Matt Hong sat down with me for a 1-on-1 interview this week. The president of USA Sports is a Harvard Law School graduate who was co-valedictorian of his college class at North Carolina State.
Before you ask if he puts his trousers on one leg at a time, Hong also said, “I was a horrible student in high school.”
He’s a self-proclaimed academic late-bloomer who had an abominable transcript before he got serious about his studies.
I’ve been curious about how the Pac-12 and USA Sports met and decided to marry. They’re now in a five-year agreement that gives the TV network 22 football games this season — the largest chunk of inventory. USA Sports will carry another 50 men’s basketball games, and as many as 10 women’s games.
Hong talked about an in-person meeting in New York at Octagon’s offices. Teresa Gould, the Pac-12 Commissioner, was there. So was Michael Molinari, head of Pac-12 Enterprises. William Mao, of Octagon, was there, too, along with a handful of others.
Gould stood in front of the room and laid out her vision for the new Pac-12.
Said Hong: “It felt like she could have been reading cards for the vision of Versant and the yet-unnamed USA Sports.”
USA Sports was spinning out of the NBCUniversal family. Versant? USA Sports? It didn’t even have a name when that first meeting went down in New York. The entity went by the nickname: “SpinCo.”
Hong said his team knew that it wanted to be nimble, innovative, ambitious, visionary, and that it needed to take some risks and be a bigger player in the live-sports programming space.
“We left that meeting from Octagon’s offices and said, ‘the ethos of what that team is trying to do matches us,” Hong said.
USA Sports has sports rights deals in professional soccer, the WNBA Finals, NASCAR, the WWE, Atlantic 10 basketball, and the Pac-12, among other entities. I asked Hong where the sports-programming world is all headed. Media consultants expect the NFL’s media rights and the new NBA TV package will have a trickle-down impact on the market.
“There’s only so much money in the entire sports-rights ecosystem,” Hong told me. “As money is spent toward, say, a new NFL deal or the current new NBA deal, there’s a bit of impact in the ecosystem. That’s afforded us opportunities.”
Some highlights of our conversation (with my takeaways in parentheses):
On how potential Pac-12 expansion might work within the framework of the existing deal: