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July 21, 2015
DALLAS, TEXAS
STEVE HATCHELL: Good morning, everybody. On behalf of our chairman, Archie Manning, and our board of directors, our chief operating officer, Matthew Sign, here today, we're pleased to have this opportunity to make a presentation to all of you in conjunction with Big 12 Media Days. In fact, we're honored to be here.
I'd like to thank in a very significant way Commissioner Bob Bowlsby and the entire Big 12 staff for providing this great opportunity to be with all of you here today. The Big 12 has remained a great supporter of the National Football Foundation, and we are very, very grateful not only for the support, but for the friendship.
As Bill had mentioned in Las Colinas, when you have time, you can come out and visit us. We're across the street from the College Football Playoff, the Big 12, ourselves, Steve Richardson of the Football Writers is in our office. So we'd love to have you come out and see all of us.
We're here today to, in a lot of ways, talk about the mission of the Football Foundation, which is to talk about the good in the game and its ability to build leaders and promote academic excellence. We believe that football is the ultimate team sport, which makes it ideally positioned to teach the lifelong lessons that will benefit student‑athletes long after their playing days.
And as many of you know, the National Football Foundation has been around since 1947, and we have provided millions of dollars and put a highlight, spotlight on the good in the game for a very long time.
Our early leaders included legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice, Hall of Fame coach Red Blaik of Army, and General Douglas MacArthur, who believed passionately about the value of football.
And our current board today continues to carry on the tradition, tapping some of the most reputable individuals nationwide and several from the Big 12, including Commissioner Bob Bowlsby; Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett; Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione; T. Boone Pickens; Texas women's athletic director Christine Plonsky; U.S. congressman Roger Williams; and locally Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
We have a great group, and they work very hard to promote the game and talk about the values that come from the sport of college football. They provide the core of leadership that we have throughout the country and have since 1947, with 120 chapters in 47 states and roughly 12,000 members.
The entire college community continues to make enormous strides protecting the future of our sport and making it safer than it has ever been. We'd like to point out a few things that we put under the catalog of prospective. There are 1.6 million college football players in America. There are 1.1 million high school football players in America in 15,500 high schools. There are 70,000 college football players at 773 institutions, and, in fact, we strongly encourage you to go see our college football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, Georgia, where we have all 773 helmets on the helmet wall, and the reason it's there is not just for decoration, it's to show the commitment to college football around the country.
The favorite fact that we like to throw out all of the time‑‑ and many of you called to get these data points. There are 38 colleges and universities that have been added to the ranks of those sponsors college football since 2010, and there are another ten programs that are slated to begin over the next few years. So when we talk about football, it's a growth sport at the college level.
You heard Bill and others talk about the popularity of the sport. There are 33 million people tuned in last year to watch the first college football Championship Game. If you're college football centric, it's awesome. The playoff was terrific. Bill and his staff did a marvelous job.
More than 49 people attended a regular season game in 2014, and another 1.7 million attended Bowl games. It's great. It's a great sport.
With all of these impressive facts, it's important to note‑‑ and this is where Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, Roger Goodell, Jerry Jones, who are on our board, give this some perspective. Only 1.2 percent of the 70,000 college football players in any given year get drafted or signed as free agents in the NFL. But the real number is that only.5 to.7 make it in any year, and the career is roughly 3.3 years once they make it to the NFL. That means that 99.4 percent, 99.3 percent, are going on to do something else, using what they learned in college for the rest of their lives.
The graduation rate is at 75 percent, a number that we get from the NCAA. So what we try to do at the National Football Foundation is to promote this all of the time. And to do so, last year we started a new project called footballmatters.org, which is our digital platform for telling the great stories that's produced by our game. It has quickly become a powerful force, highlighting the countless stories about the good in the game. I strongly encourage you to visit this site, footballmatters.org, and many of you are wonderful contributors to the good in the game. And it tells the stories of people who played football, use what they learned in football, to go on and be leaders in life.
On our board, Jeff Immelt, president and CEO of GE, played right tackle at Dartmouth; John Mack, who was the head of Morgan Stanley, played at Duke; Jerry Jones played on a National Championship football team at Arkansas, et cetera, et cetera. And we have thousands of examples around the country of people who have said to Matthew and I, put me in, Coach, I played. This is what I learned. So footballmatters.org is important to us.
I'd like to highlight a few important dates for this year. On September 24th, we'll announce the semifinalists for the William V. Campbell Trophy, presented by Fidelity Investments, who represent the best scholar‑athletes from their prospective teams from around the country. We'll also announce on October 29th, live from the New York Athletic Club, our partner, that each of the finalists will receive $18,000 post‑graduate scholarships. And then at the 58th NFF Annual Awards Dinner December the 8th at the Waldorf Astoria, one of those scholar‑athletes will be named the William V. Campbell Trophy award winner, and it's the 26th William V. Campbell Trophy scholar‑athlete we'll announce this year.
At our dinner on December the 8th, we'll formally induct the 2015 College Football Hall of Fame class, which this year includes Big 12 Legends Brian Bosworth of Oklahoma, Zach Thomas from Texas Tech, Ricky Williams from Texas, and Kansas State Coach Bill Snyder.
Following the Christmas holiday, the Hall of Fame class will travel to Atlanta, where our new Hall of Fame is, and these inductees will participate in a full slate of activities at the Chick‑Fil‑A Peach Bowl. You get a chance to see all of them be introduced again. It's the 11th national Hall of Fame salute that we've had and the very first at the Peach Bowl.
This past year, we had the great fortune with Bill Hancock helping us in such a big way to partner with the College Football Playoff to capitalize on the title game to spotlight and announce the Hall of Fame class in a press conference, the honor to have them at the game, the coin toss, and to have the Campbell Trophy winner there, and this will continue again at Glendale to highlight the best in the game, those who have played and the great scholar‑athletes that play this game. And it's always fun to announce that class. That class has not been selected yet.
The new inductees will be announced at the field. And, again, just want to take a moment because Bill and his staff have worked so hard to make this presentation great, the whole College Football Playoff, and to have us bring in the greats of the game is very, very significant for all of us.
Again, as I close, I'd like to thank the Big 12 and the Big 12 staff for the support and friendship. All of the individual institutions of the Big 12 are great friends who dropped by to see us all of the time before they come in for meetings. We appreciate all of them and all that they do to make things so much fun for us as we try to do the best that we can for college football.
Before I conclude, we have a presentation to make, and I'd like to ask Commissioner Bowlsby to come up at this time. As I had mentioned before, Bob is a wonderful member of our board of directors and does many things to keep us very relevant and alive with all of our missions, and along with Bob right now, it's my pleasure‑‑ and this is a very special presentation. We're announcing today that Donnie Duncan, who's been involved with the game of college football at every level since the early 1960s, will be recognized with an NFF Legacy Award during the 58th Annual Awards Dinner December the 8th at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
The Legacy Award, established in 2007, honors individuals and organizations who have made extraordinary contributions to the NFF, to all of college football and all of football and its missions.
Donnie Duncan has spent his entire life involved with the game of football starting as a high school and college player before becoming a successful Texas high school football coach. He would go on to be a prominent assistant for two National Championships at Oklahoma; the head coach at Iowa State, where he did wonders there; and the executive director of two Bowl games. He did a great job at the athletic director at Oklahoma. In fact, he was a very instrumental element in the creation of the Big 12 Conference.
Longtime staff member, great friend, and at this point we would like to say that because of Donnie's dedication and his commitment to the sport of football, that we would like to honor him with the 2015 Legacy Award. So we'll make that presentation to Donnie. I wanted to announce that today.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports
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