LAS VEGAS — Matisse Thybulle had one more heist in him.
Shortly after a victory over USC in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 tournament, Washington’s defensive dynamo left T-Mobile Arena, walked across a crowded plaza (in uniform) and joined a live Pac-12 Networks broadcast.
Thybulle pulled up a chair on the far right of the set, alongside guest Gary Payton, and proceeded to steal the show.
Full of smiles and completely at ease, he discussed the win, his windmill dunk and moving within one steal of Payton’s conference record.
“A lot of kids dream they’ll get to this place and not a lot of people really get there,’’ Thybulle said, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Payton. “To be here is mind-boggling.
“How do you wrap your mind around sitting next to Gary Payton, looking at him like, you’re here, and I’m a couple steals away from breaking his record.”
Payton laughed, analysts Richard Jefferson and Casey Jacobsen laughed, and the fans crowded around the set soaked it all in.
It was exactly the type of spontaneous, engaging theatre that Pac-12 Networks president Mark Shuken envisioned when he decided to bring the men’s basketball studio show to Las Vegas for live broadcasts from the plaza outside T-Mobile.
“That was way better anything we can do sitting back in San Francisco,’’ Shuken said, a short time later.
Thybulle’s on-air appearance with Payton was a gift basket for the unofficial one-year anniversary of Shuken’s strategic shift in the Pac-12 Networks’ approach to covering the marquee sports.
Beginning with the 2018 men’s tournament at T-Mobile, the networks have ramped up the number of on-site broadcasts tied to football and men’s basketball, effectively doubling-down on the money makers as a means of increasing fan affinity across every campus.
“The next step is to be present for longer and to go deeper into the stories,” Shuken explained. “Our mission is to connect the fans — that’s something we staple to our foreheads.”
Nowhere was the pivot more evident than in Shuken’s decision to take the football pregame show on the road.
Each Saturday during the 2018 season, “The Pregame” appeared on a different campus for live broadcasts throughout the day as beefed-up shoulder programming around game telecasts.
Invariably, the hosts were joined by famous alums or current coaches of the school hosting the broadcast.
At Washington State, for example, former quarterback Drew Bledsoe talked football and mustaches.
When ‘The Pregame’ went live from Stanford, Heisman Trophy winner Jim Plunkett made an appearance.
At Arizona State, basketball coach Bobby Hurley joined the set.
Mike Hopkins did the same during a broadcast from Washington and discussed his relationship with football coach Chris Petersen, among a variety of topics.
The on-site appearances were well received up and down the conference.
“The biggest strength of the network is the talent, and the interest they take in promoting the schools,” Washington athletic director Jen Cohen told the Hotline.
“They came in on a Friday, they interview, they look at the campus culture, they get alums on ‘The Pregame.’ It was like a recruiting video.”
Promoting the universities generally and sports teams specifically is a core mission of the seven-year old networks, and there’s no greater marketing tool than football.
But for years, they seemed to treat football the same as the Olympic sports.
In Dec. ’17, for example, the networks did not produce a studio show hooked to the inaugural early-signing period, when the majority of the recruiting classes were signed and sealed.
Their peer networks in the SEC and Big Team, on the other hand, devoted hours of coverage to the recruiting event.
The school voiced their opinions on the matter to Shuken, who had been on the job for just three months. Out of those discussions came an increased commitment to the major sports.
“Since Mark’s arrival,’’ Cohen said, “there has been a real focus on adding value to the schools and listening to our challenges.
“We have to put as many resources as we can into football. And we have to show it in a way that gets more eyeballs on it.”
The eyeballs issue is a serious one. But to a large degree, it’s out of Shuken’s control:
* The networks have distribution agreements with the likes of Comcast, Cox and DISH for several years to come.
* Those contracts prevent football and men’s basketball from being shown direct-to-consumer on an Over-The-Top platform.
* DirecTV and its owner, AT&T, are not interested in a carriage deal at the Pac-12’s asking price.
* Pac-12 leadership (commissioner Larry Scott and the presidents/chancellors) rejected an offer by ESPN to take over distribution of the networks, believing the existing model better for the conference over the long haul.
What’s left for Shuken to fortify, therefore, is engagement — spreading engagement, deepening engagement and measuring engagement.
After all, fan affinity will be central to the negotiations for Pac-12 media rights in a few years, potentially impacting the number and size of the bids for the full array of content.
“The ultimate objective is to elevate the value of our media rights between now and 2024,’’ Shuken said.
(The football pivot worked, according to network officials, but quantifying success is tricky. There was a substantial percentage increase in audience for “The Pregame” and the average per-game unique viewers on TV Everywhere. However, the Hotline has chosen not to publish the percentages because the networks declined to provide the underlying audience numbers.)
The unknown components to Shuken’s plan — and the Pac-12 is hardly alone in this regard — are the means of measuring engagement and the delivery methods for the content.
The media landscape is evolving rapidly, but there’s no guarantee that will continue in linear fashion, that A will beget B will beget C.
Advances in technology or fluctuations in consumer behavior could create a disruption that causes A to beget D.
“The question is, how do you monetize? How do you quantify the value of anybody who clicks, or anybody who watches,” Shuken said.
“The industry isn’t there yet. But it has to get there — not just with sports necessarily but the whole thing.”
He mentioned the video of UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi’s viral routine, which has generated 40+ million Twitter views.
“There has got to be some way to make that matter from a business perspective.”
Shuken’s drive to deepen engagement isn’t finished.
The next step: Turn the spring football games into an event.
Or, as he put it: “How do you make that thing a thing?”
That process depends on the coaches, who are wary of showing plays and formations that could be seen on the Pac-12 Networks telecast by future opponents.
Fortunately for Shuken, Arizona State was first on the calendar.
No coach is more progressive when it comes to media exposure and branding his program than Herm Edwards, who agreed to wear a microphone for the Sun Devils’ scrimmage.
“We’re just getting started,” Shuken said. “There’s so much more we going to do that’s different.
“The continued evolution of the content strategy is audience enhancement. And ultimately, we’ll have a model and a pattern to show.”
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