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BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL MEDIA DAY

October 24, 2018

Bob Bowlsby

Kansas City, Missouri

THE MODERATOR: Good morning everyone. We would like to welcome you to the Big 12 Basketball Media Day. Without further ado, I would like to introduce the Commissioner of the Big 12, Mr. Bob Bowlsby.

BOB BOWLSBY: Good morning, welcome all. We're all, I think, probably still a little bit in football mode, but it's time to start thinking about basketball as well.

We had a terrific year in 2017-18. The Big 12 was ranked first in RPI and first in strength of schedule, and we had 90% of our teams in the postseason including seven in the NCAA Tournament. We also had four teams in the Sweet 16 and Kansas in the Final Four.

In the last three years we've had 70% of our teams that have been in the Sweet 16. I think what we have always said is we have tremendous balance in the league, but we also had an almost 80% win percentage in the non-conference schedule, so we're competing up and down the ranks in the Big 12 Conference season, but we're also competing very well against the nation's best.

In fact, it was the 16th week of the season last year before we had a team in the conference that fell below 500. So those are all pretty remarkable statistics, I think, and we really feel like this year will be another year that is remarkably competitive.

Obviously we're committed to playing the full double round robin, but we also know that we need to work hard to strengthen our non-conference schedule. We've had good success with the Big 12 SEC challenge and we expect to continue that for the foreseeable future.

We're also announcing today that we have created a scheduling alliance with the Big East and that will start in the 2019-2020 season. We will coordinate on sites around the SEC Challenge and this is going to be earlier in the year. It's likely to be late November, early December, all ten teams from each league will participate and we will have five home sites and five road sites which is a little bit of an interesting coordination challenge, because as you may know, the Big East has their games on Fox and that family of networks and our games are on ESPN and that family of networks.

So we will be coordinating on sites, opponents and telecasts, but it ought to be a very good thing for both leagues.

I want to thank Val Ackerman and Stu Jackson from the Big East, John Underwood and Jeff Jackson from our conference for putting it together. I think it will be a great series.

It's a four-year agreement and there again, like the Big 12/SEC challenge we sort of see it as an ongoing activity, but time will tell on that.

Right now we have four games scheduled for next year, KU-Villanova, Texas-Providence, Oklahoma-Creighton, and Kansas State-Marquette.

We will go about scheduling the others as we can get them scheduled. We also are announcing an extension of our agreement with Kansas City. We are currently scheduled to be here through 2020 and we will be extending that agreement through '24. As you know, we also, beginning next year, in 19-20 season we will be playing our women's tournament here in Kansas City. It has been here before, obviously, and there have been 17 men's championships here. This year's will be the 18th, 11 of them at the Sprint Center, of course we were at Kemper Arena before that and the women's tournament will be in Memorial Coliseum and the team here in Kansas City, Kathy Nelson and Brenda Tinnen and all the folks with the Kansas City sports organization and the Sprint Center have done a great job for us.

Interestingly enough for us we don't have much debate at this point about the site of our tournament. I think our men's tournament has been the best in the country. This is a wonderful venue at which to host it. The area around the venue has gotten better and better every year.

The Power and Light district has been a big enhancement in the last 10 or 11 years and it keeps getting better and better.

We're excited to be here through 2024 and we're excited to have both tournaments combined and operating at the same time in the same city. We think there is real synergy there and if I could ask Kathy and Brenda to come up here and join me, they're actually -- Kathy is sporting a new t-shirt. I'm not sure she is making a huge fashion statement, but it's a good way to welcome it in. I'm not planning to take any questions from the podium, but I will be here all morning if you need to touch base with me. I will be happy to be here. Thank you. These two have an awful lot to do with why we continue to be excited about Kansas City. There is always lots of competition in this space. There are lots of cities that would like to have this. I think most of them understand it's going to be very difficult to compete against Kansas City and that's because they've set the bar so high. Thank you, both of you for your good work. Thank you to the city leadership for their good work and we couldn't be more excited to be here for the next foreseeable future through '24.

BOB BOWLSBY: We do love that, thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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