Matt Hong sat down with me for a 1-on-1 interview this week. The president of USA Sports activities is a Harvard Legislation College graduate who was co-valedictorian of his school class at North Carolina State.

Earlier than you ask if he places his trousers on one leg at a time, Hong additionally mentioned, “I used to be a horrible pupil in highschool.”

He’s a self-proclaimed educational late-bloomer who had an abominable transcript earlier than he obtained critical about his research.

I’ve been interested in how the Pac-12 and USA Sports activities met and determined to marry. They’re now in a five-year settlement that offers the TV community 22 soccer video games this season — the most important chunk of stock. USA Sports activities will carry one other 50 males’s basketball video games, and as many as 10 ladies’s video games.

Hong talked about an in-person assembly in New York at Octagon’s places of work. Teresa Gould, the Pac-12 Commissioner, was there. So was Michael Molinari, head of Pac-12 Enterprises. William Mao, of Octagon, was there, too, together with a handful of others.

Gould stood in entrance of the room and laid out her imaginative and prescient for the brand new Pac-12.

Mentioned Hong: “It felt like she might have been studying playing cards for the imaginative and prescient of Versant and the yet-unnamed USA Sports activities.”

USA Sports activities was spinning out of the NBCUniversal household. Versant? USA Sports activities? It didn’t also have a identify when that first assembly went down in New York. The entity glided by the nickname: “SpinCo.”

Hong mentioned his staff knew that it wished to be nimble, modern, bold, visionary, and that it wanted to take some dangers and be an even bigger participant within the live-sports programming area.

“We left that assembly from Octagon’s places of work and mentioned, ‘the ethos of what that staff is making an attempt to do matches us,” Hong mentioned.

USA Sports activities has sports activities rights offers in skilled soccer, the WNBA Finals, NASCAR, the WWE, Atlantic 10 basketball, and the Pac-12, amongst different entities. I requested Hong the place the sports-programming world is all headed. Media consultants anticipate the NFL’s media rights and the brand new NBA TV package deal may have a trickle-down impression available on the market.

“There’s solely a lot cash in all the sports-rights ecosystem,” Hong informed me. “As cash is spent towards, say, a brand new NFL deal or the present new NBA deal, there’s a little bit of impression within the ecosystem. That’s afforded us alternatives.”

Some highlights of our dialog (with my takeaways in parentheses):

On how potential Pac-12 enlargement may work throughout the framework of the prevailing deal: