SXsports: Bill Simmons & Nate Silver of ESPN, U.S. men's soccer coach Jurgen Klinsman

One of the big growth areas at SXSW this year is SXsports, which occupies a convergent middle ground between the Interactive and Film festivals.

That means there are a number of sports movies, like Manny, a bio of boxer Manny Paquaio, at the film festival, and lot of panel on subjects like sports drone technology and concussion research.

Big names were in attendance as well, like the duo of two of ESPN's proudest: Grantland founder and hoops analyst Bill Simmons and stat wizard and analytics king Nate Silver, whose 538 site, which jumped shipped from the New York Times, launches in ESPN on March 17, just in time for the NCAA tournament.

That news was broken during the pair's backscratching Saturday afternoon 'Media and The Personal Brand' panel, which basically was organized as a Simmons interview of Silver about the details of 538's approach and both talking about how happy they were to be working for an aggressively competitive live sports cash cow as ESPN.

The network's president, John Skipper, talked about sports as a commonality in a polarized culture as something that people can talk about" and introduced Simmons and Silver as "Dork Elvis" and "Dork Jesus," declining to comment on which one is which. When they entered, Simmons took a look at the vast space and said "this is a pretty big room for a couple of nerds."

About his move to ESPN, Silver said, "I got a lot more quality time with these folks than I did with my old bosses. ... ESPN makes more sense – there's more synergy."  

The 538 details are these: The site will have five "verticals," focusing on sports, politics, economics, weather and lifestyle. The detail-oriented data journalism approach taken by Silver as he called the 2012 election so impressively will define the site.

When a question came from a conference goer suspicious that too much political analysis could pollute ESPN, Silver reminded the crowd that he wrote for Baseball Prospectus before he crunched poll numbers for the Old Gray Lady.

On Sunday, U.S. man's coach Klinsmann was interviewed by English journalist Roger Bennett. The former World Cup winner as a player - for Germany in 1990 - who has lived in the U.S. for 15 years talked about meeting with American sports coaches like Phil Jackson and Pete Carroll for motivational tips.

"This is a country of open mindedness where you want to learn. Just like people here in Austin this week. It's about what's new, what can I learn. It's not about the past, it's about today and tomorrow. You can only move on to the future if you leave the past behind."

At one point, Bennett asked him why he's so positive, calling himself "a very negative person" in contrast. "You're English," Klinsmann joked. "You haven't won a Word Cup in a long time."

The coach came off as bullish - but realistic - on soccer in America. "Soccer in America has come a long way. It's not like we have to compete with the bigger sports like football, baseball, basketball," he said. "This country has more than 300 million people, there's plenty of room for soccer."

Compared to the other major American sports, though, Klinsmann said:  "Soccer is a little different. It's not a seasonal game. It's a year round game. It's an eleven months a year game. We're starting to see that. Eventually we will improve. How fast we can improve will see that in the next couple of years."

"I'm not saying we're going to go to Brazil and win the World Cup.  But there are always surprises at the World Cup. And we want to be one of those surprises."

Previously: SXSW Film: Evolution Of A Criminal Follow In the Mix on Twitter