BIG 12 CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYS
July 15, 2019
Bob Bowlsby
Arlington, Texas
THE MODERATOR: At this time we would like to introduce Big 12 Commissioner, Bob Bowlsby.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thanks for all of you for being here. This is the time when all heck breaks loose, so I'm glad to have you here and I guess we can all commiserate on summer being over. We have had a tremendous year. I'm going to talk a little bit about last year and I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges in intercollegiate athletics right now, look ahead a little bit on things, all things in general and then talk a little bit about football and then I will take your questions if that's all right.
We have had a tremendous year competitively. We have had a very good year financially. I think our ADs and our Board are the most aligned that they have been in the seven years that I've been with the conference. I'm very excited about what we are doing in this building. We like having this event here, but we also enjoy the 83,000 people that we had here last year in December for the championship game. So starting and ending the season in AT&T Stadium, which I consider the grandest sports venue in the world, is a great thing for us. We're glad to be here.
In addition to setting the record for attendance at a conference championship game, our basketball tournament was the best attended in our history and also among all of the major conferences last year. We captured four national championships, Baylor women's basketball, of course, Oklahoma women's gymnastics, UT men's tennis program and Texas Tech men's outdoor track program. We had a great year. We had four other schools that competed in the finals of their sport and were runners-up.
Literally hundreds of individual coaching and student-athlete awards over the course of the year, including our second Heisman trophy in a row with Kyler Murray. Then more recently just to single out one, how about Matthew Wolfe graduating from Oklahoma State being the National Player of the Year and already getting a first tour victory on the PGA Tour after less than a month. That's great. You like to see young people succeed like that.
Financially we had a great year. We distributed $38.8 million, a 6% increase from previous years. When you include the member participation subsidy, which I think most of you are aware varies from institution to institution. They vary from $1.1 million this last year to almost $4 million. The distributions for some of our schools are clearly over $40 million, and that's plus their third tier activity. So as you know that range is from about a million dollars a school to something between 15 to 20 million dollars at the University of Texas.
Of that money we took in, we distributed about 93%. We took about 7% for conference overhead to run our championships and do the things we do. A big chunk of that was legal fees, but we are an efficient organization. I think 93% is the highest percentage of distribution in all of college athletics so we feel good about that. Our distribution has gone up 55% in the last five years. So we continue on the right kind of trend. There are a number of issues of the day that I want to spend a little bit of time talking about.
I think most of you are aware that Shane Lyons succeeded me as the chair of the Football Oversight Committee and he has done a great job of that. This year they have done things to make football a safer game. That's all good. They have taken out the tandem blocks on the kickoffs, changed the way that blindside hits are being done. I think you will hear more about that over the next two days, but let it suffice to say as great of a game as it is and the regular season during October and November we need to be constantly vigilant that we're making it a safer game so young people don't have to compromise the way they live the rest of their lives as a result of participating in a sport.
We still are front and center on follow-up from the Rice Commission Report, that is principally from the point of men's college basketball, but pours over into many year areas, the transfer rule and the transfer portal continues to be a hot topic. We recently got a report from Shane Lyons saying that the number of transfers on an institution-by-institution basis are really about the same as they have been over the last few years. Interestingly enough there are kids going to the portal and leaving with a scholarship and finding difficulty in getting another scholarship at another institution.
There are many walk-ons in the portal that are going from a non-scholarship environment trying to find a scholarship and you certainly can't blame them for that.
There's plenty of work to be done on the transfer environment, so it's going to continue to be front and center issue in the foreseeable future. Obviously we have lots of judicial and legislative challenges. Some of them at the state level, some of them at the federal level. Legalized sports gambling is getting wider and wider adoption all the time. Student-athlete bills of rights and that type of proposal are pending in several states and there's talk of a federal initiative on a student rights at some point in time. Then we have a raft of pending concussion lawsuits. It's going to be a while before those are resolved, but there are a constant tending process and they're adding plaintiffs just about every month.
This is the year that we will celebrate college football's 150th anniversary. The first game was in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers, November 6th, 1869. You will hear from Kevin Weiberg and I think you will have an opportunity to learn a little bit about the celebration and how we are going to memorialize what has been a real American phenomenon. As I said earlier, college football is a great thing. It's the best regular season in all of sports, especially the month is of October and November.
I recall vividly when we began the college football playoff as operationally what we sought to do was we wanted to make sure that the playoff was embedded as much as possible in the bowl season because the bowl system had been very good to us. We wanted to try and strengthen September as much as possible, getting critical match-ups early in the year so that you could play big games without being completely eliminated from playoff consideration, and we wanted to make sure we did everything we could to make October and November even better as a regular season than what it had been before.
As we think about the evaluation of the CFP and considerations on a look-in basis as to what the future looks like, we have to remember that the aspirations that we had at the outset have been more than achieved and it's been a success well beyond any comparison to any sort of predecessor organizations or playoff.
So we have a lot to be excited about. Particularly of interest for us is the changing environment in how people are consuming their sports. It isn't just about television, it's about live attendance as well. There are some troubling signs and the two are actually related. We are competing in some measure against the very high quality television product that we have helped to develop and as all of us are finding out, mobile consumption is getting larger and larger with each passing year, digital delivery, and wide variety of evolving platforms are right on top of us and anybody that tells you they know what the future looks like three years from now or five years from now I think is delusional because the environment is changing so rapidly. What I can tell you is we are not going to see an environment where cable television is going to see more subscribers, it doesn't seem likely. I don't think it's going away. It continues to be the manner in which most Americans receive their sports viewing, but the migration is extraordinary and the past year our conference has been very much involved with our partners at ESPN to dramatically move forward in the area of how we deliver our product to our fans.
The new digital network that the Big 12 will have will be called Big 12 Now on ESPN+. I know that Nick Dawson from ESPN is here. I don't know exactly where he is, but Nick is on site and he deserves a lot of credit for the new venture that we have. Big 12 Now will be combined with our first tier inventory which is on Fox and ESPN. ESPN will, the ESPN+ app and Big 12 Now will be available on Apple TV, on Android devices, on Roku, ChromeCast, FireTV, it's available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Oculus Go and all new Samsung TVs among a wide array of other places you can get it. So whether it's your mobile device, your iPad, your Android or some manner of consumption you have with your home 80-inch TV, this is going to be omnipresent. It's available 24/7, 365 worldwide. It doesn't diminish our reliance on ESPN and Fox as our partners with our tier 1 consumption, but all of our sports will be available on ESPN+, on Big 12 Now at one time or another. There is a Big 12 landing page that is menu-driven, very easy to use and when it's fully functional and operational, ESPN+ and Big 12 Now on ESPN+ will be carrying over 800 Big 12 events. Fox will continue to have some selection opportunities on some of our Olympic sports and some of our women's basketball sports, but as I say, 24/7, 365 worldwide.
Unlike my early days with the Big Ten Network and my early days with the Pac 12 Network, the first year of the Big Ten Network you couldn't get Ohio State football in Central Ohio, and believe me there were a few angry people when they called and said we can't get this and you need to fix our problem and the answer was we can't fix your problem. You need to talk to your cable carrier. This technology is up and running. It's easy to subscribe to and it's cutting edge.
It is very much anticipatory of what tomorrow's technology environment is going to look like, and ironically we're here in AT&T Stadium and AT&T has recently made a $100 billion investment in Time Warner and the essence of their strategy is aggregation of assets delivery by streaming. That is their bet. So it's a little ironic that we are in a building that bares the AT&T name because they're going to be, as much as they're huge in the cable distribution, they're going to be even bigger in the days ahead in digital distribution.
Obviously cable is not going to go away. It's going to continue to be a huge part of our strategy, but we are on the right side of technology. We have the right partners, and the future on this is very exciting. I couldn't be more enthusiastic and to tell you the truth, it's one of the things that I spent a lot of time on and it's one of the things that I enjoy most because it is so fascinating and it is changing so rapidly.
We have also in the last year aligned ourselves with Learfield IMG College for our exclusive corporate partners program. They are veterans, proven performers. They have built around a 30-year relationship with Phillips 66 which many of you know is the longest standing sports broadcast partnership in all of college sports. Phillips will continue to be a huge part of our corporate sponsorship program and we expect that Learfield will be able to greatly expand the relationships we have with corporate entities and we are about that project right now.
We also just completed our first year with an exclusive Big 12 network on Sirius XM. We have unprecedented high-quality exposure at the present time. We are really excited about what the future looks like. As a final forward-looking component, one of the things I think that we have done that has been a real distinguisher for the Big 12 Conference is our issues forums. We have done nine of them. Many of you have attended them. We have done everything from ESports to race in college athletics, campus violence, general issues of finance, we have done student-athlete forums. We did a forum about student-athletes as employees, and a number of other things. We have had some of the biggest people in media, victims advocates, coaches, student-athletes, educators, government and elected officials, tremendously high-profile moderators, and it's been a wonderful thing for us. I was visiting with Nicole Auerbach earlier and I said it's hard to get full, thorough coverage of a lot of the issues because the long-form consideration of it doesn't get accomplished with electronic media very often, and it's done mostly in snippets. The newspapers, you don't see the three, four, five-part stories that you once saw. So this is a way where we feel like we can do a "deep dive" on the issues and really bring people together that we know are going to disagree.
So the next forum that we will do in either October or November will be around the topic of should college athletics seek a federal antitrust exemption. We will bring together some elected officials, some experts in the area, and we will likely do it in Washington, D.C. and we will have some details on that for you a little later.
Relative to football, I would just reiterate that we're still the only one playing a full Round Robin. We play nine conference games and one required autonomy FBS opponent. Last year we were 4-3 in the postseason. We have been 13-8 over the last three seasons and have a winning record against every one of the autonomy conferences that we have played.
One particular statistic I would like you all to make note of, I want to see pencils moving and fingers tapping on this. Last year of our seven bowl games, six of the seven were held below their season averages offensively by Big 12 defenses. Six of seven offenses were held below their season average by Big 12 defenses. Contrary to popular belief there are kids that tackle in the Big 12. Thank you for noting that. Half of our games last year were decided by 8 or fewer points. That's a great thing. I think it's part of the reason why the attendance trend has largely avoided us. I think playing everybody every year allows for good traditions, and I think having teams that are very competitive makes for people that wanting to go the stadium. If you're coming into this league as four new people are this year, it's a daunting task to try and find wins. These four new coaches are all excellent veteran, seasoned coaches, but not surprisingly their teams are picked 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th in our league this year. Les Miles and Chris Klieman have both won national championships. Both are extraordinarily talented veteran head coaches. Matt Wells at Texas Tech has honed his craft and has great teams at Utah State and is a great asset to Texas Tech. Neal Brown is one of the coaches that I've been keeping an eye on. He is an outstanding young coach. I don't envy the task they have. They all have to come in and build programs. They all have lots of work to do and they all have the vision right in front of their consciousness that there aren't a lot of days off in the Big 12. Every week during the season is going to be a brutal contest and, you know, it's a zero sum game. Somebody is going to win, somebody is going to lose. They are all people that have had great success and I wish them all well and welcome them here, but the task they have is not easy. The top of our league is really good.
We have ten terrific coaches. We're going to have some great games. You will hear from the coaches and the student-athletes today and tomorrow, and I just think this will be yet another terrific football season for our conference and I couldn't be more excited to get going with it. Three quick announcements.
All of our bowl partners are here, as well as all of our media partners, so feel free to talk with any of them that you may desire. Next year we will be here at AT&T Stadium again. The dates for the Media Day are July 20 and 21 of 2020, and finally, tickets for the 2019 Dr. Pepper Big 12 Championship game go on sale this Friday at 10:00 a.m. through SeatGeek. It's time to buy some tickets and happy to take questions. Happy to respond to whatever you might have.
Q. I just wanted to ask about realignment. That was a hot topic last off-season. What is the conference's thinking about realignment and adding new members this season, along with TV revenues in the future?
BOB BOWLSBY: That would be the seventh year in a row we have been asked that question first, so congratulations. You are setting records. We have had no expansion discussion at any level. We like the ten we have. We think the full Round Robin is the right way to conduct competition and in the case of our basketball, full double Round Robin. We are distributing record revenues and we have heretofore unanticipated media opportunities and I don't expect that to be an active topic on anybody's agenda within the conference anytime in the foreseeable future.
Q. Bob, two years into the title game, hasn't cost the Big 12 a spot in the playoff. Is everything positive about it? Is there anything negative about it? Additionally, we had OU and Texas make the title game last year. From your perspective, how did that change the rivalry? Did it enhance the game in October? Detract? What's your overall thought about not just the title game but an OU-Texas title game.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thank you for the question, Barry. Nice to see you. I think it can't do anything but enhance the rivalry, although it's fair to argue that that rivalry couldn't be enhanced any more than it already is. It's pretty highly anticipated. I think this year's game with OU and Texas picked one and two in the league probably has more anticipation to it than what we may have had before and of course that is multiplied by the fact that they played in the championship game last year. I think we know it's always going to be a rematch, whether it's OU-Texas or a rematch with some other game during the course of the regular season. We believe in the one versus two model. We're the only ones that can guarantee that we're going to have our two best teams playing each other.
Having said that, I'm not naive enough to think there isn't going to be a year when our co-champions are or our first and second place teams are 9-3 and 8-4 and at that point it takes the luster off of it from a national championship game standpoint, but it isn't going to diminish the competition. I think we have had good match-ups. The OU-TCU match-up was a good one. We went through a long and considered process to bring the game back, and I think it was the right thing to do vis-a-vis the college football playoff, and so I think the right thing to do was to add a nonconference A-5 opponent. That helps us to create a portfolio that is as favorable as possible to put in front of the Selection Committee. I think those games are huge games, regardless of when they're played, October, December, any other time.
I think the championship game is the right thing at the right time for our conference. I think it is the right thing to do one versus two, even though there is some risk in that, and, you know, the fans have turned out. It was fun last year to be able to announce that we had set a record in terms of all-time conference championship attendance. So I think it's all good. Is there a potential downside? Sure there is. Name a place where there isn't some downside to go along with the upside.
Q. A year ago the Big Sky Conference adopted a similar platform. Has the Big 12 had discussions about something similar to advise schools on player suspensions regarding domestic violence or sexual assault?
BOB BOWLSBY: We have a serious misconduct policy. We put it in place, I think it was two years ago. It calls upon institutions to make sure that decisions on who plays and who evaluates those situations that they're made outside of the head coaching line, in the case of football it wouldn't be an assistant coach or the head coach. We ask that it be made outside the athletics department. So institutions are left to do what they think is right, but it's going to be made at the highest levels within the university and we feel like if that's the standard, that universities can be counted upon to go through the right processes and come to the right conclusions.
Q. Bob, could you share some of the thinking, some of the advantages for ESPN+, Big 12 Now versus third tier rights? They were once seen as an advantage for Big 12 schools, something that other conferences didn't have.
BOB BOWLSBY: I think they're is still an advantage. I think we believe that the ESPN+ platform embodied in Big 12 Now is the right thing technologically. The product has evolved to the point where it's very high quality and very reliable in terms of your ability to get on and get it. While all of our schools were doing their own thing, I think we coalesced around the concept that what MLBAM and ESPN+ were doing was something that, one, could be aggregated and, two, could make the sum of the parts bigger than the sum of the parts.
We just think it was the right time to do it and frankly part of it is alignment as we go forward. We will have eight of our schools aligned. OU has a contract with Fox that goes I think another four years, and then the Longhorn Network is a little further out. So part of the process is aligning and putting ourselves in position for the future environment.
Q. Bob, has your position on playoff expansion evolved at all going into the season? Do you feel like the sport is headed toward that at some point?
BOB BOWLSBY: I'm looking at the back row and been looking at Kirby Hocutt and Bill Hancock. Bill is anxiously awaiting my answer to this. He knows that I'm capable of going off the reservation. We have had a lot of discussions. We are evaluating the current environment, which as I stated earlier I think we all agree is superior to any of the predecessor organizations but I'm not going to get into any of the specifics of what we're talking about. We have had some conversations. We're going to have some more. We will take a look back and we will take a look forward, and eventually we will have some recommendations. In the interim we're just not going to spend anytime talking about what our discussions are about.
Q. On the transfer portal with all the angst from coaches about that, how do you think they want to tweak that rule or whether they want to just kill it, and if it's all about the kids what's wrong with a one-time transfer with immediate eligibility for athletes?
BOB BOWLSBY: There is no short answer to that. So let me give you the long answer or what I consider to be the gospel according to Bowlsby. I think we're sending a bad message to kids that they can have a bad practice or a bad week of practice and just decide one day they're going to walk out and put their name in the portal without talking to their coaches. I don't think that was every envisioned and it shouldn't work that way. It's not that way in your private life or your business life and I just think we're sending a bad message. Having said that, we wouldn't be in this situation if we hadn't had coaches that were saying, well you can transfer to this institution A, but you can't go to B or C, and you can't go to D or they embargo it all together. So I think it probably was avoidable, but we are where we are now. The transfer numbers are not larger than they have been in the past. It's a combination of kids looking for scholarships that previously had them and one of the things that's happening is kids are putting their names in the portal and finding that they don't have a scholarship home or they don't have a home at a place they thought they could go to. So it's not ideal for a lot of reasons.
If I were the benevolent dictator and had an opportunity to wave my hand and make this environment the way it should be, the data could not be any clearer: After a transfer, sitting a year is good academically. There isn't any question. It's better in some sports than it is in others, but I sit on the National Letter of Intent Appeal Board and we almost always have a sick relative or some family situation that needs to be taken care of. This year in residence would give you the opportunity to take care of that. What I would advocate that's different from the current situation is I would advocate that you can get that year back. So if you stay there and go through the process, you would be able to not forfeit that year, but sit a year, get acclimated, move through your career and if you want that year back, either as a graduate transfer or as a fifth year player you can stay on scholarship and participate. I think that's the model that works. By the way I would do it in all sports.
I think we have made a mistake saying we're going to do this in some sports and not in others. I would advocate for it to be in all sports.
Q. Where are you and the Big 12 on football coaches making participation reports mandatory each week and how far down the road do you think this is from becoming reality?
BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it's hard to say how far down the road it is. We have had conversations with our coaches and we have had conversations with our athletic directors. Frankly, I don't know that we want to do anything that encourages gambling, not that that necessarily does. But the replicating what the NFL does with 32 teams is very different than replicating it across 700 schools that play football or 200 that play in Division I. I could make a case for doing an announcement. I couldn't make a case for a head coach being out in front of it and having to deal with it two days before the game or a day before the game.
Obviously any situation like that needs to have credibility to it. I don't think we're going to FERPA regulations and HIPAA regulations would not allow us to be specific about injuries, but availability reporting, the ACC has been doing availability reporting in the past. They're not doing it right now, but they have in the past. I think theirs was a three-tiered available possible, and not available, something along those lines. The case for doing it is really a protectionist case, for lack of a better term. There will be lots of people around who are talking to assistant trainers or kids on the football team or friends in the dorm or others that may think have information. A mandatory reporting would eliminate people skulking around trying to find a leak that could give them inside information, so there could be a case made for it. I would say our coaches aren't wildly enthusiastic about it but if they got forced into it, I think they would say we use a three-tier approach, we do a media relations after practice on Thursday or something like that and then everybody has to agree that you're going to stick to it. You can't say that they're out and they show up playing on Saturday. I could capably argue on either side of the issue and as more and more states adopt gambling policies we're going to have to deal with it.
Q. You have talked about this but your conference champion is going to play at least 7 power 5 games a year to where another might play 9. Do you have any thoughts in trying to normalize that across all 45 conferences or is that completely out of your hands?
BOB BOWLSBY: It's not completely out of my hand because I sit on the Management Committee of the CFP and I suppose it's something we could take up. But early on in the process we determined that we were going to leave conference scheduling to the autonomy of those conferences and they would have the opportunity to decide their champion in the manner in which they want to decide it. If it were left entirely up to me, I wouldn't make any stipulations about how many games you have to play to decide your conference championship, I would advocate for a policy that says everybody plays ten autonomy game and you can play eight conference games or seven or nine, whatever you want to do. But everybody has to play ten autonomy games and that way the portfolio looks relatively the same. We all know there is a fair amount of variance from the top to the bottom of even the FBS, even that's not ideal. But that's what I would advocate for.
I don't advocate for forcing a model on to a conference. I think that's -- that should be left to the conference to decide how they determine their champion but the structures should be evaluate by the Selection Committee.
Q. You made it clear that the teams can play defense in the Big 12. How do you continue to communicate to the College Football Playoff Committee that this is not a one-sided league to better position your teams?
BOB BOWLSBY: I think they're very mindful of it. I don't worry much about the Selection Committee. They're meticulous in the way they go about their work. The way it gets characterized in the media sometimes and by analysts that are doing the games, that is probably more where the public mindset comes from. Then the other thing is we score a lot of points. We have some very high-powered offenses and I think that equates to well they don't play any defense and that's why I was pointed in making the comment that I made. We do play defense. We pay attention to it, but we have some very talented offenses that contribute to that.
Q. Commissioner, you mentioned the domestic violence policy that the Big 12 put in place. How does it work specifically with the case against Pooka Williams Jr., the Kansas football player who was given a one-game suspension against a non-power 5 opponent for battery charge against an 18 year old female?
BOB BOWLSBY: First of all, I don't presume to know all the details about that. It's not a domestic violence policy. It's a serious misconduct policy, so it covers domestic violence but also a wide variety of other things. The Kansas process followed what our misconduct policy describes and that is that the decision is made outside of the athletics department and within university higher administration. That's the level at which that decision was made.
THE MODERATOR: Commissioner, thank you very much.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thank you all for being here.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports
July 15, 2019
Bob Bowlsby
Arlington, Texas
THE MODERATOR: At this time we would like to introduce Big 12 Commissioner, Bob Bowlsby.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thanks for all of you for being here. This is the time when all heck breaks loose, so I'm glad to have you here and I guess we can all commiserate on summer being over. We have had a tremendous year. I'm going to talk a little bit about last year and I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges in intercollegiate athletics right now, look ahead a little bit on things, all things in general and then talk a little bit about football and then I will take your questions if that's all right.
We have had a tremendous year competitively. We have had a very good year financially. I think our ADs and our Board are the most aligned that they have been in the seven years that I've been with the conference. I'm very excited about what we are doing in this building. We like having this event here, but we also enjoy the 83,000 people that we had here last year in December for the championship game. So starting and ending the season in AT&T Stadium, which I consider the grandest sports venue in the world, is a great thing for us. We're glad to be here.
In addition to setting the record for attendance at a conference championship game, our basketball tournament was the best attended in our history and also among all of the major conferences last year. We captured four national championships, Baylor women's basketball, of course, Oklahoma women's gymnastics, UT men's tennis program and Texas Tech men's outdoor track program. We had a great year. We had four other schools that competed in the finals of their sport and were runners-up.
Literally hundreds of individual coaching and student-athlete awards over the course of the year, including our second Heisman trophy in a row with Kyler Murray. Then more recently just to single out one, how about Matthew Wolfe graduating from Oklahoma State being the National Player of the Year and already getting a first tour victory on the PGA Tour after less than a month. That's great. You like to see young people succeed like that.
Financially we had a great year. We distributed $38.8 million, a 6% increase from previous years. When you include the member participation subsidy, which I think most of you are aware varies from institution to institution. They vary from $1.1 million this last year to almost $4 million. The distributions for some of our schools are clearly over $40 million, and that's plus their third tier activity. So as you know that range is from about a million dollars a school to something between 15 to 20 million dollars at the University of Texas.
Of that money we took in, we distributed about 93%. We took about 7% for conference overhead to run our championships and do the things we do. A big chunk of that was legal fees, but we are an efficient organization. I think 93% is the highest percentage of distribution in all of college athletics so we feel good about that. Our distribution has gone up 55% in the last five years. So we continue on the right kind of trend. There are a number of issues of the day that I want to spend a little bit of time talking about.
I think most of you are aware that Shane Lyons succeeded me as the chair of the Football Oversight Committee and he has done a great job of that. This year they have done things to make football a safer game. That's all good. They have taken out the tandem blocks on the kickoffs, changed the way that blindside hits are being done. I think you will hear more about that over the next two days, but let it suffice to say as great of a game as it is and the regular season during October and November we need to be constantly vigilant that we're making it a safer game so young people don't have to compromise the way they live the rest of their lives as a result of participating in a sport.
We still are front and center on follow-up from the Rice Commission Report, that is principally from the point of men's college basketball, but pours over into many year areas, the transfer rule and the transfer portal continues to be a hot topic. We recently got a report from Shane Lyons saying that the number of transfers on an institution-by-institution basis are really about the same as they have been over the last few years. Interestingly enough there are kids going to the portal and leaving with a scholarship and finding difficulty in getting another scholarship at another institution.
There are many walk-ons in the portal that are going from a non-scholarship environment trying to find a scholarship and you certainly can't blame them for that.
There's plenty of work to be done on the transfer environment, so it's going to continue to be front and center issue in the foreseeable future. Obviously we have lots of judicial and legislative challenges. Some of them at the state level, some of them at the federal level. Legalized sports gambling is getting wider and wider adoption all the time. Student-athlete bills of rights and that type of proposal are pending in several states and there's talk of a federal initiative on a student rights at some point in time. Then we have a raft of pending concussion lawsuits. It's going to be a while before those are resolved, but there are a constant tending process and they're adding plaintiffs just about every month.
This is the year that we will celebrate college football's 150th anniversary. The first game was in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers, November 6th, 1869. You will hear from Kevin Weiberg and I think you will have an opportunity to learn a little bit about the celebration and how we are going to memorialize what has been a real American phenomenon. As I said earlier, college football is a great thing. It's the best regular season in all of sports, especially the month is of October and November.
I recall vividly when we began the college football playoff as operationally what we sought to do was we wanted to make sure that the playoff was embedded as much as possible in the bowl season because the bowl system had been very good to us. We wanted to try and strengthen September as much as possible, getting critical match-ups early in the year so that you could play big games without being completely eliminated from playoff consideration, and we wanted to make sure we did everything we could to make October and November even better as a regular season than what it had been before.
As we think about the evaluation of the CFP and considerations on a look-in basis as to what the future looks like, we have to remember that the aspirations that we had at the outset have been more than achieved and it's been a success well beyond any comparison to any sort of predecessor organizations or playoff.
So we have a lot to be excited about. Particularly of interest for us is the changing environment in how people are consuming their sports. It isn't just about television, it's about live attendance as well. There are some troubling signs and the two are actually related. We are competing in some measure against the very high quality television product that we have helped to develop and as all of us are finding out, mobile consumption is getting larger and larger with each passing year, digital delivery, and wide variety of evolving platforms are right on top of us and anybody that tells you they know what the future looks like three years from now or five years from now I think is delusional because the environment is changing so rapidly. What I can tell you is we are not going to see an environment where cable television is going to see more subscribers, it doesn't seem likely. I don't think it's going away. It continues to be the manner in which most Americans receive their sports viewing, but the migration is extraordinary and the past year our conference has been very much involved with our partners at ESPN to dramatically move forward in the area of how we deliver our product to our fans.
The new digital network that the Big 12 will have will be called Big 12 Now on ESPN+. I know that Nick Dawson from ESPN is here. I don't know exactly where he is, but Nick is on site and he deserves a lot of credit for the new venture that we have. Big 12 Now will be combined with our first tier inventory which is on Fox and ESPN. ESPN will, the ESPN+ app and Big 12 Now will be available on Apple TV, on Android devices, on Roku, ChromeCast, FireTV, it's available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Oculus Go and all new Samsung TVs among a wide array of other places you can get it. So whether it's your mobile device, your iPad, your Android or some manner of consumption you have with your home 80-inch TV, this is going to be omnipresent. It's available 24/7, 365 worldwide. It doesn't diminish our reliance on ESPN and Fox as our partners with our tier 1 consumption, but all of our sports will be available on ESPN+, on Big 12 Now at one time or another. There is a Big 12 landing page that is menu-driven, very easy to use and when it's fully functional and operational, ESPN+ and Big 12 Now on ESPN+ will be carrying over 800 Big 12 events. Fox will continue to have some selection opportunities on some of our Olympic sports and some of our women's basketball sports, but as I say, 24/7, 365 worldwide.
Unlike my early days with the Big Ten Network and my early days with the Pac 12 Network, the first year of the Big Ten Network you couldn't get Ohio State football in Central Ohio, and believe me there were a few angry people when they called and said we can't get this and you need to fix our problem and the answer was we can't fix your problem. You need to talk to your cable carrier. This technology is up and running. It's easy to subscribe to and it's cutting edge.
It is very much anticipatory of what tomorrow's technology environment is going to look like, and ironically we're here in AT&T Stadium and AT&T has recently made a $100 billion investment in Time Warner and the essence of their strategy is aggregation of assets delivery by streaming. That is their bet. So it's a little ironic that we are in a building that bares the AT&T name because they're going to be, as much as they're huge in the cable distribution, they're going to be even bigger in the days ahead in digital distribution.
Obviously cable is not going to go away. It's going to continue to be a huge part of our strategy, but we are on the right side of technology. We have the right partners, and the future on this is very exciting. I couldn't be more enthusiastic and to tell you the truth, it's one of the things that I spent a lot of time on and it's one of the things that I enjoy most because it is so fascinating and it is changing so rapidly.
We have also in the last year aligned ourselves with Learfield IMG College for our exclusive corporate partners program. They are veterans, proven performers. They have built around a 30-year relationship with Phillips 66 which many of you know is the longest standing sports broadcast partnership in all of college sports. Phillips will continue to be a huge part of our corporate sponsorship program and we expect that Learfield will be able to greatly expand the relationships we have with corporate entities and we are about that project right now.
We also just completed our first year with an exclusive Big 12 network on Sirius XM. We have unprecedented high-quality exposure at the present time. We are really excited about what the future looks like. As a final forward-looking component, one of the things I think that we have done that has been a real distinguisher for the Big 12 Conference is our issues forums. We have done nine of them. Many of you have attended them. We have done everything from ESports to race in college athletics, campus violence, general issues of finance, we have done student-athlete forums. We did a forum about student-athletes as employees, and a number of other things. We have had some of the biggest people in media, victims advocates, coaches, student-athletes, educators, government and elected officials, tremendously high-profile moderators, and it's been a wonderful thing for us. I was visiting with Nicole Auerbach earlier and I said it's hard to get full, thorough coverage of a lot of the issues because the long-form consideration of it doesn't get accomplished with electronic media very often, and it's done mostly in snippets. The newspapers, you don't see the three, four, five-part stories that you once saw. So this is a way where we feel like we can do a "deep dive" on the issues and really bring people together that we know are going to disagree.
So the next forum that we will do in either October or November will be around the topic of should college athletics seek a federal antitrust exemption. We will bring together some elected officials, some experts in the area, and we will likely do it in Washington, D.C. and we will have some details on that for you a little later.
Relative to football, I would just reiterate that we're still the only one playing a full Round Robin. We play nine conference games and one required autonomy FBS opponent. Last year we were 4-3 in the postseason. We have been 13-8 over the last three seasons and have a winning record against every one of the autonomy conferences that we have played.
One particular statistic I would like you all to make note of, I want to see pencils moving and fingers tapping on this. Last year of our seven bowl games, six of the seven were held below their season averages offensively by Big 12 defenses. Six of seven offenses were held below their season average by Big 12 defenses. Contrary to popular belief there are kids that tackle in the Big 12. Thank you for noting that. Half of our games last year were decided by 8 or fewer points. That's a great thing. I think it's part of the reason why the attendance trend has largely avoided us. I think playing everybody every year allows for good traditions, and I think having teams that are very competitive makes for people that wanting to go the stadium. If you're coming into this league as four new people are this year, it's a daunting task to try and find wins. These four new coaches are all excellent veteran, seasoned coaches, but not surprisingly their teams are picked 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th in our league this year. Les Miles and Chris Klieman have both won national championships. Both are extraordinarily talented veteran head coaches. Matt Wells at Texas Tech has honed his craft and has great teams at Utah State and is a great asset to Texas Tech. Neal Brown is one of the coaches that I've been keeping an eye on. He is an outstanding young coach. I don't envy the task they have. They all have to come in and build programs. They all have lots of work to do and they all have the vision right in front of their consciousness that there aren't a lot of days off in the Big 12. Every week during the season is going to be a brutal contest and, you know, it's a zero sum game. Somebody is going to win, somebody is going to lose. They are all people that have had great success and I wish them all well and welcome them here, but the task they have is not easy. The top of our league is really good.
We have ten terrific coaches. We're going to have some great games. You will hear from the coaches and the student-athletes today and tomorrow, and I just think this will be yet another terrific football season for our conference and I couldn't be more excited to get going with it. Three quick announcements.
All of our bowl partners are here, as well as all of our media partners, so feel free to talk with any of them that you may desire. Next year we will be here at AT&T Stadium again. The dates for the Media Day are July 20 and 21 of 2020, and finally, tickets for the 2019 Dr. Pepper Big 12 Championship game go on sale this Friday at 10:00 a.m. through SeatGeek. It's time to buy some tickets and happy to take questions. Happy to respond to whatever you might have.
Q. I just wanted to ask about realignment. That was a hot topic last off-season. What is the conference's thinking about realignment and adding new members this season, along with TV revenues in the future?
BOB BOWLSBY: That would be the seventh year in a row we have been asked that question first, so congratulations. You are setting records. We have had no expansion discussion at any level. We like the ten we have. We think the full Round Robin is the right way to conduct competition and in the case of our basketball, full double Round Robin. We are distributing record revenues and we have heretofore unanticipated media opportunities and I don't expect that to be an active topic on anybody's agenda within the conference anytime in the foreseeable future.
Q. Bob, two years into the title game, hasn't cost the Big 12 a spot in the playoff. Is everything positive about it? Is there anything negative about it? Additionally, we had OU and Texas make the title game last year. From your perspective, how did that change the rivalry? Did it enhance the game in October? Detract? What's your overall thought about not just the title game but an OU-Texas title game.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thank you for the question, Barry. Nice to see you. I think it can't do anything but enhance the rivalry, although it's fair to argue that that rivalry couldn't be enhanced any more than it already is. It's pretty highly anticipated. I think this year's game with OU and Texas picked one and two in the league probably has more anticipation to it than what we may have had before and of course that is multiplied by the fact that they played in the championship game last year. I think we know it's always going to be a rematch, whether it's OU-Texas or a rematch with some other game during the course of the regular season. We believe in the one versus two model. We're the only ones that can guarantee that we're going to have our two best teams playing each other.
Having said that, I'm not naive enough to think there isn't going to be a year when our co-champions are or our first and second place teams are 9-3 and 8-4 and at that point it takes the luster off of it from a national championship game standpoint, but it isn't going to diminish the competition. I think we have had good match-ups. The OU-TCU match-up was a good one. We went through a long and considered process to bring the game back, and I think it was the right thing to do vis-a-vis the college football playoff, and so I think the right thing to do was to add a nonconference A-5 opponent. That helps us to create a portfolio that is as favorable as possible to put in front of the Selection Committee. I think those games are huge games, regardless of when they're played, October, December, any other time.
I think the championship game is the right thing at the right time for our conference. I think it is the right thing to do one versus two, even though there is some risk in that, and, you know, the fans have turned out. It was fun last year to be able to announce that we had set a record in terms of all-time conference championship attendance. So I think it's all good. Is there a potential downside? Sure there is. Name a place where there isn't some downside to go along with the upside.
Q. A year ago the Big Sky Conference adopted a similar platform. Has the Big 12 had discussions about something similar to advise schools on player suspensions regarding domestic violence or sexual assault?
BOB BOWLSBY: We have a serious misconduct policy. We put it in place, I think it was two years ago. It calls upon institutions to make sure that decisions on who plays and who evaluates those situations that they're made outside of the head coaching line, in the case of football it wouldn't be an assistant coach or the head coach. We ask that it be made outside the athletics department. So institutions are left to do what they think is right, but it's going to be made at the highest levels within the university and we feel like if that's the standard, that universities can be counted upon to go through the right processes and come to the right conclusions.
Q. Bob, could you share some of the thinking, some of the advantages for ESPN+, Big 12 Now versus third tier rights? They were once seen as an advantage for Big 12 schools, something that other conferences didn't have.
BOB BOWLSBY: I think they're is still an advantage. I think we believe that the ESPN+ platform embodied in Big 12 Now is the right thing technologically. The product has evolved to the point where it's very high quality and very reliable in terms of your ability to get on and get it. While all of our schools were doing their own thing, I think we coalesced around the concept that what MLBAM and ESPN+ were doing was something that, one, could be aggregated and, two, could make the sum of the parts bigger than the sum of the parts.
We just think it was the right time to do it and frankly part of it is alignment as we go forward. We will have eight of our schools aligned. OU has a contract with Fox that goes I think another four years, and then the Longhorn Network is a little further out. So part of the process is aligning and putting ourselves in position for the future environment.
Q. Bob, has your position on playoff expansion evolved at all going into the season? Do you feel like the sport is headed toward that at some point?
BOB BOWLSBY: I'm looking at the back row and been looking at Kirby Hocutt and Bill Hancock. Bill is anxiously awaiting my answer to this. He knows that I'm capable of going off the reservation. We have had a lot of discussions. We are evaluating the current environment, which as I stated earlier I think we all agree is superior to any of the predecessor organizations but I'm not going to get into any of the specifics of what we're talking about. We have had some conversations. We're going to have some more. We will take a look back and we will take a look forward, and eventually we will have some recommendations. In the interim we're just not going to spend anytime talking about what our discussions are about.
Q. On the transfer portal with all the angst from coaches about that, how do you think they want to tweak that rule or whether they want to just kill it, and if it's all about the kids what's wrong with a one-time transfer with immediate eligibility for athletes?
BOB BOWLSBY: There is no short answer to that. So let me give you the long answer or what I consider to be the gospel according to Bowlsby. I think we're sending a bad message to kids that they can have a bad practice or a bad week of practice and just decide one day they're going to walk out and put their name in the portal without talking to their coaches. I don't think that was every envisioned and it shouldn't work that way. It's not that way in your private life or your business life and I just think we're sending a bad message. Having said that, we wouldn't be in this situation if we hadn't had coaches that were saying, well you can transfer to this institution A, but you can't go to B or C, and you can't go to D or they embargo it all together. So I think it probably was avoidable, but we are where we are now. The transfer numbers are not larger than they have been in the past. It's a combination of kids looking for scholarships that previously had them and one of the things that's happening is kids are putting their names in the portal and finding that they don't have a scholarship home or they don't have a home at a place they thought they could go to. So it's not ideal for a lot of reasons.
If I were the benevolent dictator and had an opportunity to wave my hand and make this environment the way it should be, the data could not be any clearer: After a transfer, sitting a year is good academically. There isn't any question. It's better in some sports than it is in others, but I sit on the National Letter of Intent Appeal Board and we almost always have a sick relative or some family situation that needs to be taken care of. This year in residence would give you the opportunity to take care of that. What I would advocate that's different from the current situation is I would advocate that you can get that year back. So if you stay there and go through the process, you would be able to not forfeit that year, but sit a year, get acclimated, move through your career and if you want that year back, either as a graduate transfer or as a fifth year player you can stay on scholarship and participate. I think that's the model that works. By the way I would do it in all sports.
I think we have made a mistake saying we're going to do this in some sports and not in others. I would advocate for it to be in all sports.
Q. Where are you and the Big 12 on football coaches making participation reports mandatory each week and how far down the road do you think this is from becoming reality?
BOB BOWLSBY: Well, it's hard to say how far down the road it is. We have had conversations with our coaches and we have had conversations with our athletic directors. Frankly, I don't know that we want to do anything that encourages gambling, not that that necessarily does. But the replicating what the NFL does with 32 teams is very different than replicating it across 700 schools that play football or 200 that play in Division I. I could make a case for doing an announcement. I couldn't make a case for a head coach being out in front of it and having to deal with it two days before the game or a day before the game.
Obviously any situation like that needs to have credibility to it. I don't think we're going to FERPA regulations and HIPAA regulations would not allow us to be specific about injuries, but availability reporting, the ACC has been doing availability reporting in the past. They're not doing it right now, but they have in the past. I think theirs was a three-tiered available possible, and not available, something along those lines. The case for doing it is really a protectionist case, for lack of a better term. There will be lots of people around who are talking to assistant trainers or kids on the football team or friends in the dorm or others that may think have information. A mandatory reporting would eliminate people skulking around trying to find a leak that could give them inside information, so there could be a case made for it. I would say our coaches aren't wildly enthusiastic about it but if they got forced into it, I think they would say we use a three-tier approach, we do a media relations after practice on Thursday or something like that and then everybody has to agree that you're going to stick to it. You can't say that they're out and they show up playing on Saturday. I could capably argue on either side of the issue and as more and more states adopt gambling policies we're going to have to deal with it.
Q. You have talked about this but your conference champion is going to play at least 7 power 5 games a year to where another might play 9. Do you have any thoughts in trying to normalize that across all 45 conferences or is that completely out of your hands?
BOB BOWLSBY: It's not completely out of my hand because I sit on the Management Committee of the CFP and I suppose it's something we could take up. But early on in the process we determined that we were going to leave conference scheduling to the autonomy of those conferences and they would have the opportunity to decide their champion in the manner in which they want to decide it. If it were left entirely up to me, I wouldn't make any stipulations about how many games you have to play to decide your conference championship, I would advocate for a policy that says everybody plays ten autonomy game and you can play eight conference games or seven or nine, whatever you want to do. But everybody has to play ten autonomy games and that way the portfolio looks relatively the same. We all know there is a fair amount of variance from the top to the bottom of even the FBS, even that's not ideal. But that's what I would advocate for.
I don't advocate for forcing a model on to a conference. I think that's -- that should be left to the conference to decide how they determine their champion but the structures should be evaluate by the Selection Committee.
Q. You made it clear that the teams can play defense in the Big 12. How do you continue to communicate to the College Football Playoff Committee that this is not a one-sided league to better position your teams?
BOB BOWLSBY: I think they're very mindful of it. I don't worry much about the Selection Committee. They're meticulous in the way they go about their work. The way it gets characterized in the media sometimes and by analysts that are doing the games, that is probably more where the public mindset comes from. Then the other thing is we score a lot of points. We have some very high-powered offenses and I think that equates to well they don't play any defense and that's why I was pointed in making the comment that I made. We do play defense. We pay attention to it, but we have some very talented offenses that contribute to that.
Q. Commissioner, you mentioned the domestic violence policy that the Big 12 put in place. How does it work specifically with the case against Pooka Williams Jr., the Kansas football player who was given a one-game suspension against a non-power 5 opponent for battery charge against an 18 year old female?
BOB BOWLSBY: First of all, I don't presume to know all the details about that. It's not a domestic violence policy. It's a serious misconduct policy, so it covers domestic violence but also a wide variety of other things. The Kansas process followed what our misconduct policy describes and that is that the decision is made outside of the athletics department and within university higher administration. That's the level at which that decision was made.
THE MODERATOR: Commissioner, thank you very much.
BOB BOWLSBY: Thank you all for being here.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports
