Thank you Verne (Lundquist), for the extraordinarily kind introduction. We are delighted to have you hosting our Football Media Day. Verne is a dear friend of many years, and as we all know, he is a national treasure. His iconic calls in a variety of sports will live forever in the sports pantheon. And as well as being one of our greatest announcers, a Hall of Fame announcer, Verne is an incredibly warm and gracious human being – the Verne you have seen on air for many years is the Verne you will always see in person. We welcome him and his lovely wife Nancy and look forward to the sessions with Verne and our coaches and players that will follow my address.
We thank Napa Auto Parts, which is sponsoring our media days, and its Connecticut President and General Manager, Geoff Watson. We are grateful for and delighted with their support of our Conference and of college football.
I want to recognize a giant of the game who passed away earlier this year. The great Wayne Hardin coached at both Navy and Temple and was extremely successful at both places. He coached Roger Staubach at Navy and Steve Joachim and Joe Klecko at Temple. We were privileged to have Wayne conduct the coin toss at our football championship game last year between, fittingly, Navy and Temple.
I would like to take a moment to recognize some important individuals in our Conference. Renu Khator, who ably chairs our Conference’s Board of Directors, has led the University of Houston to new heights, and David Rudd, our vice chair, has done a great job at the University of Memphis. Kudos to our outgoing chair, Susan Herbst of UConn, who did a terrific job leading this Conference, and who will continue her work as our Conference’s member of the NCAA Board of Directors. She replaces John Hitt of UCF in that role, and John did a wonderful job representing us in Indianapolis over his four-year term. I would be remiss in not also recognizing Gerald Turner, the President of SMU, who represents our Conference on the College Football Playoff Board of Managers, and who, as our past chair, was instrumental in building the foundation of the Conference.
Mark Harlan of USF serves as our Athletic Director Chair, and Mark is one of the finest young ADs in the country. He has big shoes to fill, as East Carolina’s Jeff Compher did a fine job as chair and provided inspired leadership for our league and wise counsel for me, and no doubt Mark will do the very same.
Tom Bowen of Memphis serves as our AD vice chair, and has already served the Conference in many roles over the years, including as our AD representative to the College Football Playoff. Tom is doing a remarkable job building Memphis into a powerhouse in all sports.
Our presidents, athletic directors, SWAs and FARs are the best in the business, and without their vision and commitment, this Conference would not be where it is, could not have achieved so much success so soon. I enjoy working with them and look forward to many productive years ahead.
I want to thank my outstanding staff led by Donna DeMarco, whom I recently named our Chief Operating Officer, Scott Draper and Michael Costa, for all their hard and intelligent work. Special thanks to Bernie Cafarelli, Chuck Sullivan and Catherine Carmignani and the entire communications and digital staff for organizing this great event.
I would like to congratulate Scott Strasemeier and Stacie Michaud from Navy, who were recognized by the Football Writers Association of America as one of the top media relations departments in the nation.
A special welcome to Bill Hancock, who has done a phenomenal job with the College Football Playoff, making it a premier event instantly. We are also pleased to partner with and support the CFP Foundation’s Extra Yard for Teacher’s Initiative again this year. It is a worthy cause and has been championed by Bill and the CFP.
We appreciate the attendance each year of our guests from the college and media communities. I wish I could name all of them but I must limit myself to a handful.
We thank ESPN, our primary rights holder, for its great promotion and coverage of our league. The Thursday and Friday schedules especially provide us unprecedented exposure. John Skipper and Burke Magnus at ESPN have championed us and our P6 campaign. Pete Derzis, who oversees all of ESPN college sports, is a huge supporter of the Conference.
Our friends at CBS Sports and CBS Sports Network are here. Dan (Weinberg), Bess (Barnes), Greg (Trager), Mariel (Brady), we thank them and we thank Sean McManus and David Berson for their strong support and their enthusiastic and outstanding coverage of our league. They provide us with additional exposure and platforms that permit us to build our brand.
Our consultants at Wasserman, Dean Jordan and Tag Garson, are helping us frame our television and media strategy in an increasingly complex but promising media environment. IMG works closely with us to develop sponsorships for our league which are true partnerships in building our brand. We welcome IMG’s president of college sports, Tim Pernetti and also Josh Reese, who oversees our sponsorships.
I am again pleased to welcome our bowl and other partners who provide such strong support, and also our friends in the media, who have treated us fairly, and have given us the opportunity to make our case.
I hope all our guests enjoyed the clambake last night, unquestionably the highlight of our media days. And I believe that we set another record for lobster tonnage consumed!
Before talking about our conference’s outstanding football, in which we all take such pride, I want to recognize the outgoing chair of the UConn Board of Trustees, Larry McHugh, who has done a great job for UConn in that role and has been a strong supporter of the American Athletic Conference. Larry holds a special place for me as he was my high school football coach many years ago. As the coaches assembled here have done and are doing with their student-athletes, Coach McHugh taught my teammates and me life lessons, including the value of hard work and dedication. You never forget your high school football coach, and you never forget what he taught you. As for the game itself, Coach McHugh always talked about the essence of football being blocking and tackling, and although I was a quarterback, I was not immune from the blocking and tackling drills, I can assure you. But his words remain true today, and the coaches who stress fundamentals remain the most successful.
This is a critical period for The American Athletic Conference, and we approach it with optimism and confidence. The conference is clearly on the cusp of great things, having already accomplished so much in our relatively brief history. We have issued a strategic plan that will guide our efforts to be and remain a Power6 conference, that will provide us with benchmarks to measure our progress, that sets forth our priorities and emphasizes student-athlete health and well-being, and providing them with educational and athletic opportunities at the highest levels. We recently added Wichita State University as a basketball and Olympic sports member, and we welcome them. They are a great addition and add stature to our league.
When this conference was formed in 2013, we were not sure what we had, what our impact on the national collegiate scene would be, but we were confident, determined and hopeful, and, despite the headwinds we faced and the naysayers, we had good reason to be optimistic. We have schools that desired to compete at the highest levels, that have flourished in a strong, competitive, dynamic conference that receives terrific media exposure. Our schools have met with success and have built a Power6 brand. I had no doubt they would – in football, in men’s and women’s basketball, in Olympic sports. Neither did our Presidents and Athletic Directors have any doubt despite the obstacles. We were not about to settle for anything less than excellence. Vince Lombardi once said that if you do not settle for anything less than the best, you will be amazed at what you can do, amazed at how much you can rise.
Football is our focus today. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Temple, our 2016 football champion, and Navy, our west division football champion. We had a memorable season in 2016, and it will only get better. I am extremely pleased and gratified by our success over the past four years because it was not predetermined, it was the result of hard and intelligent work by our administrators, coaches and, of course, their outstanding, determined players. Owing to television deals that were cut before we achieved prominence, we currently lack the financial resources of many of the other P6 universities, but we have the will and we have the ability.
We also have a pedigree, we have six schools that were BCS or old Southwest Conference schools - and joining these schools with others that were yearning to compete at the highest level has created a powerful dynamic. This competitive dynamic has resulted in great success – two major New Year’s bowl wins, 19 P6/Notre Dame wins in football over the past two years, wins over Penn State, Notre Dame, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, Florida State, Louisville twice, Pitt twice, Syracuse, VA Tech, Miami, North Carolina, NC State, Purdue, the list goes on. 32 games with television viewership of 1M or more viewers in the past two years, and our football championship game on ABC the past two years. Not to mention a men’s basketball championship in 2014, three women’s basketball championships, including the remarkable UConn 111-win streak, and individual Olympic sports champions. A Power6 resume indeed!
We have had numerous top NFL draft picks, numerous national award winners, and numerous highlights in our four-year history. We had 15 players selected in the 2017 NFL draft, 5
th among FBS conferences. Zay Jones of ECU set the NCAA season and career receptions records, and broke the record set by ECU’s Justin Hardy a few years before. The credit for all this goes, of course, to our excellent players who defeat heavy odds in the form of the immensely challenging schedules we play, to our outstanding coaches who recruit intelligently and who coach brilliantly, and to our administrators who hire and support those coaches and who intelligently marshal our resources. We have a first-rate roster of coaches, and we welcome five new coaches, Charlie Strong at USF, Major Applewhite at Houston, Randy Edsall at UConn, Luke Fickell at Cincinnati, and Geoff Collins at Temple. Any anxiety over so many new coaches is easily dispelled by our conference’s phenomenal record of hiring top assistants and established veterans who have invariably gone on to great success in our league. These coaches will no doubt do the same and join our incumbent coaches to comprise as strong a group as any in college football. I would be remiss if I failed to mention our outstanding officiating crews ably led by Terry McAulay. They do a great job and are a great group.
Our next step is critical. We want to be accepted eventually as an autonomy P6 Conference because we believe we are already a P6 conference, and correspondingly we want and need a TV/media deal that recognizes what we have achieved and affords us the resources to continue to build the Conference and continue to compete successfully with the other P6 conferences in the ever-competitive college football environment. And make no mistake, we do not want simply to compete, we want to win! I again channel Vince Lombardi; who, at his first meeting with his Packers team in 1959, said “we will relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not achieve it because it is unattainable. But in the process we will achieve excellence.”
That is
our goal.
As I mentioned, our TV partners, ESPN and CBS, have afforded us great exposure and professional support, and we in turn have provided them with an excellent product and many outstanding moments. We provided ESPN with its two highest Thursday night ratings this past year; Notre Dame-Temple two years ago had 6M viewers. The networks and the viewing public now know we can compete and win against the best P6 competition, and as long as we continue to challenge ourselves and play top P6 opponents, we will continue to provide great value to our media partners. We have engaged our devoted fans, our communities, our 2.6M national alumni and our TV viewers.
The other P6 conferences increasingly see us as a peer conference and enjoy scheduling us. For example, we have begun to play Big Ten teams more than we have in the past. We are playing three Big Ten teams this year and 17 games are scheduled between now and 2023. We are working on scheduling more. Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany and I touch base from time to time, and the Big Ten Athletic Directors respect our teams, and consider them good intersectional opponents which are building quality football programs. Our footprint overlaps with the Big 12, SEC and ACC, and we also have a number of games scheduled with those conferences. And although the Pac 12 is more geographically challenging, we will be playing UCLA, Arizona and Stanford, among others, over the next several years. We have averaged 26 P6 games over the past four years, and our goal is to play at least half of our nonconference games against other P6 schools, and possibly more. This is ambitious, but we welcome the challenge, it will strengthen us further.
I want to pause and recognize Commissioner Delany. He is a firm advocate for the well-being of student-athletes, and has been a strong advocate of a fair, transparent and sensible football recruiting and compliance model. Without his efforts, the new comprehensive football recruiting model, which includes a December early signing period, might not have passed. It is not without its issues and it is not the entire answer, but it was needed and is better than what we had, and also demonstrates that collectively the FBS conferences can get something important done. Our conference vigorously supported this comprehensive plan and Jim’s advocacy of it, not only because it is good for us, but because it is good for college football’s recruiting process, and therefore for prospective student-athletes.
Our conference has also been a leader in football safety issues. We helped spearhead legislation to prevent low hits to a stationary quarterback’s knees, as well as hits to a sliding quarterback or other sliding runners who have clearly given themselves up. We have supported the concussion protocols and the Inter-Association practice guidelines, we have supported time demand legislation and protocols, and our concussion education program is advanced.
All this is designed to protect our student-athletes. Football is a great game, a generational heirloom that has given us thrills over the many golden autumns going back almost 150 years. It has provided competition and tests of sacrifice and endurance for young men for generations, given them a sense of teamwork and the rewards of hard work. It is an exciting game, fun to watch and extremely popular. But it is also a rough, physical game, there is no denying that. But we
can make it safer and we will. We want to preserve it from those who attack it and would seek to eliminate it. Would this country, would our young men who love the sport, be better off without football? The answer is an emphatic
no. We as human beings would never have accomplished anything if we did not take risks. But we can minimize the risks and dangers and preserve the incredibly dynamic and enjoyable competition on the gridiron
Steve Hatchell and the National Football Foundation have been in the forefront of the efforts to preserve and enhance our great game, and again I take the opportunity to applaud him and the NFF for their tireless and intelligent advocacy. Steve has a unique understanding of the headwinds football faces, and he is an educational resource for our conference and schools, and an action agent we need in the fight for football’s future. .
America loves football and loves college football. It is the second most popular sport next to the NFL, and of course it drives so much of the business of college sports, the Conference rights fees, conference realignment and so forth. We as a conference have embraced football and our football accomplishments are remarkable. We have earned national respect. We have the commitment of our administrators - our presidents and athletic directors - we are all striving mightily and all of our teams are on an upward trajectory. I could not be prouder of our efforts and of our success.
As we continue to excel on the playing field, our student-athletes continue to do great things in the classroom. Once again, we had a record number of student-athletes – more than 2,300 – named to the conference’s All-Academic Team. Included in that group are 368 football student-athletes, many of whom are here with us today. We had a record 16 individuals chosen as CoSIDA Academic All-Americans and our institutions produced two Rhodes Scholars last year – Kirk Smith, a cross country student-athlete from Tulsa, and Lucinda Ford from Navy.
Congratulations also to the University of Cincinnati, which won the American Athletic Conference Academic Excellence Award in football for the second consecutive year. Cincinnati had 48 football players – the most in the Conference – named to our All-Academic Team, which is truly a remarkable achievement.
The achievements of these outstanding students is in concert with some of the groundbreaking work being done at our schools through our conference’s academic consortium. Our consortium is funding 12 research grants for the 2017-18 academic year that will be focused squarely on student-athletes’ physical and emotional health and well-being, and this research will be presented next April in Orlando at the American Research Symposium. We have a unique opportunity to be a national leader and we are committed to advancing scholarly studies in this vital area.
We likewise remain proud of the legacy of sportsmanship and citizenship that our student-athletes are leaving at their schools and in their respective communities, a legacy reinforced by 12 outstanding head coaches who inspire their student-athletes to set the standard for those qualities and for community service and outreach. I look around the room and I see terrific players, but more important, terrific young men who compete on the field and in the classroom, and in a climate of compliance and sportsmanship.
The season ahead is extremely promising, but also extremely challenging. We play 18 games against the other P6 conferences, Notre Dame and BYU, many against the best teams in those conferences, Michigan, UCLA, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, TCU, Georgia Tech, Missouri and Arizona, among others. Our efforts, the foundations we have built, the improvement in facilities and best practices, are paying off and will pay off in greater measure in the years to come. We have done what some said we could not do, and it gives me great satisfaction to recognize and proclaim that here today. We stand today as a cohesive conference, a strong P6 brand, ready again to deliver excitement and top competition.
I wish all of our teams great success this season and I applaud them and their coaches for their commitment and sacrifice. As the late, great Bear Bryant once said, the sacrifices the players and coaches make are great, but the rewards are also great. We look forward to proving him correct again.