Greg Hansen: By hiring MGM's George Kliavkoff, Pac-12 admits it's time to fix football, finances

George Kliavkoff has worked for NBC, MGM, MLB, TBS, A&E, Hulu, the WNBA and the Hearst Corporation. He has a degree in journalism and a Law School degree He has lived in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

By all accounts, he is OSM — one smart man.

But Kliavkoff, who was on the varsity rowing team for the Boston Terriers in the early 1980s, probably wouldn’t know the Dawg Pound from the Zona Zoo, or if Ralphie the Buffalo runs at Folsom Field or Rice-Eccles Stadium.

He’s got a lot to learn.

The Pac-12’s commissioner-to-be was pictured Thursday standing in Sun Devil Stadium next to ASU president Michael Crow and Sun Devil athletic director Ray Anderson, which he will soon learn is not the best way to build a consensus in a league split 12 ways by a great emotional divide.

Why not introduce himself at the 50-yard line of the Rose Bowl, the most hallowed piece of turf in the league? As much as being the Pac-12 commissioner is about the big things, it’s also about the little things. Ultimately, the scoreboard counts them all.

The TurnkeyZRG search firm is not infallible. But it is thorough: In its online application for the Pac-12 commissionership, it recommended 43 qualifications that an applicant must meet:

“Be strong yet humble.’’ (The anti-Larry Scott clause).

“It takes a team.’’ (Another Scott addendum).

“Prefer a learner to someone who thinks they have all the answers.’’ (Sound familiar?)

‘’Need a discoverer; things are too fluid for a pre-existing playbook.’’

The 43 requirements touched on (a) moral compass, (b) business acumen, © winning edge and (d) inspirational building. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. There are two easy but pertinent questions every Pac-12 athletic director and potential ticket-buyer would ask Kliavkoff:

“How are we going to pay these bills?”

“Can you do something about those 8:37 p.m. kickoffs?”

By hiring a non-traditional commissioner — someone who is a board member of BetMGM, a company established in 2018 to create a world-class sports betting and online gaming platform — the Pac-12 chancellors and presidents are confirming that those 3.5 GPAs on the Stanford women’s lacrosse team don’t carry as much weight as finding new streams of revenue that’ll help pay for those $340,000-a-year outside linebacker coaches.

“George is the new prototype for a sports commissioner,” said Oregon president Michael Schill, who acted as the Pac-12’s spokesman Thursday. “What drew us to George was his ability to see where the hockey puck was going to go. It attracted all of us.”

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Hockey puck? That’s a 2021 college athletics term for new opportunities in corporate income.

When Kliavkoff was executive vice president of MLB Advanced Media 15 year ago, he made a reputation as a savvy money-man by figuring out a way to sell team logos as cell-phone screen savers for $2.49 each. Tens of millions were sold. That led to a promotion to NBC Universal, where Kliavkoff became its chief digital officer. Which soon led to nine more high-profile jobs before Turnkey and the Pac-12 asked him to save a stalled football operation and a league-wide reputation as a powderpuff football league.

It’s not that complicated, is it?

If the athletic directors at USC and UCLA had hired better football coaches the last dozen years — if the league could find another Pete Carroll or Don James — the programmers at ESPN and ABC would be offering their coveted 1 p.m. kickoff times for the USC-Washington game again.

Kliavkoff said his three immediate priorities are supporting student-athletes, optimizing revenue for conference affiliates and “doing everything to make our teams more competitive and produce more revenue, especially in football.”

Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne could’ve done that. Utah AD Mark Harlan could do that.

But because Byrne and Harlan don’t sprinkle their conversations with talk about digital platforms, video streaming, Google and Hulu, they are viewed as old-timers.

No problem there. The Pac-12 needed something different and Kliavkoff is someone different. If that means he can help USC get back to football playoffs or Arizona to the Final Four, even better.

Both Schill and Klivakoff said they, to use the new commissioner’s words, “know where the bread is buttered.” They will focus on football and men’s basketball, the Pac-12’s two revenue sports.

One of the ironies of hiring Kliavkoff out of the vast MGM hotel and entertainment conglomerate is that it was MGM that provided Scott with the $7,000-a-night suite at the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament in 2018. It was a disclosure that seemed to be one of the last strikes against Scott, whose excesses often embarrassed the league during a period in which schools like Arizona, Washington State, Oregon State and Cal began to pile up debt service to historic levels.

Schill said that Kliavkoff is so intuitive that “he knows what he doesn’t know.”

More importantly, given Scott’s example, George Tibor Kliavkoff knows what not to do.