was so weird because my partner and I were onstage leaning against the stripper pole. He just thought that was the greatest thing ever.
The topic at the time was like, hey, is this a pro sports market? We were very in favor of Vegas and tried to explain to him like, hey, there’s people here from a population standpoint. It’s growing, people will support the teams, everyone doesn’t live on the Strip. There’s lots of normal people here.
Vegas is very transient. We’re up to a population of 2.3 or 2.4 million, so the city has grown. From a show standpoint, the show I did in 2014, I’m not going to say it’s completely different, it’s 90% different than it is now.
BN: What percentage of your show is devoted to local talk?
SC: Well, it depends on the year. Right now, since we don’t have the Raiders in training camp yet, I’d say at the peak, we’re probably 70% local. Maybe at worst, like 55% local. I think we can do Raiders 11 months a year.
I’ve been joking the last couple weeks about where baseball is right now especially for younger listeners. I’ve been joking that this is kind of like the three week sweet spot for us to talk baseball and then that’s it. We’re probably done except for a topic here or there.
I think our audience is so into the NFL with the Raiders here and with gambling and with transplants that if an A’s related story came down, I might talk about the Falcons and Bijan Robinson before I would talk about the A’s.
The NFL, I can’t even quantify. What is it 50 times bigger than Major League Baseball? Almost every NFL team is more interesting than an average Major League Baseball story. Maybe that’s going to change in five years. I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to work out with the A’s. And I like baseball. I play fantasy and I gamble. But baseball has its place and football is king. We could do national college football stuff over most sports almost every day.
But yeah, we try to do local; we talk a lot about the Raiders. Obviously, the Vegas Golden Knights got on the show a lot this year. I’m actually part of the broadcast team for UNLV men’s basketball and football and a little bit of women’s basketball. If UNLV was like the sixth most popular topic in 2014, it might be the 12th now because there’s so much going on here. The market has just changed.
The Raiders dominate, Vegas Golden Knights dominate. We have a good WNBA person on the show. We do a good amount of the Aces and WNBA. So yeah, the show has changed a lot.
BN: Is there any buzz at all about the A’s coming to town?
SC: The buzz that I hear is negative because it’s another one of these state and county funded deals. So most of what you’re going to get on social media is negative. Our show, it’s me every day and I have a rotation of four or five other dudes who are with the company. Our show was, I’ll say 90% against it. I don’t know if there’s buzz because we don’t really talk about it positively.
I don’t want to say like, hey, there’s no buzz and it’s all negative because that’s what we’re putting out. I think there’s a little bit of buzz, but there’s apprehension too because people are annoyed that they pushed us through from a money standpoint. People are smart here.
I actually think this is one of the more savvy sports markets because we didn’t have it. We didn’t have major league sports before and we were fine. We have all these transplants here so they know sports. They know who the A’s are. They know what they’ve done over the years. We have a lot of Northern Californians so they know what the A’s have been doing.
I think it’s a bizarro vibe. We definitely want Major League Baseball here. I think people are enthused to get a stadium here. But most people I talk to want an expansion team. I’ve been saying a bunch of times, I’d rather have the Rays. I want a good organization. Bill Foley and VGK have raised the standard here, they’ve raised the bar. That dude got the arena done without almost any public money. All he does is spend to win and if that means making tough changes, he makes the changes. He’s a model owner. That’s the standard he set. They just won a Cup in six years. If the A’s come in limping and are like, ahh, give us five years to build, people here are going to be like, I don’t think so.
BN: That’s what I was thinking. If this was like a Golden Knights expansion type thing, do you think there’d be way more buzz than there is with it specifically being the A’s?
SC: Yep, billion percent. Yeah, because people have already seen it. What they did is virtually impossible. It is crazy. The league gave them a little bit of a head start by softening some of the expansion rules, but the bar they set is almost impossible to reach.
Now people are like, oh, all our new teams better be as good as the Knights. It’s like, well, the A’s right now, I don’t know what they are this year, a 45- or 50-win franchise that’s still rebuilding. When they come here, there’ll be all that excitement the first two, three years about the stadium, and then we’ll see from there. Vegas people, it’s a small town but you better give them a really good reason to go down anywhere near the strip, or they ain’t goin’. You need to win.
BN: Is Vegas the one market in America that actually does less gambling talk now than before it became legalized on a state-by-state basis?
SC: We don’t do less now. We do about the same. Do we do as much as other markets? We might not. [Laughs] Which is weird because gambling is part of our show every day and I have one block where we try to bring on an insider and do some picks and stuff. But I mean, we make bets all the time within the show. A lot of stories are framed by whatever event is going on with the odds.
But here’s the thing, we have deals with books, but the way deals are made right now where programming is kind of forced to do sportsbook talk based on behalf of whoever, FanDuel or BetMGM or DraftKings or whoever else, we don’t have anything like that where they force us to do gambling. But we do it. We’ve always done it. We’ve done a live Sunday preview show from the Westgate for, I don’t know what it is, probably 17 years now. It’s always part of the program. I think most of the audience understands it. It’s still a pretty big part.
I’ll go back to 2010, our pro sports at the time with local interests were sports gambling, different boxing promotions, we were very big into the UFC for about 13 years. We would travel to boxing and UFC on the road and do the home events with special shows on Fridays and whatever days. That was kind of our pro sports back then. Now it’s Raiders first, then the rest of the NFL, then college football. Where UFC and boxing and sports gambling used to be, they had a higher status on our show, they’ve been dropped down a little bit.
BN: You guys didn’t go from zero to 60 with professional sports teams, you’re like zero to 150 or something like that. For you, who’s been there this long, that’s gotta be a trip, right?
SC: Oh, it’s amazing. What’s going on right now, we have F1 coming up in November. They’re still finishing an $80 million construction project on the Las Vegas Strip and the adjacent roads. The world’s richest sport is coming here.
We have the best team in the WNBA. We’ve got NFL here, which who knows how many thousands of people that’s bringing to the market every week. This new thing the Sphere is amazing. I think that’s probably going to host some sporting events, more like UFC and boxing down the road and might be a big video game haven. Then to your point, the A’s, we’re the number one destination to move or expand in Major League Baseball.
The funny thing is I speak about it like it happened quickly. It didn’t. In the early 2000s, there was still nonsense. The NFL had, I think it was like a 52-inch TV rule. For some reason, they tried to crack down in 2003 or ‘04 on Super Bowl parties. They said they were going to have people on the ground measuring the TVs. They actually did scare a bunch of casinos into making their Super Bowl party smaller.
There was stuff like that. There was advertising. Vegas the TV show wasn’t allowed to be pushed in commercials on an NBC Super Bowl. Within the last, what, seven years Tony Romo had his fantasy football thing cancelled. That’s pretty recent history. So to come this far this quickly, and obviously, a lot of it is the legalization of sports gambling in whatever it is now, 30+ states, that normalizes what we do here, so people aren’t as afraid.
Actually, I think other markets are now more aggressive than we are because there’s no sportsbook at Allegiant, there’s no sportsbook inside of T-Mobile Arena. And there are sportsbooks popping up in arenas and stadiums and for the Super Bowl. I was sitting outside of Talking Stick for the Suns. They have a big FanDuel sportsbook like adjacent to the building. We don’t do that yet. That’s how far and fast it’s come.
It’s funny, people are now cocky. They’re like, oh, we’re getting an NBA team. Of course we’re going to get one, LeBron wants one. There’s a group that’s got a building plan down at the south end of the strip about five miles down from Mandalay Bay. They’re going to build a separate arena, so the NBA team might not have to use Foley’s building, and we’re going to have another 20,000 seat arena five miles down from the Strip.
BN: How about going forward, is there anything specifically that you would like to do in your broadcasting career?
SC: That’s a funny one because I always say this, radio is so tumultuous, and the company I work for Lotus Broadcasting is actually really loyal, really loyal, so the fact that I’ve been on here in some form since 2004 is pretty amazing because that doesn’t happen in a lot of markets.
I want to see our show grow. I think if the A’s come here and NBA comes here, I’m going to look at all of the opportunities to further build a brand, and do cool shows and cover all these cool athletes. This place has worked out way beyond any expectation. I think we’ve made enough connections around town being here for whatever it is 27 years and 19 local, that’s hard to walk away from. I don’t know how people jump from market to market every four and five years because so much of what you get in terms of inside information, that takes a while to build connections.
Dude, I’m a weirdo. I want to live somewhere where I’m comfortable. I’m not stressed. I don’t have to drive a whole bunch. The audience is chill. There really are no rules here, so you can kind of do whatever you want within reason. It’s a great place to live, the weather’s great for most of the year. At this point, I’m old enough where I’m just completely averse to cold weather. I travel to cold weather markets, but it’s for like three days and I’m like, yeah, back to Vegas where a bad day is 56 degrees.
Brian Noe is a columnist for BSM and an on-air host heard nationwide on FOX Sports Radio’s Countdown To Kickoff. Previous roles include stops in Portland, OR, Albany, NY and Fresno, CA. You can follow him on Twitter @TheNoeShow or email him at bnoe@premierenetworks.com.
