BIG 12 CONFERENCE BIG 12 MEN'S BASKETBALL TIPOFF MEDIA DAY

October 20, 2021

Bob Bowlsby

Media Day Press Conference

Q. How would you describe the effort from so many people that has gone into getting us back to this point over the last 12 months?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: This is the first time we've done the men's and women's Media Days in one location. We needed to set up to make sure it accommodated both events.

Yesterday went very well with the women. Today has been terrific.

Coaches are not usually effusive with their positive comments about Media Days. Most of them would rather go in for a colonoscopy than come to Media Day. They have been complimentary to the setup.

Q. We'll talk about the craziness of the last 12 months, in particular last two months for you. Take us back since we were here in March of '20, all of the complications, things that you as commissioner of the Big 12 and other commissioners had to deal with.

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: The A5 commissioners went about nine months talking with each other in concert every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, for that entire nine months. There was a lot of collaboration that went into it.

Frankly, I'd have to say I'm proud of the way we got through the football season, the basketball season. We had to move some things around. We had some surprises. I think what we learned was you better not plan very far ahead of time. You're better off to leave some things uncertain, deal with them at the last minute than we are to try to make plans, then have to scuttle them.

Generally speaking, we got most of the football season in. We got an amazing amount of the basketball season in. We got an NCAA tournament in. I think given what our country has up against, given what our schools were up against, I think we got through it in pretty good fashion.

Q. Oklahoma and Texas leaving, you'll have UCF, BYU, Houston and Cincinnati coming in. What are those conversations like behind the scenes about what these next few years will look like for this league?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Well, I know remarkably little about the time frame. I know what the options are. In the case of BYU, they've said they intend to start on July 1st, 2023. That's great.

I think the others will try and do that, but they have indicated to us they plan to join not later than July 1st, 2024. They have some things they need to do to extricate themselves from the American Athletic Conference. They're in the process of doing those.

We're hopeful that it could be as early as '23, certainly not later than '24. I think we'll find ourselves having to play in divisions at that point.

For a while, we'll be 14 members. So Texas and Oklahoma have made the statement publicly, and our documents would indicate that they will be with us through June 30th of 2025. Until we see anything to the contrary, that's what we're going to assume.

We'll play with 14 for a while, then we'll fall back to 12, and we'll reassess at that point. That could entail looking at targets of opportunity for additional expansion, it could entail a strategy to get larger.

I feel very good about the four that we've brought in. We're here talking about men's basketball, and I think these four schools bring remarkable strength to the Big 12. We're already pretty strong.

Q. Is there a scenario that you see where the two teams, programs that are leaving, leave sooner than 2025?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Well, I certainly would make the assumption that they would try and leave earlier than that. We have agreements in terms of our rights, notice provisions in our bylaws, and we expect to exercise our prerogatives around those documents.

Q. Is it possible when all is said and done, this could actually be a better basketball league than the league you and I have watched over the last decade, statistically the No. 1 league in basketball?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Yeah, well, I think that's arguable. I really do. Nobody has a better basketball tradition than Cincinnati. BYU has traditionally played in the top 25, doing it coming out of a relatively mid-major league. I think in Houston's case, their strength is self-evident. They were in the Final Four last year. UCF has had good teams as well, coached by my dear friend Johnny Dawkins.

I think you don't ever replace truly an Oklahoma and a Texas, but in the sport of basketball, I don't think there's any question that we don't fall off much and we may gain.

Q. How would you describe financially where this league will be, where you foresee it the next three to five to eight years as you try to recoup?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Well, we have an agreement that runs through June 30th of 2025. It will be consistent through there.

We will go to the market when the time comes. It's good to own live content. Nobody knows what it's worth until somebody is ready to pay you for it. As you guys all know, we're on the air on Big 12 now, on ESPN+, and streaming has become a bigger and bigger part of the televising of college athletics. I think that migration is going to continue.

How you model in the marketplace is really dependent upon how many suitors there are, how many people are going to compete for that content.

To forecast what it might be worth is really a fool's errand because it's only worth what anybody will pay you for it at the time they are going to consider it.

We think we're going to continue to play at a very high level. I think our content is high quality. We're going to be in three different time zones in a fairly significant manner. I'm very bullish about the value of our conference going forward.

Q. How will the name, image and likeness issue affect the Big 12? It would seem to me the Big 12 would be pretty well-placed to do well by student-athletes with this.

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Yeah, I think not everything is just as I would like it relative to name, image and likeness. As you know, I was involved in the organization within the NCAA that was trying to put some guardrails around this.

There are some things that I think we should have done that we didn't do. We didn't do them because there was concern about litigation at a time when we were already involved in lots of litigation. I'm not a lawyer. I can't capably argue that side of it.

I think we would be in a better situation now if we had some things in place like rules around who can use the logo. The institutional marks and logos are institutional intellectual property. They don't belong to the student-athletes. Some are using them, some are not using them.

The long and short of it is I would have preferred to have some guardrails around it. I think the day has come where student-athletes ought to be able to profit from their name, image and likeness. Shouldn't be an inducement to go to a particular school or to try to get somebody to transfer.

I think you've been around it a long time, as I have, it's hard to evolve, but I think it was time for us to evolve.

I actually believe we'll have a national standard at some point in time. I don't think a patchwork of state laws works. I think we'll end up with a federal law of some sort. It might come through the judicial system, it might come through federal legislation, but I think we'll get some consistency eventually.

Until then we're just going to have to deal with the circumstance that we have.

Q. A couple weeks ago the Big 12 announced it would allow member schools to decide the amount of education-related benefits athletes can receive or can be given in an academic year following the Alston ruling over the summer. Paint the picture. What does that look like for student-athletes in the Big 12?

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Well, what we did, we had a standstill that our board put on and said, We aren't going to do anything until we start to see what the marketplace is doing.

The SEC took their step, others are considering it. Unlike most of the time in the past, we can't call them and say, Hey, what are you doing with this? The courts have said that's collusion, and therefore illegal.

You really are left to your own devices. So what we did was we came out and said we're going to let the Alston opinion stand in its entirety, and individual institutions can do with it what they will.

There's a fair amount of institutional prerogative and breadth of prerogative there. That makes people uncomfortable because we've always tried to legislate competitive equity in the rules.

But in this case I think we're probably going to be relatively slow to jump in. Eventually it could go all the way up to $5,980 per student-athlete.

One of the challenges in this is it can go to both scholarship athletes and non-scholarship athletes. If it goes to non-scholarship athletes, it changes the equations around how many scholarships you can give.

We're just going to have to play it on the fly. I think that our institutions will look at it modestly in the early stages.

Right now we have a delta in our league between $2,400 a year and $6,800 a year in full cost of attendance. You never hear it show up on the recruiting trail. Everybody was worried that it was going to be the end of athletics as we knew it.

In the end, we managed through it. The college athletics environment has proven to be pretty resilient over the years. Indeed, NIL went in on July 1st, these other things have come down the pike, and we're still playing.

Q. Still watching and enjoying.

COMMISSIONER BOWLSBY: Absolutely.