BIG 12 MEDIA DAYS

July 20, 2005

Kevin Weiberg

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Thank you, Bob. Good afternoon, everybody. I am going to be fairly brief in making some introductory remarks. There are a few things I wanted to call to your attention to, and I know this was, I think, billed at one point as a state of the conference address. I don't know that I am exactly going to do that. I am going to make some general comments about the conference, our upcoming tenth anniversary year, and some of the areas that we will be spending some time focusing on this coming year, and then we will open it up to your questions. As I said, this is our tenth anniversary season. We are planning a year-long celebration as part of the tenth anniversary of the conference. We will be looking for a lot of good promotion across our conference. We will be asking our schools, on a cooperative, voluntary basis to work with us in areas like displaying our tenth anniversary logo on uniforms, field and court markings where it's possible. We are also going to be working with our television partners, and I think all of them have planned some activities in which they will be focusing a little bit of attention on the history of the conference over that 10-year period, and we will certainly, as we will be working with our corporate partners in hopes that they will activate some of their promotional plans around our tenth anniversary celebration. So it will be a year-long effort. It is a significant milestone in some respects, even though our conference remains a young one. It is the passage of 10 years, and I think, in many respects, one in which a good opportunity to make an assessment of where we have been and where we are going. We will also be conducting some special voting through coaches and media relative to tenth anniversary teams, all sport teams, over the course of the ten years. As I have said, there will be, in all sports, a media-coach evaluating process in that regard, but in the sports of football, men's and women's basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball, we are also going to have a fan component through our Big 12 web site in which fans will be able to cast votes for the significant players who have achieved a lot through the first 10 years of the conference. Through the course of the season we will be announcing those all 10th anniversary teams. That will be another fun aspect of the coming season. In terms of taking a bit of an opportunity as a result of what will be our tenth competitive season to do an assessment of where we are at, I wanted to make just a few comments about it. I think the growth of the conference has been steady and substantial through this 10-year period. Our teams have made consistent competitive progress. We really enter seasons now, I feel like, with a level of confidence among our coaches and athletes that, really, across our championship sports, when they enter a season, there is a feeling that we have an opportunity to compete for a national championship. Our track record across a variety of sports has been very good, as evidenced by six national championships in this past season, a high watermark for our conference. I think we have also done a good job over the period of the last several of years of raising the national profile of our conference, and not just in terms of the competitive success of our teams. I really feel like our people have played a significant national leadership role in a number of areas, and those areas include things like NCAA academic reform efforts, efforts to bring new rule structures and guidelines to national recruiting processes. I just have a sense that our people have played a very active role in a lot of these areas, and we feel like national leadership in that regard is very important to us, and our profile nationally in those areas is very important. I think also it is important that our present chancellors are very much involved in the governance of the conference, but are willing to serve in NCAA leadership roles and a number of very important task force efforts and things Myles Brand has implemented as part of his NCAA leadership. One of the things I have observed of the growth and depth of the conference over the last 10 years is the increasing amount of collaboration that exists among our universities outside of collegiate sports. In chancellors' meetings our presidents and chancellors have been spending time talking about ways that the conference umbrella can serve to be of assistance in fostering economic development across our seven-state region and in other areas of collaboration related to research and things of that kind. So from my perspective, it is an example of a growing depth of the conference in terms of interrelationships among members. I think we have also spent a significant amount of time in recent years related to issues of student athlete welfare and academic progress of student athletes. It is an area of ongoing concern to us, and an area in which we know, in particular, in some of our most high profile sports, we have work to do. We played a leadership role, I think, in terms of the development of the NCAA's academic reform package. We are going to continue to work within the system relative to that package and the way it's managed, issues surrounding the academic progress rate, for example. It's an ongoing area of importance and focus for us. In this 10 years we have also been blessed with a stable and steady revenue base and it has grown significantly in that period of time. In the nine-year history of the conference our distributions to our members has doubled, which I think is a significant achievement. So, in all, I think our conference is well-positioned to meet the challenges of the next several years and I feel good about the progress we have made. As for the coming year, there are a number of areas and important initiatives we will be focusing on. You have already seen one of those demonstrated here in the previous hour. It is certainly important to us that our effort to assist our football officiating program through the implementation of a successful instant replay experiment takes place, and I think we have a good plan in place to do so. We are also going to spend a significant amount of time here in the next few weeks focusing on finishing our old agreements which we announced this past week. We have some ongoing work to do in that area. That will be a busy part of the remainder of the summer. Our athletic directors will continue the discussion in this coming year regarding scheduling, in particular, how to handle scheduling in 12-game seasons, both non-conference scheduling, but also the number of conference games we play, which will be an ongoing point of discussion. In this coming year we will also focus attention on future championship sites in football and men's and women's basketball, and we will begin a process to award additional sites sometime during the course of this academic year. In the coming year, while we have no active television negotiations, we will spend time preparing for the next major round of negotiations, which will begin most likely in the winter of 2007, so after two more football seasons. We also have a number of very important programs that we are going to be implementing this coming year that were approved by our conference members at the recent spring meetings. We're enhancing right now the type of compliance reviews that we do throughout campuses in the course of each year. We are enhancing our drug testing program, as well as expending more monies on gambling prevention and awareness programming. It will be a year in which we are going to be focused on implementation on a lot of those pieces. Now, on a personal note, my time in terms of the BCS coordinator's role is, I think, beginning to reach a point where it's coming to a close. I would have to say that once we get through the bowl games, it will be a pleasure to be able to spend a little more of my time focused purely on matters related to the Big 12, while certainly there will be a transition period in terms of BCS coordinator's role to another conference office. We will make sure that that transition occurs as speedily as possible. With that in mind, I think I will open it up to your questions.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: We only have had general discussion at this point. We did not make any legislative proposal. The conference has had until July 15 to put forward legislative initiatives, and after some discussion about it, we decided it just wasn't ripe quite yet, at least within our own conference, to think about sponsoring such legislation. We are -- the Atlantic Coast Conference, I believe, was talking about it. I don't know if they proceeded with it. I haven't seen the full list of legislative items. I know they were contemplating that possibility.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: There is not. We had no conversation today. We hope to have some additional dialogue before the day is out today. As I said yesterday, we remain very interested in Houston as a possible bowl site.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: We will start our process, as I said, to review future championship sites this next year. I don't know when that precisely will begin. We will have some dialogue about it, September conference meetings. I think we will probably get more in depth into it as we get out of the football season, and I would say that around the time of our spring meetings is probably a target we're looking at awarding additional sites. We have been pretty pleased with the idea of rotating championship sites. At this juncture I would say this would likely be our intent for the future. I don't really see a scenario right now where we would anchor a championship event, football or men's or women's basketball, in a city for a number of years. Houston has been a good site for us in terms of the football championship game. We are anxious to see how it goes this year with the championship game being here. We know the quality facilities exist here for basketball. I think what we would have to analyze with basketball is a different kind of event in the sense that more of the tickets in the basketball event are really taken by people from our institutions. We provide approximately 1,100 tickets to each of our participating teams for our basketball tournaments, so 13,000-plus tickets go to the fans of the schools, and it creates different kinds of travel issues than perhaps we have around the football championship game where we are expecting the majority of tickets to be sold to fans in the local market. I think, from a travel standpoint, we have to think carefully about location of the basketball tournament in terms of kind of the central corridor of the conference with that in mind. That doesn't rule out Houston, but I think it's one we have to analyze carefully.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: The latter part of your question first, we are actively considering one, if not two, additional bowl games to our line-up. I think all of you probably tracked our announcement of last year. We have entered into agreements with six bowl games for future contracts going for 2006 to 9. We are very pleased with the new line-up of games. We think we met a number of the objectives we set out to accomplish as part of our negotiations in terms of having quality destinations, quality balanced opponents across multiple conferences, having the ability to have some enhanced exposure on New Year's Day was important to us. We also like the opportunity to have a high-level bowl game in the state of Florida, which is something new to us. So there were a number of objectives we set out to achieve. I think I said during the teleconference that we felt that if we simply ended up with a status quo when we started the process, that would have been okay, too. We liked the partners we were working with. We kind of ended up with a blend that I think is good at this point. If we can add additional opportunities that make sense, we will do that.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: There is not. There are essentially eight opportunities guaranteed. If we were in a situation where we had a ninth eligible team, we would be looking at any open spots that would be out there.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: That is just the reality of it. The other side of the coin is we had the agreement with the bowl game in Fort Worth, and we have yet to provide a team in two years. That's the issue that you get into as you work your way down into additional bowl opportunities. You want to make sure you have a reasonable opportunity to provide a team, particularly when a bowl is making a lot of plans in terms of how the market is behaving around your conference, and having a team from your conference. That's one of the considerations as we try to look at it. On the other side, you are right, our coaches and all want to make sure they have a place to play in the post-season if they are bowl-eligible. That's the balancing act.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Listen, in addition to those relative non-conference games, I think all of us in the conference office have observed the challenges that we have in terms of finding quality non-conference games, particularly intercessional games for television in the month of September. It's a real challenge for us. It's one that we have talked a lot to our athletic directors about in terms of their plans for future scheduling. So the question now, I think, in front of us is: Is there anything additional we can do from a conference standpoint other than the kinds of encouragement and incentives we have provided to members to handle their non-conference schedules up to this point? So we have been trying to encourage them to schedule, on an annual basis, at least one opponent that would be considered perhaps to be a Top 50 or Top 60-type team. We have also been providing incentive in non-conference scheduling perspective. If your game is selected for television in the non-conference, you receive an extra unit in the revenue sharing plan, trying to use those kinds of approaches. The question is: Is that sufficient or are there additional things we need to do. Part of that, I would just say, is this ongoing discussion about the number of conference games, whether in a 12-game season, 8 games is the appropriate number. We will be having more dialogue about that.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Is Tim still here? He skipped out. This year's number, it depends on the network you appear on, but I think it is around $200,000.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Each conference is different in terms of its preparations. In our conference we have a rolling five-year period that members are obligated to, and they have to give notice if they intend to withdraw or they suffer a severe financial consequence at the beginning. Fortunately we are not in a position where we have had to worry about those kinds of circumstances. Each conference is different in terms of its membership provisions. From the standpoint of my opinion about realignment, we obviously were interested observers in the realignment that was taking place. I don't think there is any question that some of the opportunities that we have had in our bowl negotiations were created in part by the realignment that took place, so it has had some consequences in terms of effects on our conference. I think some of the realignment that has occurred has resulted in greater geographic similarity, which has the potential for those conferences to be able to stay together for a longer period of time, and those would probably be my general observations.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Not really. We have the ability to take a little bit of time here to assess the situation. At the same time, I feel like we have been at this for nearly six months. I think we started discussions with our good friends from the Cotton Bowl back in February. This has been a fairly lengthy process and I think we would all like to bring it to some conclusion. There are some missing pieces of information, however, that we are trying to be a little bit careful about. One of those is the number of wins that will be required for a team to be bowl eligible in 12-game seasons. I don't think we are going to know the final answer to that question until April when the NCAA legislative process is complete for this coming year. So we are trying to be a little bit cautious in terms of thinking about additional bowl opportunities. At the same time, if there are opportunities there that we think make sense, we will probably go ahead and move on them.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: It's mixed. That will be a discussion we will have here in an upcoming meeting. There are some that, I think, believe that it would be a good conference-wide initiative. There are others that would like probably to have more institutional autonomy. That's not unusual. We deal with those kinds of feelings in a variety of issues.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: The issue of scheduling 1AA is not a major concern to me. I think when you are talking about the upper level of 1AA, those teams can be very competitive in a way that is very comparable to some of the 1A programs that are out there. If you look at the computer rankings that exist for college football, many times you will find some of the 1AA teams that are more highly rated by those ranking services than are some of the 1A programs. Do we want a whole schedule built around those kind of opponents from a conference perspective? I think our television partners, I think, would feel the same, we don't. We would prefer to see quality intercessional match-ups with at least one of those existing on everyone's schedule.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: That one, to me, is not just a north-south question. It is a question of a big budget versus small budget. We always are involved in looking at those issues, trying to track financial reporting. It is not as good as we would like it to be nationally in terms of similarities in reporting, so it's hard to get a good fix on exactly what's being spent in some of the sports programs. You know, to me, there is also sort of a diminishing return principle that kicks in relative to spending. I mean, I don't know that if you are spending 80 million, that spending 90 million is going to make you necessarily any more successful. What's important is that you have good, quality facilities, that you are able to compensate people in your program, the coaches that do an outstanding job at a level that allows you to be able to have a reasonable chance to retain them and that you have the kind of dollars to expend to hopefully attract the best student athletes and hopefully retain them through having the kinds of support programs that you need within the athletic department. As I look at our situation, I really feel like we have seen growth in every one of our programs in terms of their athletic budgets and their ability to improve their facilities. If you really look across our conference in terms of competitive success, and you measure it in ways that are not just related to a single sport, we find that in many cases our small budget programs are doing very well in terms of winning championships and fielding competitive teams. So, to me, there is not a one-to-one relationship between how much you spend and how much you win. Is it important to have the monies to do the things you need to do? Sure, it is. We monitor those things and discuss revenue sharing periodically because it is an important factor. I don't think it's purely a north-south issue.

COMMISSIONER WEIBERG: Well, we maintain a year-round program. It is a random program with a focus on performance enhancing drugs. We are increasing the number of tests. We are going to be working with the Center for Drug-Free Sports, the same testing agency that handles the NCAA testing program. It is somewhat unique in that many conferences do not have their own separate testing program. We have had such a program since the outset of the conference. What we are essentially doing this year is really enhancing the amount of money spent on the program by about double the amount we were previously spending, so that will result in more tests. We are currently still in the discussion phases about the kinds of tests, the screens that we will actually be doing, but we are obviously putting more emphasis on that effort.