Brian Rolapp is continuing to bring some of his old NFL colleagues on board at the PGA Tour.
Rolapp, the former head of the NFL’s media businesses who took the job of PGA Tour CEO last summer, has made another key hire from the NFL’s executive ranks. According to a report by Josh Carpenter and Ben Fischer in Sports Business Journal, Rolapp has lured Will Deng, the NFL’s head of corporate strategy, to join the PGA Tour as its new SVP of media strategy.
Deng spent 11 years at the NFL, managing some of the league’s pivotal projects in its transition to a more digitally focused media strategy. Per SBJ, Deng headed the NFL’s effort to stream its first-ever online broadcast, a Jaguars-Bills tilt from London that was livestreamed on Yahoo and averaged 2.36 million viewers. That game eventually paved the way for the NFL’s Thursday Night Football package to become a streaming exclusive, with Amazon’s Prime Video paying the league $1 billion per year for rights to the series.
Deng will be tasked with leading the PGA Tour through its next round of media rights negotiations. The Tour’s linear broadcast agreements with CBS and NBC, and digital deal with ESPN for PGA Tour Live, all expire following the 2030 season. However, the PGA Tour plans to take those rights to market in late 2028. The end of the decade will prove a busy time in the sports media rights marketplace, with significant inventory for the NFL, MLB, NHL, SEC, and others all becoming available around that time.
The crowded market will make it all the more important for the PGA Tour to have someone like Deng navigating these deals.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.