BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYS

July 14, 2021

Bob Bowlsby

Commissioner Press Conference

BOB BOWLSBY: Good morning, all. Sorry to keep you waiting. I got caught on an interview and couldn't get here right on time. But first of all, let me thank Academy Sports + Outdoors for being our presenting sponsor this morning. Thanks, also, to our friends at St. Philips School. You'll see a bunch of young, enthusiastic reporters. They are currently in the back of the room, and they are here as kid reporters from St. Philips School in South Dallas, and we are excited to have them a part of the day.

First of all, let me spend a little time on retrospective. It's nice to have all of you here. It is kind of remarkable that we are shaking hands and face-to-face and not many masks, and it almost feels a little bit like normal. This would have been our fourth year at AT&T, I believe, and of course last year we weren't here, but I think among the things we learned over the last year is that we have to be patient. In our business, we are not real good at that.

But this time last year we had no clue whether we were going to be playing football when the fall came around. Indeed, it was the middle of August before we got to the point of making a decision, and I think we learned that you don't plan too far ahead. We were advised by our medical professionals to make small adjustments, to listen to our medical advisory committee and the hired consultants that we had.

We also spent a fair amount of time listening to our student-athletes, and I think that was -- in retrospect, I think it was particularly impactful to all of us. The questions from the young men that were playing football, and we talked to other student-athletes, as well, but we talked a lot to football because of the attention it was getting, and they wanted to know if they go forward and play the season last year, were they going to lose a year of eligibility if they got two or three or four games into it and found that they couldn't continue. They wanted to know if they opted out, were they going to lose their scholarship. And they wanted to know if they were going to be any more likely to contract the virus in practice or in meetings or in a competition.

We were able to answer their questions to their satisfaction, and that's one of the reasons why we got through the year as well as we did, and that's why our student-athletes, especially in football were bought into confidence that those questions could be answered.

But as I say, on August 15th, we didn't really know if we were going to play or not. We were certainly hopeful that we would. We spent a lot of time, I was on conference calls with my A-5 colleagues literally every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, from the middle of March until early September.

And so now, a year later, we got 90 percent of our contests in. We had some disruptions. We had some games postponed and rescheduled. We ended up having some that were canceled. We got through a winter sports season remarkably. We had our share of potholes, and some of them we were able to navigate around and some of them we slammed right through them.

But in the end, I think we had a pretty successful year. There were a lot of people that had their hands on the oars. We went back in a moment of gallows humor and counted up all the board calls we had with our CEOs. We had 35 board calls from last March until February of this year.

We also had AD meetings at least twice a week, and we have spent the last two or three months trying to get that number reduced. And every time we start slowing down the meetings or scheduling a smaller window or fewer occasions of meetings, we find that we end up with a really long meeting and still have a lot to do.

And so recently I re-introduced the topic that we needed to think about, whether we were going to have competition thresholds this year, what our testing protocols would look like for people that didn't have the vaccine, and I would have to say that among the athletic directors, I don't know that I've ever introduced a topic that was less warmly received than the revisitation of all the protocols and things that we have gone through in the last year.

And yet, indeed, with the Delta variant, there are good reasons that we need to continue to be vigilant, and we will be. There's still going to be a fair amount of testing. We had a lot of surprises and disappointments during the last year, but ultimately I think self-discipline became the coin of the realm.

I think you'll find that teams in all sports that were the most self-disciplined, that followed the guidelines, that did the testing things that they needed to do, that did the necessary social distancing, adhered to protocols when they were traveling and on the road and in locker rooms and the like, they are the ones that were ultimately the most successful.

All of this was fairly intellectually demanding and fascinating in a lot of ways. I certainly learned a lot during the course of the year. It was also emotionally taxing. I don't think there's any way to dance around that. It was a long year. It was a long year for all of you. It was a long year for all of us.

Frankly, I'm kind of -- I'm exhausted. I didn't -- I wasn't excited about revisiting protocols for this fall, and yet I think if you're honest with one's self, you have to -- you have to look at this and say, yeah, we wish we were done with it, but we're probably not quite done with it.

We are certainly, as we go forward, encouraging student-athletes to get vaccinated, and in doing that, to minimize the impact that the Delta variant will have on our activities. Frankly, anyone not getting vaccinated is taking unnecessary and unwarranted risks. And that's not just student-athletes; that's anybody in our society. I think the Delta variant may, indeed, be a blessing for us because it punctuates the fact that we're not done with this yet.

And before I move on from the retrospective, I want to take a minute to recognize Ed Stewart. Ed is off to my right over here. Ed's leadership and insights and dedication and persistence were all a big reason why we were successful last year. I have to tell you, he ran the -- our medical committee. He was the primary contact with our consultant. He was our liaison with football officiating and our officiating crews. And, you know, that didn't get a whole lot of publicity, but the fact is we have had lots of challenges in the officiating environment.

Yeah, I would be remiss not to recognize Ed for his leadership. And, Ed, thank you for all you did during the course of the year.

But as much as we spend a little time looking back, I think we had an extraordinary year as a Conference. We had five National Championships. We had in total ten teams play for national championships and were in the finals. Despite missing seven games during the middle of the season, Baylor captured the men's NCAA Basketball Championship in fine fashion.

We were the only conference that was undefeated in the postseason in football, and for the first time in 25 years, somebody other than Stanford won the Learfield IMG College Directors' Cup. That's an accomplishment that the University of Texas did this year on the strength of 13 conference championships, and several national championships, and so we had hundreds of competitors win individual NCAA championships in a wide variety of sports. We had a bunch of top-five finishes. Mack Rhoades, AD at Baylor, was named the Sports Business Journal Athletic Director of the Year.

And almost amazingly, I was -- Bob Burda supplies me with a whole bunch of statistics when I get ready to prepare for this. One of the ones that just sort of jumped out at me is the OU softball team hit an unbelievable 511 home runs last year, including 19 grand slams. Those are astonishing numbers. And in addition to it, they played through the loser's bracket to win yet another national championship.

We had a great year, and I think we're going to have another great year going forward. There will be 77 current or former Big 12 athletes that will be competing in the Olympics. Every one of our schools is contributing an Olympian, at least one. Many of them are -- are Olympic competitors, but this year, about 75 percent of the U.S. Team are former collegians. It will be fun to watch in a couple of weeks. So competitively we had a great year.

It was also a year of social activism and student-athlete activism. We were right in the middle of that, as well. Our board established a conference-wide diversity, equity and inclusion committee that was comprised of the chief DE&I officers on each campus. Our departments certainly made it a priority as well. Our public service announcements were centered on messages of anti-racism and support for social justice. The Black Assistant Coaches Alliance was founded within the Big 12 Conference. We initiated a Big 12 voting registration activity for all of our schools. We instituted and developed a program for student-athlete mental health and wellness.

And for the sixth year in a row, the Conference produced dozens of short features telling the story of student-athletes who have overcome adversity to produce high achievement in the classroom and on the playing surfaces and in our society through our Champions for Life program.

So it was an impactful year, a competitive year and looking forward, I mentioned some of the challenges that are still present. Who knows what the Delta variant will do and how it will affect us. I suspect that even after an excellent year, we will be expected to do even better.

We have some people that are involved in national leadership, Linda Livingstone, the president of Baylor, now serves on the Board of Directors and on the NCAA Board of Governors. Shane Lyons, the AD at West Virginia, will serve as the chair of the NCAA Council this year. And we have dozens of other people who participate on sport committees, rules committees and other voluntary opportunities to serve America's thousands and hundreds of thousands of student-athletes.

So we find ourselves in a very litigious environment. It's a period of broad and multifaceted change. NIL, College Football Playoff, student-athlete health and well-being, it's a long list of things that we will be working on. But with the challenges come opportunities, and the Big 12 intends to lead and take advantage of those opportunities. We expect to lead on the playing surfaces, in the classroom, and in steering and strengthening intercollegiate athletics in '21 and '22 and beyond.

We are excited to get going this fall, including football, but we will also have another half-dozen or so sports going on in the fall.

And to that end, the last comment I'll have is that tickets for the Dr Pepper Big 12 Football Conference Championship held in this facility -- it's nice to start and finish the season in the same location -- go on sale Friday, July 16th, at 10:00 a.m., and the tickets are available on SeatGeek.

With that, I'll be happy to answer your questions on those topics or any others you may have.

Q. It's been a summer of eventful stuff, the NIL, the transfer portal exploding, and you came up with a 12-team playoff. Could you rank those and how you think they are going to affect college football in particular going forward?

BOB BOWLSBY: That's honestly a question I haven't given much thought to. I guess I would probably rate all of them 100 in terms of -- in terms of importance. You know, the CFP is clearly a one-sport issue. Perhaps wouldn't have quite the impact of name, image and likeness that is going to affect all students in all sports.

You know, I don't think the lawsuits are going to go away anytime soon, and we don't have the opportunity to put a priority on those. We just go to court when the judge tells us to and send the legal fees when it's time to pay our lawyers.

I think they are all I-A, I-B, I-C, and we are going to be dealing with all of them for the foreseeable future. I think relative to Name, Image and Likeness there was a commonly held misperception that the sky was going to fall on July 1 and we were going to be in an Armageddon scenario. Obviously, that hasn't happened. There have been some things that have occurred that have raised eyebrows, but generally speaking, schools are managing it. There isn't the consistency that I might have liked, but it is pressing ahead.

As I said before, no lives were lost, and we're just going to have -- we'll live with the confusion for a while, and eventually I think we'll have a chance to figure it out. I couldn't tell you which conduit we'll have to follow in order to resolve it, but either state law or NCAA rules or federal legislation, I think we'll probably get to something other than a 50-state patchwork eventually.

You know, those are all big issues. Those are all things that are not going to be resolved soon. Frankly, I hope the CFP is close to resolution by the time the board meets in September. It may, by virtue of being a single sport in a relatively shorter time frame, be resolvable.

I would say my biggest challenge right now is the breadth of those things you just ticked off and the fact that we haven't been successful in getting many of them to go away. So we continue to work on it. You feel a little like you're pushing the boulder up the hill and sometimes moving ahead and sometimes not.

Q. You talked about protocols for COVID. Has anything been established for this season, or is that yet to be determined?

BOB BOWLSBY: No, it's yet to be determined. As I said at the outset, if we've learned anything, it's to be patient. Frankly, we're not excited to think about having to have protocols, but we're not -- we're also not unprepared.

So no decisions have been made. Our athletic director subgroup that Ed has led has been sort of the ideation engine for these things when it comes to the full group of ADs. But I suspect that some of those protocol issues will be resolved in the next 30 days.

But we've just -- we've learned the lesson on patience and long-term planning, and it's just most of the time not worth spending a lot of effort on it.

Q. Has the Big 12 been able to figure out what the long-term financial impact from the pandemic and the reduced crowds is going to be from last year?

BOB BOWLSBY: Thanks for the question. It's a good one, and I wish I had addressed it in my comments. It varies from institution to institution. You know, in our case, we distributed about $35 million per school this year, plus or minus, and that was about probably $4.5 million per school less than we would have expected when we went into the year. "Expected" may not be exactly the way to say it because we were already in the midst of the pandemic and knew that we had to make some adjustments.

I think the long-term impact of it is going to be felt more in campus than it is through the central distribution from the conference office. We expect to be able to get our games in this fall, and we derive from that the revenue that we get from two TV contracts and a CFP involvement and other bowl games and NCAA Tournament and the like, and most of those things are likely to return to some semblance of normal.

The longer term hangover is likely to be on campus where lots of ticket sales were lost. And it varies from place to place. Some laid people off. Some had reduced terms of service. And some dealt with it very early, and others chose to deal with it later. And so it really is very much institutional.

But that impact is real, and it's not likely a one-year impact. I think that it will be into fiscal year 2023 before some institutions fully recover. Others will be able to do it more quickly through use of reserves or borrowing or other things.

It's a little bit all over the place, but the impact is principally at the institutional level. And those of us in the conference office have tried to be mindful of that; that our schools are going through a whole set of different challenges than we are within the conference office.

Q. Following up on the vaccination statement that you made, what's your impression in terms of how the vaccination has been met by institutions, what feedback you're getting from coaches or ADs? Is that going to be a bit of a work to get the rates where you want them? And how much specifically can the Big 12 office -- how much input can you have and how much pressure can you put on making that right?

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, we have a great interest in it. We don't have the authority to mandate. We only have authority that's vested in us from our boards or our ADs. We can ask those questions as to whether or not they want to mandate it, but I -- generally speaking, I don't think they are going to because institutions in large measure are not mandating vaccinations for other students on campus.

We certainly are going to do everything we can to encourage vaccination. I think it's very short-sighted to not get vaccinations. Even if the Delta variant weren't around, it makes sense to get vaccinated.

I think it's early in the year. It's early in the process. We have always thought that viruses were more prevalent during late fall and through the winter. And so, you know, if indeed the Delta variant is as virulent and as infectious as it's been reported to be, not getting vaccinated, you're rolling the dice in terms of whether you'll contract the virus.

And beyond that, for a student-athlete, you're also rolling the dice on whether or not you're going to be able to participate because you're going to be in a testing protocol if you're not vaccinated.

As an example, with the baseball tournament, the University of Texas' team was fully vaccinated, all their coaches and student-athletes, and you saw what happened to North Carolina State. I hesitate to point fingers because I don't know fully the circumstances, but they had some unvaccinated people and they had some breaches of protocols and you see what happens.

The potential is still there, and I can't quote chapter and verse for you on the ten teams and how many of their football players are vaccinated or what percentage, but I know it's a priority for coaches and for athletics directors, and it's an appropriate priority for medical professionals, as well. Anybody you ask suggests that you get vaccinated.

Q. What impact has it had on the Big 12 that one program has won so many championships in a row and is favored to win it again?

BOB BOWLSBY: You're talking about in the sport of football?

Q. Yes.

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, you know, just like what we're experiencing in the playoff, Oklahoma deserves the attention that they have gotten, and when they have been predicted to be near the top or to be champions, they have delivered. And so you know, we had, I think it was a 13-year period where Kansas won every basketball tournament or every regular-season championship.

All things being equal, I think we have tremendous top-to-bottom competition in our league, and yet Oklahoma has consistently under Coach [Bob] Stoops and now Coach [Lincoln] Riley performed at a very high level. And just like Clemson and Ohio State and Alabama deserve to be where they have been on a national basis, Oklahoma deserves to be where they have been within our conference.

I think this year they are going to continue to be chased by a very good Iowa State team that beat them recently. So I think the competition will be -- will be high. I also think we have got some really good teams down in the ranks. I think there are those that are building, but I think the middle of our league is as good as the middle of any league out there.

So you're going to have to be ready every day, and nobody knows that more than Coach Riley and his team. They understand. They may have gotten a lot of first place votes, but they are going to get tested during the course of the season.

Q. In your role as a commissioner, you mentioned NIL and the world didn't fall apart on July 1, but there have been some interesting situations, like the one in Miami where a booster is willing to play every player on the football team $6,000. As a former athletic director and now the commissioner, what do you see your role and the Conference's weight, their role in trying to make sure there's an equity and some rules regarding NIL that keep competition equal?

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it's a great question. Allow me to philosophize just a little bit. I think the level playing field has always been a bit of a mirage. We try and do it through scholarship limits and coaching limits and contest limits and the like, but it's easier to recruit to some places than it is to others. It's easier to get transfers to some places than it is to others. You can only do so much with rules to create a level playing field. And so I really think this is another area where there are places that have advantages and there are places that have disadvantages, and I don't think that's ever going to change.

Having said that, we are spending a lot of time at the conference level talking about what the Alston decision should do to our scholarship package. We are spending a lot of time trying to suggest things to our members that will give them some guidance.

We can make rules at the conference level, and we may well do that on NIL and on other things before it's all settled. On the other hand, what the courts have said is that we can't spend time talking to the SEC or the Big Ten or Conference USA about what they think they ought to do and making rules on that fashion where we're all doing the same things. That's what we've gotten cracked over the knuckles on from an antitrust standpoint.

There's a limited amount that we can do in concert on a national basis, and we're still finding our way. Our board has seeded a subcommittee to talk about what these packages ought to look like. And I think for in the near term you're going to see some institutions comfortable with doing some things and other institutions not comfortable with that.

Eventually -- and we have two states that have state laws, Oklahoma and Texas have state laws in their states. Those laws are going to prevail, and the rest of it is left to institutional discretion. In other states where there's no state law, the NCAA's guidance on it is going to have to prevail, and schools are going to have to figure it out.

I was, as you know, intimately involved in the formation of some of the governance packages and legislative packages that were forwarded. I would have liked to have seen more in the way of guidance. The NCAA package had a lot more in the way of guidance, and it would have provided some very helpful assistance to the schools, and it would have provided some consistency in those states that didn't have the Name, Image and Likeness laws.

But that didn't happen, and we sought to avoid anything that would cause us to be sued again. So it is where it is at this time, and we're collectively trying to figure it out. Some of it's being done at the institutional level, some of it at the conference level and still a bit of it at the national level.

Q. Several ADs have already announced full stadiums for the fall. When you talk about the Delta variant and protocols and things like that, how are these ADs balancing their need to want to have normalcy, and yet university presidents are probably facing political pressure to return to full normalcy versus all the things you're still talking about with COVID still out?

BOB BOWLSBY: I think university leadership is getting pressure on both sides of it. I think some quarters are pressing to get back to full stadiums, and there are probably people that are pressing to be very cautious about it. I think all of our schools are relying on local health officials and doctors that serve on our conference medical committee. So we are drawing upon the best information that we can.

In the end, these kinds of decisions have always been made on a local basis, local health officials, in some cases governors' offices. But if we get to a point where public assembly is ill-advised because of a spike in the variant, it's not inconceivable we would go back and try and revisit those things on an institutional basis or collectively.

I think it's entirely possible and it's exactly that sort of occurrence that we're trying to anticipate and make sure that when the middle of August comes around, if we find that we've got nine miles of bad road in front of us, that we can make an informed decision.

But do we want to return to some semblance of normalcy? Yes, we do. Do we think that it could be done safely? Yeah, I think health professionals that are advising us believe that it could be done safely. Whether or not the circumstances will worsen is yet to be seen.

Q. The College Football Playoff will probably command the biggest TV contract in college sports history. That's probably going to bring back the spotlight on the fact that the players don't benefit monetarily. But with the NIL era upon us, do you think perhaps that might give that spotlight, that the players might benefit by being in a playoff situation?

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, I'm not going to grant you that they don't benefit. I still think that college athletics is about helping 18-year-old adolescents become 22-year-olds adults and in the process get a good education and have a good athletic experience.

If having a professional career or an opportunity to compete in the Olympics is in your future, that's a highly desirable by-product of a college education. I think there's much to be gained from participation in college athletics. We also have been careful to optimize what we provided in the way of benefits for family travel and those kinds of things within the current NCAA rules.

The NIL as it pertains to the CFP I think is probably an unknown at this point in time. You certainly -- just as it's questionable whether or not you can appropriate institutional intellectual property, it's probably a good question to ask whether you could appropriate College Football Playoff intellectual property for use with your NIL.

But that's not to say that student-athletes couldn't activate in a lot of substantial ways around their participation in the College Football Playoff. I think there will be those opportunities, and I think some of them could be fairly lucrative.

Are we headed for revenue sharing? I don't believe we are. I hope we're not. I think it would be a very bad step. I think while you might suggest that it's a fairness issue, you know, I would suggest as a former college wrestler that there's not a football player in America that worked any harder than I did, and yet they have the benefit of an adoring public, and I didn't.

So if there's any credence to the labor theory of value, all student-athletes are entitled to NIL and a scholarship and other things that may come as student-athlete benefits. But having said all that, it's very easy to draw the dichotomy between the high-paid coach or the high-paid commissioner, or whoever, and a student-athlete that only gets their education paid for. You know, those conversations are always going to be held. There isn't any doubt about it.

I can tell you this: The motivation for expanding the playoff is not the money. The motivation for expanding the playoff is the realization that participation could be broader and access could be more readily accomplished and more institutions could stay close to the flame.

I think the 12-team playoff, if adopted, will be a tremendous asset for the regular season. There will be 40 schools that have a legitimate claim to a path to the playoff in mid-October, and by early November, there will still be 25, and we're not going to be in a situation where who is in and who is out starts taking place the first week of November. It's gotten fairly predictable, and that's going to be a good thing for college football.

Q. You were part of the four-man working group for the College Football Playoff. You talked about checking egos and self-interest during the process. But talking about it just now, do you see the 12-team playoff being a net-benefit for the Big 12, and what kind of feedback since you guys have unveiled it have you received personally?

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, the first piece of feedback I got was there was great surprise we went as large as 12, and you know, I think the short answer to that question is why not eight, was eight with the highest-ranked six conference champions included just didn't allow enough opportunity for at-large participation. So that was one of the gating issues.

I think moving forward, we haven't had a year in the Big 12 in the playoff era where our champion didn't finish in a position where it was one of the top-six rated champions in college football, in the poll. So I think our chances of -- while it's not automatic, I think our chances of having our champion and perhaps one other in the event are pretty good. I'm willing to live with those. Is it a certainty? No, it's not. But it's a risk that I think is an enhancement for us.

I think the other thing is most of our members see the value of playing through a ten-team conference, even though we're playing everybody every year. You know, you've only got to beat nine others in order to get to the championship. That's easier said than done, but it's also easier than going through 14 or 15 to get there.

So you know, I like our dog in the fight. But it wasn't what's about going to benefit the Big 12. I certainly took my own temperature on that during the course of hundreds of hours of conversation, but I was proud of the three colleagues that were in the room with me. I think everybody did a good job of checking their hat at the door.

Q. Back in May, OU athletic director Joe Castiglione said he was "bitterly disappointed" that the OU-Nebraska game had to be played at 11:00 a.m. What response do you have to that and any of the frustrations that have been voiced with the 11:00 a.m. kickoffs?

BOB BOWLSBY: Well, 11:00 a.m. is an inconvenience for some fans. Some fans prefer night games. When I was at Stanford, I did a survey, and there were those that wanted to play afternoon games exclusively and hated night games. There were those that played night games exclusively and hated afternoon games. And it turns out it depends on whether your children are involved in youth activities or whether you're an old person and don't want to get home too long after dark.

It depends on who you ask. I think Joe's position on it was it was a marquee game and he would have liked to have seen it played in prime time.

He's entitled to that position, and we talked about it extensively in the time before he made his comments. Having said that, we all signed the TV contract, and we can change it the next time around if we want to change it, but we are going to live by our stipulations on the television agreements and that's what we did on this occasion.

Q. One more question about the playoff. When realistically do you think we'll see expansion on that front?

BOB BOWLSBY: Can't answer that question for you. We're going to have discussions with our TV partners and with our bowl partners to talk with our own constituents. In our case, the presidents and chancellors and ADs in the Big 12 and other conferences are going to do the same thing through the summer.

I'm hopeful that we will have a decision at the September board meeting, but if we're not able to touch the necessary bases and get agreement on how it fits together, we won't be able to do that. If we're unable to come to some closure on it either in September or at some period of time afterward, I guess that we'll likely wait till the end of the 12-year agreement and implement it at that time.

Q. On the playoff situation, it's going to have to dilute the impact of regular-season games to a certain extent with the larger field, right? And also, do you think the conference championship games are eventually going to have to go away to use that week for playoff games?

BOB BOWLSBY: I don't think it will go away, the conference championship games, for use of that week. I think it will be a week later or maybe two weeks later, and so I don't -- one of the things we looked at was moving the season a week earlier. Then you'd have your conference championship games the week before Thanksgiving.

Ultimately we didn't do that, having advocated it, but it probably isn't completely off the table. But expect those games will be played the second or third week in December, and so it won't impact the conference championship games.

But as it has always been, it's up to the leagues to decide if they play a conference championship game. It isn't a requirement, but there is -- there is the determination that the conference champion, however designated, is going to be the representative. So some of that will be left to individual conference discretion. But I'm going to guess most of the conference championship games will survive.

Q. If the College Football Playoff is expanded to 12 teams, does that automatically ensure that the number of teams that exist in the Power Five conferences stays the same, or is there still potential for future consolidation and reduction from that number?

BOB BOWLSBY: I think conference realignment -- and thank you for none of you asking me the expansion question. I think I won five bucks on that -- no, sorry, you missed your chance.

It's really moot on that question. Conference alignment is always at the discretion of the conferences. But you have to remember, the last time around, the last round of conference realignments was all driven by cable households, and we find ourselves now in a rapidly shrinking cable environment. It is much less driven by capturing a particular cable market because if it's an in-market fee, you get a lot more money for it than if it's an out-of-market fee. So the more you can include those things, the more revenue you're going to derive from it.

That motivation is essentially gone. The cable universe has shrunk 20 million households already. It's going to continue to shrink as we migrate to digital consumption and streaming.

And so a lot of the motivation for realignment is no longer there. Is that to say it couldn't happen? No, it could possibly happen for other reasons. But it doesn't appear to me that the motivation is there at this point in time. Not to say it couldn't happen, but it's not one of the things that keeps me up at night.

Thank you all for being here. Good to see you.