ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCE

October 17, 2003

John T. Casteen

Gene De Filippo

Lee Fowler

John Swofford

J. CASTEEN: I was asked to come today because James Barker who is the Chair of the ACC Council of Presidents could not come. And he asked me to extend his greetings to you which I do. He's worked very hard on this process. He's been an extraordinary kind of leader. In a way I feel kind of bad that he is not here to take part in today's event. I do want to introduce also T.K. Wetherell, the President of Florida State. T.K. became president at the beginning of this process, and made a remarkable impact on the conference. We welcome him. I also want to introduce the current ACC President who is the University of Virginia faculty athletics representative Carolyn Callahan. Carolyn is here. As you know, this gathering today culminates a long period of discussion and study. Months, or depending on how you count, years, because the discussion really goes back to the decision in the early '90s to invite Florida State to join the Conference. The discussion has taken place in very public and very private ways. The discussions among the presidents at our meetings, speculations in the press, the athletics directors, the faculty reps, all sorts of people who called into the sports radio talk shows have had their part to play in this process. As I learned in recent weeks the internet has been full of discussion of the topic. Expansion has not been an easy process, but I do want to say that it's been a process that was essential and that the purposes have been, I think, well defined and quite public in the beginning and remain so. We have looked at ways to improve the competitiveness of athletics and academic programs in the eastern United States. We have looked at issues having to do with the well being of students-athletes, at the long-term financial stability of the Conference, and I should tell you also, a lot of issues that are kind of footnotes: Such as the linkage between academic programs and athletics programs in our various campuses but also in the regions that we serve. One of our major issues all along has been to create a platform for the kind of academic collaborations that the Big 10 for many years, the Pac-10 in recent years have created. I don't think one could have predicted a better outcome. We now have three new partners who bring strong traditions of success both on the playing field and in academics. All three are, in a sense, best known because of their athletics programs. But what I have been impressed about with each has been the national stature of academic programs. We have watched the University of Miami bring some of the nation's finest marine science, coastal ecology and international studies, and other programs into our Conference family. Industrial engineering and dozens of other fields that Virginia Tech has benefit my own home state constantly. Now with Boston College there is a kind of completion of the circle, an institution that's a kind of legend in our country; one with a tremendous history of achievement, both in the classroom and on the playing fields. It's currently ranked the 36th among all national comprehensive universities. Overall, now, half of the ACC's 12 members now rank in the U.S. news top 40 institutions. Boston College has had three schools ranked in the top-25 graduate schools in the disciplines in recent years - the School of Social Work, School of Law, the Lynch School of Education. In every sense it brings a kind of academic fitness to our Conference that adds value to all of us. Boston College academic programs for women and for men are nationally competitive and well respected. The men's ice hockey team enters the upcoming season as the nation's top ranked team. It regularly has NCAA tournament contenders in softball and men's and women's basketball, among other sports. The football team is a perennial Bowl Game participant as well. I should tell you that I lived in Boston College's shadow for five years when I was president of UConn. One of the great pleasures of living and working in New England when I did was the competition with BC. The balance between academic and athletic programs is really what the ACC is all about. Boston College is a great fit in this sense. The outcome, I think, matches the very best that we could have hoped; in many ways a surprisingly sensible and understandable conclusion to the search. I have the pleasure, at this time, to introduce my colleague Father Leahy, the President of Boston College. The Rev. William Leahy has been President of BC since 1996. He was previously the executive vice-president at Marquette. He is a distinguished scholar of 20th century American Social and religious history. He earned his doctorate in history at Stanford. As have my other colleague presidents in the ACC, I have known Bill Leahy for a number of years. We believe that he's going to make great contributions to the Conference, to the Council of Presidents and to education in the region we serve. Would you join me and welcome Father Leahy (applause).

FATHER LEAHY: Let me first say that it's very good to be here today especially since the Boston Red Sox lost last night so there's a certain amount of gloom in the city of Boston. I come down here and I see vitality and green and I have along with the others who are in the group from Boston College received a very warm welcome and I want to thank, especially President Casteen, President Barker from Clemson and John Swofford, in particular, because they have been individuals who have been very helpful and very, very attuned to the issues and concerns that BC has in terms of Conference affiliation. So let me say thank you to each of them and also let me speak a little bit about why Boston College has accepted the invitation from the Atlantic Coast Conference to become a member. As you know, this has been a long process and for us, we, first and foremost, became very interested in the possibility of the Atlantic Coast Conference because of the academic benefit that we would have. We all know how important academics are to our institution and while we play in a number of sports, academics are at the heart of what we're about as an institution. For us to be in a Conference that has five other institutions that are in the top-40, is a major, major benefit. For us, as we look long-term at demographics in terms of student recruiting, this part of the country, the southeast, has all kinds of positives for us. And then also of interest to us is the academic collaboration that's underway among the schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the faculty exchange, the graduate students that will be able to benefit from cooperation, and other aspects of that academic collaboration. And also a school that remains faithful to our Jesuit Catholic roots. Besides the academics, we very much appreciate the stability and strength of the ACC, for our programs in intercollegiate athletics we want to have opportunities for them to be in a Conference that's strong and stable and the ACC is certainly that. And then there are the obvious financial benefits for us as well. So as I come here today, I know for Boston College this is going to be a very, very positive experience for us and we are committed to doing all we can to make sure for the ACC that we contribute to the overall strength and health of the Atlantic Coast Conference. I very much, along with Gene DeFilippo, and the rest of our Athletics Department and institution, look forward to being in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Thank you. (Applause).

G. DeFILIPPO: Thank you. I would like to echo what Father Leahy said and thank President Casteen and John and Nora Swofford and also three of my colleagues for making the time to come today, Dave Braine, a long time friend, Jim Weaver, a long-time friend and also Lee Fowler, thank you for being here and for making an effort to come. Father talked about why Boston College was interested in coming to the Atlantic Coast Conference. I'd just like to take a couple of minutes and tell you a little bit about Boston College. We have about 14,500 students. We have 31 sports programs and approximately 750 student athletes. Those 750 athletes last year, had an overall GPA, or an average GPA of 3.0. And that's something that we're very, very proud of. Approximately 315 of those student-athletes had a cumulative average of 3.0 or above. Over the last ten to twelve years Boston College has graduated about 85 percent of those student-athletes; something that we're very, very proud of. We have one of the top-20 athletic programs in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. Our football team has been to four consecutive bowl games. We have won the last three - over Arizona State, the University of Georgia, and Toledo. We have the best football graduation rate in Division 1-A this year and our graduation rate for all of our student athletes, both male and female, is sixth in the country in the latest poll. Our men's basketball team won its Division last year and won the Big East regular season Championship and Tournament Championship in 2001. Our women's basketball team advanced to the Sweet 16 last year. Our men's soccer team made it to the NCAA tournament, to the Great 8, and finished sixth in the country in last year's poll. Currently our women's field hockey team is ranked 13th in the nation and our women's soccer team is ranked 20th. Boston College has enjoyed a tremendous relationship with the Big East and I have made a lot of friends over the years who I have the utmost respect and admiration for. But Boston College made a decision to advance itself both academically and athletically into the Atlantic Coast Conference. We think that we have a very fine school. We think that we have a very fine athletic program and we're very, very proud to be a new member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Thank you. (Applause).

LEE FOWLER: On behalf of the Directors of Athletics, I see Joe Alleva in the back of the room too. He got here a little bit after we came up. I just wanted to welcome you and your athletics program to the ACC. I visited, since we made this announcement on Sunday, with a couple of our teams. Our volleyball team I met yesterday afternoon with and I know there's been a lot of discussion about the culture of our league and the student-athlete welfare. It was interesting to me yesterday afternoon as I talked to our volleyball team who is struggling right now. I went in to kind of pep them up and give them a talk. I asked the 15 players how many of them had ever been to Boston. Only one of our players had ever been to Boston. So I think that in itself, as we talked to our faculty and our members on our campus about why Boston College and the interest in Boston College, I think that in itself is going to give a wide range to our student-athletes to go places they haven't been before and see things they haven't seen which I think is very important. When I was an 18 year old freshman I played in a road trip at St. John's; then we went to Boston College. I was not well traveled at that point in my life - grew up in Columbia, Tennessee. I was eating breakfast - back in those days the media actually traveled with the teams. That's something that doesn't happen anymore. They don't get to know our student-athletes like they once did. I asked a waitress in Boston to have country ham for breakfast and she wanted to know what country I wanted it from. (Laughter) So I knew at that time I needed to learn some more about America and I think our student-athletes are going to do. We welcome you and we're very excited about the relationship with Boston College and the ACC. Thank you. (Applause)

COMMISSIONER SWOFFORD: Thank you, Brian, let me just echo what has already been said. I am very, very pleased for our schools that Boston College will be joining our ranks. I think it is an excellent match for both parties - a national top-40 academic institution with a high-quality, broad-based and competitive athletic program of integrity, joining a Conference that is committed to those same academic and athletic values and standards. Boston College, under the leadership and wisdom of Father Leahy, and Gene DeFilippo, I think will be a superb member of the Atlantic Coast Conference. And I know how much our schools, all of whom are represented here today, how much they are looking forward to your being a part of our family. It's gratifying, to say the least, to finally be at this point, with Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College joining our current nine members to give us a strong balanced blend of public and private institutions to move forward as a Conference. Together, we're well positioned to maximize the potential of our collective group as well as to maximize the potential of each individual institution and its athletics program. I want to congratulate and commend our presidents and chancellors on their decision and I thank Father Leahy and Gene, for their very prompt and positive response. I think this is a point where tradition meets opportunity and the end result should be a productive union that preserves important old traditions while establishing exciting new ones.

COMMISSIONER SWOFFORD: That's up to the Big East and Boston College and when that's settled on their end was the basis of our invitation to Boston College.

G. DeFILIPPO: I would give you the same answer. You know, we need to really, really think about this thing and to take everybody into consideration and, you know, at that point in time we'll certainly -- the latest date would be July 1 of '06 and it could be before that but we'll just have to see how it goes.

FATHER LEAHY: What I can tell about that is, BC has gone into a court in Boston asking for a declaratory judgment to sort out what is that exit fee requirement in the Big East Conference; whether it's going to be 27 months, 5 million or is it going to be one year, one million or two million. That has to get sorted out. Whatever the lawyers determine is certainly what Boston College will do in the way of that exit requirement.

FATHER LEAHY: I don't. I just know it takes time and I am sure there will be all kind of motions that will be necessary and we all know, when lawyers get involved, things tend to get drawn out.

COMMISSIONER SWOFFORD: I can't really answer the last part of it. Obviously we're set to move forward with 11 for as long as that may be. It may be one year; it may be two years. If it's one year, then, you know, we'll be ready to move into a 12-member scheduling concept for all sports very quickly. There are some things we will still need to settle at this point in time, but with all of the work that went into the anticipation of us landing ultimately at 12, we certainly won't be starting from ground zero in terms of those concepts. But we also have some aspect of it that we have not yet finalized.

J. CASTEEN: Could it have happened in June? I doubt it. As you know in the negotiations among the presidents that led to the initial actions we spent several weeks trying to work out ways to address a whole set of issues. A number of us, from the very beginning, had seen Boston College as an ideal member of the Conference. The pieces of the final vote that led to the invitation fell together very quickly when it became clear that there was going to be a significant national issue involving whether football Conference Championships could be played as separate games with 11-team conferences. I was very much surprised that we came together at the point when we did and in particular that the vote was unanimous. But in truth, I think that after the initial decision to invite Virginia Tech and Miami, it was clear to everybody that we had had an incomplete entity that we needed to go ahead and move to the 12th institution. Boston College was the only institution I heard discussed at that point. As I explained in my first remarks that seemed to make great sense to me because of my own history with Boston College. But I was very pleasantly surprised when it turned out that we actually had unanimity on something that we had thought was going to be very hard to resolve and at the end; it was not. The groundwork was all laid. I guess the answer to your question about June was we were laying foundations. We did that all through the discussions that were held between June and this month. And it fell together in a right way.

COMMISSIONER SWOFFORD: We will continue to pursue it. I think it's hard to gauge what kind of chance it has. I think it has more legs under it now than it did initially but the legislation is there, the management council is actually meeting today and then the Board of Directors meeting on the 30th of this month. But we will leave that legislation in progress and we will support it.

J. CASTEEN: It was largely a matter of symmetry. We had intended to extend the footprint of the Conference, we were attempting to create an entity like the Pac-10 in terms of its geographic expanse. Frankly, a lot of us have felt that there would be academic benefit in having partnerships that reached up into the northeast, the Traveling Scholar Program, the extraordinary growth in foreign study programs and so on that, occurred because of the ACC affiliations, all cried out for some additional steps. I doubt that it's news, but I think people know that a lot of us believe that conferences could be somewhat larger yet, and that one should not simply say that there is a perfect number, whether it's 11 or 9 or 12, or whatever it might be. We're just discovering the ways in which the more complex conferences can benefit academic programs. The Traveling Scholars Program has allowed graduate students throughout the footprint to move from one institution to another seamless. That enhances the quality of graduate education immediately. Florida State operates, widely recognized as one of the three or four most successful foreign study programs in the U.S. Access to Florida State's programs which UNC, for example, has been able to negotiate this year. That has immediate benefit because we don't have to make double investments in facilities and in faculty. We expect to see that become more and more the style of the Conference because we think it benefits everybody.

GENE DeFILIPPO: Jake and Chancellor Shaw are wonderful people. I am not going to comment on anything that they had to say. They are certainly entitled to their opinion and I have the utmost respect and admiration for both of them.

G. DeFILIPPO: Again I can't speak for Syracuse or any of the other schools in the Big East Conference. That's something that we're going to talk about and we're going to exit when it's best for everyone. It certainly appears - and I don't want to assume anything - but it would certainly appear that you are correct, they would like to see us gone at some point in the future, but I don't know if that would hurt them, "them" being the Big East Conference. We'll just have to talk through that and see what works best for everybody.

G. DeFILIPPO: No, I don't think that that's a real concern with our recruits. I really don't. Because we'll have this -- the date worked out at some point in the very near future; then we'll be able to answer that question. I don't see that as an issue.

FATHER LEAHY: When we were looking at the question of Conference affiliation and beginning the process of reorganizing the Big East, we were looking and they still are looking at schools out in the Midwest, so if we had stayed in the Big East we would be faced with a significant increase in travel time for our various teams and right now, going into the ACC, we know we will be traveling more by plane which will not, I don't think in any significant degree, increase the travel time, nor miss class days. And I also like the shift because it's going to reduce the number of trips by van and bus for our student-athletes. So from a safety point of view, I think it's a plus for us.

G. DeFILIPPO: If I can add to that, we were pleasantly surprised with the numbers of flights from both Boston and Providence that are direct flights with 50 passenger regional Jet service to cities like Charlottesville, Greensboro, Raleigh-Durham. We will fly more than we have. That will be more of an expense, but as father said, from a safety issue, we wanted to get away from the vans, that a lot of us have traveled on for a long time. So there are advantages, but it will definitely cost us additional dollars to travel. We are going to do everything we can to be sure that it does not take any additional class time away from our student-athletes.

COMMISSIONER SWOFFORD: I think, too, in terms of the other schools in the Conference, our presidents, as well as athletic directors, and faculty representatives, had a number of conversations about the travel issue, class time missed issue, through this entire process. I think in terms of Boston it became very clear ultimately that the direct flights from many of our areas currently in the ACC, that there were plenty of them and that that would not be problematic. I think ultimately it also became clear that controlling schedules in your sports is very institutionally based and if you will look around our schools and Lee, you may want to comment on this, even in the Olympic sports, most of our schools are playing national schedules. It's not real difficult if you pick up an additional Conference game or two that may be in Boston or maybe in Blacksburg, Virginia or may be in Miami that you can compensate and maybe you don't go to Austin, Texas or Los Angeles, California or Chicago, Illinois. And you don't add games because you can only play so many games. You simply add a Conference game. I think that our schools, the longer time went, and the more that was studied, became more and more comfortable with that. Let me just share some information with you too, if I may, which just out of interest kind of thing with -- maybe it's useless information, but it's a bit insightful, I think. It is 430 miles between College Park and Chestnut Hill, between Boston College and Maryland. It's 522 miles between Tallahassee and Coral Gables. So interestingly enough, Boston College is actually closer to Maryland than the University of Miami is to Florida State. In terms of Greensboro being considered pretty much the geographic center of the Conference, it's 759 miles to Chestnut Hill and it's 805 miles to Coral Gables. So Greensboro is still sort of the center of the League in terms of the footprint.

G. DeFILIPPO: No, as Father said, we'll let the lawyers decide all that and we're going to do what we're told to do so, no, I don't have any concerns about that.

FATHER LEAHY: I don't either.

G. DeFILIPPO: We do. We are only going to play six league games in the Big East next year anyway so we do have to find an additional football game. So we are out there right now trying to find a 1-A opponent at home. We have been trying to do that for several weeks.

J. CASTEEN: I am not sure I buy the final part of that. I was reading the other day that there had been something like 50 conference realignments in the course of the '90s. So I think that last piece somewhat begs the question you asked earlier. As to the earlier question, about 25 years ago as I recall it, the Big-10 created a couple of entities that support academic collaborations among their members and they also include the University of Chicago. One goes by the acronym, MUSEA - there are a couple other titles that are used. One thing they discovered was that if they had institutions that made common commitments to academic programs, such as, for example, relatively high-admission standards and a determination to maintain high graduation rates, and used some part of their -- initially in the case of the Big-10, some part of their academic -- athletics revenues as seed money to begin the academic collaborative they could as they have over time, developed seamless movement from one graduate program to another; set up an extraordinary set of foreign study programs and the point about the academic affiliation is simply it creates a community of institutions. Most of us are or, more less, isolated within our regions. Within say North Carolina there are a couple of great national private institutions, by most assessments probably two or three major national public institutions and a number of very important regional institutions. We, in Virginia, have no easy mechanism to work out, for example, common access to foreign study sites for those institutions. What we're looking for with the expanded ACC is a kind of platform, first of all, for the kind of programs that are identified and second, for other types of opportunities. We have looked very carefully at ways to use electronic networking to link our resources. Unless you use a modern research library on a regular basis this is hard quite to understand. But, for example, the several million manuscript items that are contained in the Alderman library in Charlottesville, are accessible at this point through some early electronic imaging systems to people who know quite how to get into them. We would like to have that type of access a common place resource that would benefit graduate students or faculty on a broad scale. To do it, frankly, you need the economies of sale, that having a large number of research libraries collaborate would bring. So that's the fundamental vision. We believe that athletics ought to generate benefits for the academic program. I think I can speak for all of the presidents of the ACC institutions in saying that our principle is something like this: First of all, we believe that athletics ought stand on its own financially; it ought to be a self-sustaining venture in terms of the cost of it. Two, it ought to contribute in many difference ways to the academic well being of the institutions. One of those ways is financial. As I think a lot of you know, beginning in the early '90s, I began to require athletics to make a contribution to the faculty salary accounts that served the university generally. That relationship is, in part, a matter of simply taking advantage of the availability of strength in various parts of the university. In effect, it is a way of bringing the institution together. I think the success of that type of venture over the last decade or so is one of the reasons for the strength the ACC has. We have a common set of principles. We have been very clear about the academic component of those principles; about the academic purposes of many of our collaborations. At the same time, frankly, we are very clear about the value of athletics competition. Most of the conversation today has had to do with the major men's sport and that's understandable. But I think I need to underscore that we are as firmly committed to the women's sports including the ones that will never make a dime, as we are to any other aspect of the program. The purpose is to develop great institutions that will shape education nationally and globally and this is one of the vehicles we use.