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DISCOVER ORANGE BOWL: FLORIDA STATE v NORTHERN ILLINOISDecember 31, 2012Jon SteinbrecherMIAMI GARDENS, FLORIDA THE MODERATOR: What does it mean to you and to the conference to have Northern Illinois playing in the Discover Orange Bowl? JON STEINBRECHER: Well, it's a validation of a lot of things we've talked about in the last couple of years. I've been on the job I'm currently in for about three‑and‑a‑half years, and the question I got continually is can you ever get a team in a BCS game? I said, well, if we would look at past history and if the rules we have in place for qualification to a BCS bowl were in place 12 years ago that they are today, we probably would have had two or three teams in a game. So based on that, yeah, I think we can do that. And then to go out and have the kind of year we had this year, and I think what people haven't focused on as much as when you look at our Conference Championship game, we were probably the first non‑AQ conference to have in essence what ended up being an AQ game. The winner of that game was going to a BCS game. I think Kent State was sitting right there right on the edge ready to go, and then for Northern to make the jump they did, I think it really spoke to the depth of our league. Q. Could you talk about the assistance that the MAC was able to provide financially for Northern Illinois to participate in a bowl like this? JON STEINBRECHER: Yeah. Well, just philosophically as we were preparing for this in the last month, month‑and‑a‑ half of the season thinking that this is something that could happen, we have probably like every conference a schedule of how we'll handle reimbursements on all our bowl games. We did not have a schedule in place for a BCS game. As we looked at it, there's some pretty significant obligations, and we wanted to make sure that the school was not under any kind of a financial hardship. Truly this is going to be a celebration for Northern Illinois, it's going to be a celebration for the whole conference. So we've just ensured that that is the case. Kids can come down here and play, the administrators can come down here, take care of the people they need to take care of, it's going to be a wonderful event, there's going to be a lot of people at the game. I say this about all our presidents: It was a very quick conversation, and we truly view this as a celebration for the entire conference. Q. You mentioned the Conference Championship game, Kent State obviously if they had won that game would have been in. What was your thought process when Northern Illinois won the game? Was it expected that they would be in, or was there a few sweats? JON STEINBRECHER: Well, I thought they had an awful high hill to climb, let's put it that way. We were thrilled with the quality of the championship game. I mean, it was as good a championship game as there was out there. Probably it was the only overtime game we've ever had in our history. So in terms of that we were tickled to death with the way that played out. But that Sunday waiting out the rankings was quite nerve wracking. Q. When did you find out? Obviously I imagine you find out before the announcement was made. What was that relief like? JON STEINBRECHER: The conference commissioners, we get the final rankings emailed to us at 3:00 that day. So at 3:00 I walked into Bob Gennarelli's office, and said I don't know exactly where we're going, but we're in a BCS game. So there was a great deal of excitement. I was tickled to death. And then shortly thereafter I was able to reach out to Northern Illinois and talk with them, and I'll cherish that. Q. Obviously Coach Fisher got up here and talked about the legacy that his FSU team is leaving, but it's also their first BCS bowl game of that class. With what Northern has been able to do with this BCS bowl game and what they've accomplished, can you talk about the legacy they're leaving as a relatively unknown program? JON STEINBRECHER: Well, I'd say that they're known now. That's part of the growing process. It's about building your brand, and you do it by what you do on the field, not by great sound clips and all those types of things. It's going out and beating people and doing that on a consistent basis. I think if you've looked at the history of the Mid‑American Conference over the past decade or so, what we've seen is that we've had top teams that were very good, but we've not had that one program have that sustained excellence over that period of time. And that's really been the difference. You look at a Boise, they've went and kind of ran away from the field in their conference. We've not had that. We've had different champions it seems like every year. In this case you look over the past three to five years, Northern has clearly been on that trajectory and they've built that brand and they've built that history of excellence. And now the challenge will be for them to continue it and for others in our league to try and emulate that. Q. As we sit here on the last day of the year, you reflect back on 2012, what a great year it's been for the MAC, Ohio going to the Sweet 16, Kent State to the College World Series, and now NIU in the Orange Bowl, talk a little bit about that and how it's elevated your conference. JON STEINBRECHER: Well, it's interesting, we came out of the last academic year, what would that have been, the 11‑12 academic year, and we talked about that was probably the greatest year in the history of the MAC in terms of overall excellence across all of our sports programs, and you hit on a few of those highlights, and we said what can we do to top it? Well, this is certainly putting us in the right direction. We had a great men's soccer season, volleyball, some good things happened, here we are in football, we're in a BCS game. Not to many people focused on the fact that the Mid‑American Conference of the 11 FBS conferences we had the second‑highest number of academic All‑Americans of all the conferences. You have a Northern Illinois program that has the single‑highest number of academic All‑Americans of all the football programs in the country. So a lot of those things we can talk about and be proud about. It's what we continually try to focus on and I think the past few years have talked to it, across all of our sports programs, the top teams in our league are very competitive nationally. We're very proud of that. Q. How does this bowl berth‑‑ we look at some of the lower‑tier MAC schools, let's say Akron. How can they use this and point to recruits and say, look at NIU, we can do this, as well, how does that help the other schools aim for this? JON STEINBRECHER: You're known by the company you keep, so I think everybody now can point to everybody else in the league and say you can come here, you can play, you can get to one of those games, plain and simple. I imagine everyone has that in their recruiting pitch right now. Q. I'm curious what kind of feedback you got from the pointed comments you made about Georgia Tech and its waiver for 6‑7 and just a month later, what you got back about that? JON STEINBRECHER: Virtually nothing, quite frankly. It was done and over with. That was a situation, it occurred, we dealt with it, you move on. Hopefully our governance groups will deal with that and come up with a rule that we can all live with. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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