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PACIFIC-12 CONFERENCE MEN'S MEDIA DAYNovember 1, 2012Larry ScottGary StevensonSAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA LARRY SCOTT: Good morning. I'm Larry Scott, Commissioner of the Pac‑12 Conference, and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all here today for our Media Day with our coaches, but also to celebrate the launch of Pac‑12 men's basketball season. It's a great pleasure to host you here at Pac‑12 Studios. This facility only broke ground in February, and the team led by Gary Stevenson, who you will hear from later, has done an incredible job of getting the facility built out, getting the networks launched August 15th, and doing over a hundred events since then at a remarkable level of quality. So it's a great pleasure to host this event here and to have so many people be able to visit our facility. As you can see from the video, the Pac‑12 Conference has a storied history in men's basketball, and there's a lot of excitement and very high expectations about the future. Perhaps the anticipation and excitement is more intense this year because of the significant change in the amount of exposure our conference will receive this year. There's a buzz around these studios, which didn't exist in the past, and what Pac‑12 Networks is going to do to expose men's basketball. But, to start with, this is the first year of a new 12‑year agreement with ESPN and Fox. Pac‑12 men's basketball is back on ESPN on a regular basis for the first time in a long while. We'll have 46 games on the ESPN family of networks this season, 22 with our longtime partner Fox Sports Net, and every other men's basketball game, approximately 150 games, are on the Pac‑12 Networks. So for our fans, for our alumni, for basketball enthusiasts throughout the country, they're going to get more Pac‑12 basketball than they have ever seen. In a few minutes Gary Stevenson, the President of Pac‑12 Enterprises who oversees the networks, will give you more detail about the programming, plans for all sports and basketball. But I want to mention it now because it really is one of the key cornerstones about what is new and exciting about this conference. Unprecedented exposure, on par or better than any conference is going to have this season. And because of our West Coast location, because of what our schools stand for, because we are in the corridor of innovation in this country, you'll also see a tremendous commitment to technology and innovation as part of these networks. So all the men's basketball games that are going to be on Pac‑12 Networks will be available on devices like this, like the iPad, your phones, and it's going to make it very easy for our fans, for media, for basketball followers to follow Pac‑12 basketball. The men's basketball season itself and what happens on the floor also promises to be very exciting. There is an influx of a lot of new talent to the conference this year twinned with stability amongst our coaching ranks. I think this is the first time since 2001‑2002 season that there have not been any coaching turnovers in our conference this year, and those two things combined bode very well for this coming season. What's also new and exciting about this season is how it is going to finish. After ten years at the Staples Center, the Pac‑12 Men's Basketball Tournament is moving to a new home where we will start new traditions in LasVegas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. We'll be partnering with LasVegas Events and the MGM Grand, which is known for big‑time events, for doing it right and putting on a great show. And we feel all those elements are befitting for the Pac‑12 and our great men's basketball program during the year. So there's a lot that will be new there and exciting. We're pleased to be joined today by Pat Christenson, the president of LasVegas Events. He'll be available throughout the day if people have questions about the tournaments, the accommodations for media, format, our staff. Pat would be happy to answer any questions that anyone has. We have got teams coming off a strong postseason last year, Stanford, Washington in particular led to a postseason record of 17‑8. So we are very optimistic about what this season's going to look like. Between coaching, between new talent in the conference, the way some of our teams ended the season last year, all bodes very well. In addition to all that is happening within this country, for the conference, I want to touch for a second about our international plans. We kicked off our China initiative this past summer with the UCLA men's basketball team. I was over there with Coach Howland and his team. First time ever through a conference‑led initiative that we brought a team over there to play games. We are mindful of the enormous popularity of basketball in China. There are 300 million basketball fans over there. We have admired what the NBA's done over there, and we feel that as a conference being on the West Coast, the gateway to the Pacific Rim, we are best suited to take advantage of the natural relationship between the Asia‑Pacific territory and our conference. So the UCLA trip where they played against two university teams, and the Shanghai Sharks, one of the leading professional teams, is the first of what will be an annual competition where we send over teams to China, and we will also be hosting teams over here, in men's basketball, but also starting next summer in women's basketball and other Olympic sports as well. So our ambition and the exciting new plans are significant here in the U.S., but also overseas. Now it gives me great please to introduce Gary, who only started last September. Gary Stevenson has a long history with the NBA, with the PGA TOUR, with his own media and marketing consulting company. At the NBA he was responsible, amongst other things, in media marketing, for the launch of the WNBA, and brings great experience in television, also basketball. Gary has put together anall‑starteam around Pac‑12 Enterprises, Pac‑12 Networks, and it is my pleasure to bring him up to talk to you more about our plans for the season. Gary. GARY STEVENSON: Thank you, Larry. And let me echo his comment that we are very, very proud to have you at Pac‑12 Studios today. Last year at this time we had three employees and we were officed at‑‑ in Walnut Creek at the conference headquarters. We broke ground here on February the 15th. And if you can imagine this space that you're in with no lights, no plumbing, no air conditioning ducts, that's what this space next door looked like. We moved in, into our facility‑‑ excuse me. We broke ground on February the 15th and we actually moved into the facility four and a half months later. What you'll see next door is an 80,000‑square‑foot state‑of‑the‑art facility that was built in four and a half months. We look forward to having you look around and seeing it, because it gives us an opportunity to showcase so much of the Pac‑12 content. We went on the air on August the 15th with 127 employees on board. So we have been up and running about 78 days. In those 78 days we have produced 172 live events, so we're well on our way to producing 550 live events this year. Next year we'll produce 750 live events, and in the third year we'll produce 850 live events. We have more than 50 providers that are distributing our content, including four of the top five in the country: Comcast, Cox, Dish, and Time Warner. And we're working day and night to make sure that we have full distribution just as soon as possible. But let me tell you a little bit about our content thus far. In football we have had all 12 schools on at least twice, and we have had 15 of our games thus far that have featured top 25 teams, including this weekend when No. 24, Arizona, faces No. 25, UCLA, which is a really big game in our football schedule. In Olympic sports‑‑ all Olympic sports have unprecedented coverage. We're proud of the fact that we will have two‑‑ at this point we'll have two No. 1 versus No. 2 in the country games on our network: last week when Stanford women's soccer played against UCLA, and this weekend when Stanford and Oregon go head to head in women's volleyball. We have totally rebuilt pac‑12.com to deliver special features and much more intense and content to our fans. And we're the first network to launch TV everywhere at the same time we went on the air, which gives you an opportunity to watch games on your iPad or your iPhone or your PC. We hear from fans on a daily basis and, knock on wood, thus far we have gotten a positive response. And, remember, when we built the Pac‑12 Networks, it really was in response to our fans who said they wanted more Pac‑12 programming. So let's talk about men's basketball. It's remarkable to think that over 90 Pac‑12 basketball games weren't televised last year, including 23 conference games. Our networks give us an opportunity to rectify that situation. We will have 142 regular‑season games on the air this year, including 94 conference games and eight Pac‑12 tournament games. We will have at least 12 games from every school and more than 20 in some cases. 70 percent of the Pac‑12 home schedule will be on our networks, and that does not count the additional shoulder programming that we'll have around men's basketball. One of the things about the Pac‑12 Networks, it allows us to create connections, connections for alums to their schools, one school to the other school, the schools to the conference, and one of the important things are for student‑athletes to stay connected to their families. I'll give you an example. Kaleb Tarczewski is a freshman at Arizona, one of the top recruits in the country. He is from Claremont, New Hampshire, which is roughly 2600 miles away from Tucson. As you can imagine, there's not many direct flights from Claremont to Tucson. So with Pac‑12 Networks his family and friends will have an opportunity to watch Kaleb play in a lot of his games this year. We'll also connect with our fans by telling stories that haven't been told before. We have 24 hours a day to really dig into the stories about student‑athletes, about coaches, about history, about tradition of this great conference. Aziz N'Diaye, who plays for the University of Washington, is from Senegal. This summer he and his Husky teammates had an opportunity to travel to Senegal, to his home, which gave him an opportunity to be reunited with his family for the first time in three years and also gave his teammates an opportunity to learn more about a Aziz. Take a look at what happened this summer in Senegal. (Video played.)       GARY STEVENSON: We have brought in an experienced group of analysts who have a deep understanding of this conference to help tell these stories. Guys like Bill Walton, Ernie Kent, Brevin Knight, Matt Muehlebach, Detlef Schrempf, Lamar Hurd, Don MacLean, and so many others. We will rely on their knowledge and experience to help us tell the many interesting stories that come from our 12 campuses. It all begins eight days from today, November 9th, when we feature five games on opening night. We will have the season opener for 11 of our 12 schools, and we'll feature all 12 schools in our first week of coverage. We'll start the conference schedule on January 2nd, and we'll follow with three more games that weekend, including Stanford at UCLA. And if the last five years are any indication, we expect a down‑to‑the‑wire race that will culminate in our new basketball tournament in LasVegas. And it will all play out on the Pac‑12 Networks. We look forward to a great season, and we hope you enjoy your day at Pac‑12 Studios. Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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