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BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYSJuly 16, 2019Kevin WeibergArlington, Texas THE MODERATOR: We are now joined by Kevin Weiberg with the CFB 150. Kevin, welcome. KEVIN WEIBERG: Thank you very much and good morning everybody. It's great to have the opportunity to be here, share a little bit of information with you about college football's 150th anniversary, the initiative I have been leading for the past couple of years as we prepare for what we hope will be a terrific celebration of the sport through the 2019 season. So what I'm going to do this morning is take you through a handful of slides to give you additional information about how we're organized and some of the things we have planned and I think we will show you a very short video at the end and I don't know that I'm going to have time to take questions here. I got about a 10-minute slot, but I will be off to the left here and if any of you do have follow-up questions or want to chat with me individually, we will do it at that time. So we do have a birthday to celebrate. As part of this celebration the first game, well recognized, was played in 1869 on November 6th between Princeton and Rutgers. Remarkable really if you think about the sport having its launching pad just a few years after the end of the Civil War. This game has a strong tie to the college campus. This initial game was organized by a group of college students from both Rutgers and Princeton and those roots have carried forward obviously through the game even until today. Here is a little bit about how we are organized. We have a not-for-profit company that was formed back in August of 2017. We have a Board of Directors that consists of the leadership group of all of the organizations across college football. It is chaired by Pac-12 Commissioner, Larry Scott. We had broad-based advisory committees which included representatives from Divisions II and III as well as other groups across the college landscape and the funding has come from the college football playoffs as well as the NCAA and we're looking forward to advancing the mission that we were given around this which is to make this a broad-based national celebration and to use the platform of the anniversary to remind people about the aspects of the game that have been so important across all these years. I mentioned stake holder organizations and here is a glimpse of a lot of those groups. A lot of the time I've spent is organizing support across the landscape of college football. Good examples are the American Football Coaches Association, Todd Berry and his group are helping us gain support from the coaches, but also in week one of the season coaches will wear a joint AFCA-150 patch on the sleeve of their shirt. The college football Hall of Fame has a terrific display at the Hall in Atlanta that follows the evolution of college football through the decades and it's another activation from stake holder groups. That's that slide. I'm sorry. I jumped ahead there on you. Here are some of the things we're doing relative to the actual national offense. We have distributed over 200,000 uniform patches and helmet decals. Some of you may remember 1969 the 100th anniversary. In that year there was a helmet sticker on the side of the helmets. This year we will have a jersey patch for teams at the FBS and FCS level. At the Division II, III, NAIA and junior college level we have provided a helmet decal. I have been pleased by the acceptance of that from teams around the country. We're seeing a number of Tweets from schools that are showing their 2019 jerseys with the patch on it. It's a volunteer program, but I think we would have two-thirds of the teams wearing it all season long. Some will do it on a more selective basis. It has been great to see that support. We also built out promotional assets that we care calling the CFB 150 Celebration Playbook. It exists at our website, CFB150.org. Schools can go there, register, download promotional assets that they can use in stadium, scoreboard graphics, social media graphics, and they can customize it, use their own school colors. We are trying to encourage schools to tell their own stories about college football and its significance and its impact. We have had great response there. I think we have over 90% of FBS schools that have already registered to use the site and downloaded files. That's a great indication that we're going to see a lot of that through the course of the 2019 season. Media companies have been very important to our effort as well and I've been pleased from the response that we have received from all the entities that twice college football, the most significant commitment coming from ESPN which was an early adopter of the anniversary initiative and they are doing a terrific amount of programming. We have an agreement and you see the lock-up of our logo with ESPN. I have worked with Nick Dawson and the production and programming teams at ESPN and you're going to see a lot there starting on August 17 with 150 consecutive days of unique content devoted to the anniversary, vignettes. They have documentary series they will be doing, a couple of weekly documentary series through the course of the season as well as two longer-form documentary series. They are doing a number of lists, greatest teams, players, coaches, games, things of that kind that they have assembled, a national voting panel related to that and that will be fun to see as the season unfolds. But they're not the only network that is promoting the anniversary, CBS, Fox will also use the logo as part of their game coverage and will include unique aspects in their content, NBC through its Notre Dame coverage, Stadium through coverage of USA games and of course the conference networks as well. What we tried to do in thinking about the season was segment our coverage into the season into certain blocks. We are primarily focused on the early season neutral site games as ways we can provide additional exposure and activation for the anniversary. On August 24, week 0 this year we have four games that will occur around the country. Perhaps the most prominent of which is Miami versus Florida at the Camping World kickoff game in Orlando. That game was moved up a week, is an ESPN telecast and we will have an opportunity to focus on the anniversary pieces in addition to telling the unique connections of those two schools to their history in college football. We will also be doing that kind of stuff with some of the other neutral site games that extend out about through September 14. I think there is a Texas game in Houston on that date in which the folks that host that game at the bowl game in Houston will be helping us with in-stadium activations as well. Then it skips a little bit to the middle part of the year as we get closer to the anniversary week we have encouraged schools to make sure to recognize the anniversary at least one home game during the 2019 season and after that we will focus on the period surrounding that birthday, November 6th. There are two weekends of games that bookend November 6th, which is a Wednesday in 2019, and we will be planning to do activities throughout the week. One of the more prominent ones would be the NFL recognizing the college football 150th anniversary as part of the Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants in New York. It is also the NFL's centennial season and we are happy to have a cooperative arrangement with the NFL and appreciate their recognition of college football and there will be some things that night and also on a lot of the college football, on the NFL, rather, platforms, their network, et cetera. We also have a mid-week game in the MAC. A little action on November 6, between Miami of Ohio and Ohio University the longest standing MAC rivalry game. We will do recognition on the Rutgers campus that night and then on November 9 we have a special game between Princeton and Dartmouth in Yankee Stadium which will be fun to wrap up anniversary week. The Bowl Association, as we close it out, through the 40-plus bowl games, they have been terrific partners through this effort and we will have in-stadium recognition around the bowls. They are doing a lot to promote their own histories through their effort. I think we included a series of slides from the Bowl Association regarding their activities. So I would encourage you to check that out and we will culminate this with the National Championship game January 13 in New Orleans and we will do special things that week with Bill Hancock and his staff to recognize the anniversary and the all-time great players that have been part of college football. That's what we have in mind to try to bring special attention to this great milestone in college football history, to celebrate the good in the game as we call it. We have a 30-second video message we're going to show you which gives a flavor of how we're treating some of the thematic approaches to this, and as I said I will be available off to the side if you have any other questions. Thank you. (Video playing.) FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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