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COMMISSIONER ARESCO:
....Now I get to the part that you're all interested in.
I think that really this conference has had, as you know, a remarkable inaugural year. I think the appropriate phrase that comes to mind today is, What a difference a year makes.
I stood in front of you last year in Newport. We were in another location, of course. I hope you like it. It's absolutely a beautiful place. The weather cooperated with us. I talked about the progress we made. We reached milestone after milestone.
We had a settlement with the Catholic 7 group. We had new television deals. We had a new name and a new logo that were well received. We had new sites for our basketball championships, that went extremely well. The list goes on and on.
But we hadn't yet played a game in the American Athletic Conference. Although I felt strongly we had great schools that would do well, it was all promise and surmise at that point.
Not anymore. We've had, as you know, a remarkable year. We far exceeded everybody's expectations, although perhaps not our own. UCF won the Fiesta Bowl in convincing fashion beating the Big 12 champion, we won the men's and women's Division I national championship in basketball, a magical run by the UConn men and women. UConn also won the national championship in field hockey. SMU was the runner‑up in the NIT. We won the women's NIT. Had a team in the College World Series. 21 of our men's and women's sports produced a combined 34 NCAA post‑season bids.
We had top‑10 finishes in football, in men's and women's basketball, in men's soccer, in baseball, and in men's golf.
It has truly been a storybook year.
How do you spell power? What does power mean in today's collegiate landscape? What should it mean?
We are speaking of power here when you do as well as we have done. As I look at our journey, I'm reminded of something St. Francis of Assisi said, You should start by doing what is necessary, then doing what is possible, then suddenly you are doing the impossible.
We put our heads down, tuned out the distractions, laid the foundation, began competing. We pretty much did the impossible. An emphatic victory in the Fiesta Bowl when few people gave our champion a chance, upset win after upset win in the NCAA tournament for UConn men beating teams like Michigan State, Florida and Kentucky. The exception is of course is the UConn women, they do it impossible routinely. They're remarkable.
When you think about it, with all the great conferences out there, the Big Ten, the SEC, the ACC, the PAC‑12, the Big 12, all the other conferences that play basketball at a high level, again, as I said, a remarkable achievement.
We set a high bar for ourselves, no question. We're not going to rest on our laurels. Lincoln once said, Some see opportunity in every obstacles, while others see obstacles in every opportunity. We saw opportunities where we had problems many months ago. We're going to continue to approach things in that spirit.
Any problems we may have, we will turn into opportunities. We intend to compete and to continue winning. That's why we're here.
We believed in the idea of this conference, what it could achieve. We'll be judged and measured by how we perform. We relish that. We don't flinch from that challenge.
Houston and Tulane will open new state of the art on‑campus stadiums next month, bringing the energy and passion of college football to their campus communities.
Cincinnati is renovating their stadium, which will transform one of the most historic stadiums anywhere into a modern marvel of engineering. Other of our schools are considering new stadiums.
You can take each of the schools represented in this room and find evidence of progress and the desire to succeed at the highest level of college athletics.
We all hear a lot about Power 5 conferences, the Equity 5, the High Resource 5, the Group of 5, the Autonomy 5, whatever you choose to call them, and we consider ourselves a power conference as well.
We're not going to take a backseat to anyone. We see the landscape as five plus one and we're knocking on the door. Our goal is to be in the conversation as the sixth power conference. I believe by virtue of our performance that we already are.
As I said, we're knocking on the door and we will eventually knock it down.
We hear that the new NCAA governance system which allows autonomy in limited areas to the Equity 5 Conferences will cause us somehow to be left behind, that resources of those conferences are simply too great.
That we will not be able to keep up and compete.
I don't buy that for a minute and what we did this year proves it. When our schools won the Fiesta Bowl and the national basketball titles, reporters asked about our conference status and my response was, Look at those student‑athletes on the podium. Tell those kids they are not power teams in a power conference. They just won the national championship. They just won a BCS bowl game. This is America. We believe in upward mobility. This success will translate into greater success.
We know we're not always going to win. No one does. But we will compete at the highest level. Again, we will win our share. We'll do it as we've always done it, with sportsmanship and class.
I'm proud of our student‑athletes. You're going to meet a number of them today. I met some of them last night. They're phenomenal young people. The way they play, the way they conduct themselves on the field, the court, off the court. I cannot tell you how pleased and proud I was when the Fiesta Bowl representatives told me they enjoyed the UCF team as much as any they had ever hosted. They said the players were terrific to everyone. This is a great tribute to George O'Leary and his team and also to our conference.
We are proud of the achievements of our student‑athletes in the classroom. Education will always be the bedrock principle in this conference.
When you look at the makeup of our teams, you find some top players in the country. Just look around this room. Lorenzo Doss of Tulane was an All‑American last year, Shane Carden, who spent some time with me at East Carolina showed me around the facilities. Unquestionably one of the best quarterbacks in the country. We have as dynamic a group of quarterbacks as any conference in the country.
John O'Korn of Houston, P.J. Walker of Temple, Tyler Matakevish is an elite linebacker. There's not a conference in college football that has a better group of receivers than the group of receivers that are with us. You saw that with the UCF wide receivers in the Fiesta Bowl. We play exciting football in this conference. Power, it is here in this room.
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'd like to illustrate just how competitive the teams in this room are and have been.
If you look at the last five years of the 11 teams we have here, as well as Navy, which will be joining next year, they've won against the follow be teams: from the ACC, Florida State, Miami, Clemson, Virginia Tech, Louisville, Pitt, Syracuse, Boston College, North Carolina, NC State and Wake Forest. That's 12 of the 14 teams.
From the SEC, wins over South Carolina, Georgia Missouri, Mississippi State, Mississippi, and Vanderbilt.
From the Big 12, Baylor, Oklahoma State, TCU, Texas Tech, West Virginia, Iowa State.
From the Big Ten, Penn State, Purdue, Illinois, Rutgers, Maryland, Indiana.
From the PAC‑12, Oregon State and UCLA.
That's 37 of the 64 teams in our conferences that our members have defeated in the last five years alone and we also have multiple wins against Notre Dame.
As proud as we are of our All‑Americans, our NFL Draft picks, we're equally proud of our players who distinguish themselves in the classroom and their community service. We have eight players who have been nominated for the Allstate Good Works Team for their exemplary service, including one who is with us today, Kenneth Harper of Temple, congratulations.
We're proud also of the players who inspire us in their fight to overcome adversity. I was especially pleased to see Munchie Legaux from Cincinnati and I'll be happy to shake his hand after he takes the field this season.
Although he's not with us, I want to recognize the progress and continuing fight of Tulane's Devon Walker, an inspiration to all of us. He earned his degree while continuing his recovering from a paralyzing neck injury. Devon was signed by the New Orleans Saints as a free agent.
I also want to acknowledge the perseverance of a man from Newton, Massachusetts, who will be on Tulane's roster as a long snapper this fall Aaron Golub. He's legally blind, but doesn't let that stand in his dream of playing major college football.
From Tulsa to Philadelphia, from Annapolis to Dallas, from Cincinnati to Orlando, from Memphis to Tampa, from East Carolina to New Orleans, our student‑athletes have distinguished themselves and will continue to do so.
We have outstanding basketball, as well as football, in this conference. Just like football, we have an All‑Star roster of men's basketball coaches including Kevin Ollie and Larry Brown, who have won national championships. We have UConn's women's basketball team as well as several other competitive women's basketball teams. We have national championship contenders in soccer, baseball, tennis, softball, track and field, and golf. The conference is in great shape.
But today belongs to football. Coming off a successful year crowned by UCF's Fiesta Bowl win, what can we look for this season?
Again, as I said, we have an incredible roster of coaches. You just look around the room. A terrific group, a great group of players and committed players.
Although we were a new brand, we were a BCS conference, we've not forgotten our roots. As I said, we're going to be in the power conference conversation. We've challenged ourselves with really, really difficult non‑conference schedules. In fact, our schools collective play the toughest non‑conference schedules in the country, including games against 10 teams in the top 25 Coaches Pole from last season.
We have three games this season against Brigham Young University. I would point out they are clearly, in our estimation, a power team and one of the great college programs. We're proud that our teams are playing BYU. In the next several years we're going to be playing them quite a bit.
UCF opens the season in Dublin against Penn State. We're all looking forward to that.
We're just as ambitious when it comes to the post‑season. We know strength of schedule matters. We know that merit will matter. I'm happy to welcome Bill Hancock, the director of the College Football Playoff, as well as friends from the Fiesta Bowl, the Chick‑Fil‑A Peach Bowl, the AT&T Cotton, the Orange Bowl, the Allstate Sugar Bowl, and the Rose Bowl. We welcome everyone and we're confident we'll have regular‑season contenders for these exciting new post‑season formats. And that we will be a fixture in the New Year's bowls. We know we're going to be judged on our merits.
I want to congratulate Bill on his superb job in working all of the commissioners to develop the College Football Playoff.
We have a terrific and accomplished Selection Committee and Bill and his staff have no peers when it comes to organization and operations. The Playoff and the host bowls are going to captivate the country. They're going to be a resounding success.
The CEO of my former employer CBS, says the CBS Thursday Night NFL Package will be a sure thing. I'm sure he's right. The College Football Playoff will also be a sure thing.
Our own bowl partnerships assure our schools a terrific destinations and the ability to compete against the best possible opponents. This year alone our teams will face the SEC, the ACC, the Big 12, along with BYU, which is also contracted to play one of our teams in the Miami Beach Bowl if BYU qualifies. We will have bowl games based in Washington D.C., Miami Beach, Fort Worth, Birmingham and St.Petersburg, playing against obviously these other high‑level conferences.
You have to beat the best to be the best. If our schools didn't have that as a goal, they wouldn't be in this conference.
You've all heard a lot about the NCAA governance redesign process, the restructuring of the NCAA, the move by five conferences to gain a measure of autonomy in passing legislative. A lot of it is inside baseball and I'm not going to go into the detail today. But I do want to commend the NCAA steering committee on their outstanding work in the governance redesign process.
Dr.Nathan Hatch and his colleagues have had a tough job and I think balanced everyone's very interests well. No one will be completely happy and no one will be completely unhappy either. That's the nature of a good compromise. I believe the model will be approved and embraced.
Although we would prefer to be in the autonomy group, we should not feel threatened by a certain level of autonomy for those conferences with significant resources who want to do more for their student‑athletes.
This system would not be necessary if those conferences did not worry that lesser resource conferences might frustrate their efforts to do more for their student‑athletes. We, too, as a conference have resources and visibility. We share the same goals and eventually we want to be in that same autonomous group in that same room.
I say it's only a matter of time if we're capable of doing what we're capable of doing. I mean that firmly.
We wanted to retain our NCAA's board seed and we have. We will have representative on the NCAA and the NCAA council, which will be the legislative body for most items.
We wanted to maintain our ability to compete, that's the key. In the critical areas of scholarship limits and transfer rules, those are going to be subject to what we call shared governance. They're not in the autonomy category. We have a say in that. That can't be done unilaterally by the other five. So our ability to recruit and compete is thereby preserved. That is key.
I will admit I do not care for Power 5 designation. We do not accept the notion that we're not a power conference or this 'have not' tag that some people use. We have resources. We have enormous potential.
Make no mistake, we'll remain an integral part of the FBS college football fabric. We'll always have naysayers. We have far fewer now than before. It's our job now to prove them wrong as we did last year, as UCF did in the Fiesta Bowl, as we did in the basketball championships with UConn.
Our television ratings, already strong, will continue to grow. We're going to continue to pursue innovation. We play on Thursdays an Fridays. We've carved out Fridays as a good niche for our conference.
We own and operate our own bowl game. First conference to do that. We have big ambitions, we wouldn't have it any other way.
Michelangelo once said, The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. We embrace the notion of doing more for our student‑athletes. We support NCAA health and safety initiatives and guidelines. As a conference, I am here to reiterate on behalf of our presidents and ADs, I'm reaffirming our conference‑wide commitment to funding student‑athlete scholarships up to the full cost of attendance. We issued a press release that in September of 2013. We're one of the fist conferences to do so.
Scholarships have not kept pace with the costs incurred by student‑athletes in various areas. We need to remedy this. It's the right thing to do.
But we're opposed to playing players to professionalizing the model. That concept, not as widely supported as the litigators would have you believe, would destroy the raison d'etre of college sports. It's critical to remember that our sports programs are an important aspect of higher education, of our overall mission of educating our young people. The latter is our primary mission. It is not our ancillary mission.
The vast majority of our student‑athletes are going pro, as the ESAs that you've all seen say, in something other than sports. Our capable student‑athletes receive the most valuable benefit, a scholarship that opens the door to a superb education.
Being at the highest level of college athletics competition does pose issues, no question. But this competition is important to the country, to our communities, to the schools and to their alumni. But above all, it's important to the student‑athletes who compete. You have the history of these great schools and programs behind them. These programs have always been a part of the cultural fabric of the country.
Our schools and conferences bestow upon our student‑athletes the fruits of a century of competition and branding.
When I visit our schools and I see the outstanding and costly facilities, many of them new, others on the drawing board, I know our student‑athletes are receiving the best training in the most modern venues and facilities. They play in outstanding stadiums and arenas. They have the best coaches and support staff and dedicated academic counseling.
Coaches are often well‑paid, yes, but as a result they are involved in college athletics rather than gravitating towards pro sports leagues.
We face a series of lawsuits which seek to destroy the collegiate model. Make no mistake, whether it's unionization, anti‑trust, or pay‑for‑play, these lawsuits seek to dismantle to what we've built and they want to professionalize the model. Such a result might be a bonanza for lawyers, but it's not going to work well for our student‑athletes or our universities or our fans.
However, I remain optimistic about the long‑term future of college sports. The message of our critics is simple. Ours is more nuance. We have not done a great job in conveying our message. We must do better. I believe their message is wrong and ours is right and at the end we'll prevail in this litigation and the public opinion will be on our side.
We've also heard the notion that the level playing field should be abandoned. The notion that you have a level playing field, you try to maintain a level playing field, and you should no longer worry about that, that's an antiquated notion.
Again, I don't buy that for a minute. This attitude actually plays into the hands who litigate against us. It also plays into the hands of those who don't support the collegiate model.
None of us believes there can ever be a truly level playing field. We're not naïve. We know life doesn't work that way. We know schools have profoundly different levels of resources, branding and fan support.
But we have strived to make the playing field more level and we have done so. This has been a decades' long effort. It enhances competition for countless schools. Our efforts in this area over many years have had an impact. We have seen programs emerge. We've seen stunning upsets. It's all part of the wonderful tapestry of college athletics.
You have to compete. You don't simply win by showing up, by being favored. Remember UCF in the Fiesta Bowl. The impact and glow and memories of those upsets endure, often for lifetimes. They extend well beyond the fields and courts.
I ask you, do we want to go back 50 or 60 years to what many would consider the wild west days when a few select schools tended to dominate, could stockpile players? Was that system really good for anyone but perhaps those select schools? I'm not even sure it was so great for them in the long‑term. It certainly wasn't good for the stockpile players.
Was it good for schools that simply could not compete but now can? Was it good for the players, the students, the fans all over the country? I suspect that it was not.
The system today is fairer and it's better. Although none of us likes the sense of separation, autonomy for those five conferences is not the threat. Deregulation of scholarships and professionalizing the collegiate model are among the real threats to us and to college sports. If you deregulate scholarships and pay players, eventually only the richest schools will prevail.
There's a fragile balance now. That is not the key point. More importantly, what does paying players do to the educational mission?
Although our football and basketball programs are prominent, college sports are different than pro sports. Anyone watching a big college game, a pro game the next day, can see that. Why tamper with this? Why play Russian roulette with something that has worked, that has worked for a century, that benefits countless student‑athletes in all sports, and who then become part of an educational mission, students who take advantage of opportunities offered them to absorb values and skills that will last a lifetime?
You can criticize the amateur model all you want, but at heart our sport have an amateur aspect that we cannot lose.
Enforcement is another area that demands our attention and it's been talked about by some of my fellow commissioners. We have to develop a thoughtful approach to it. I myself do not think federal or state legislation is the answer because that could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences and inconsistencies in enforcement across the United States. Injecting politics into this sensitive area does not seem wise.
However, a focus on the big violations in a more streamlined way to deal with the lesser ones is definitely warranted. The program should fall on the individuals involved, not on the schools that are cooperating and trying to root out and remedy any expected wrongdoing.
I myself serve on the CCA, College Commissioners Association Enforcement Subcommittee chaired by Jim Delany who has been a thoughtful advocate of change in this area. I believe we're going to develop some good ideas over the next year.
In concluding today, I want to thank and applaud everyone in our conference for the commitment, dedication, hard work and good will they've all shown. We're now a strong and nationally admired conference. I won't be using the term 'reinvented' anymore. Although we are now established and have had significant early triumphs, our work is just beginning. As Winston Churchill said, It is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
The resolve of our presidents and athletic directors, our other administrators and conference staff was the glue and foundation of all we have achieved. If I sounded defiant at times today, it is because I was and I am.
I scoff at the term 'non‑power conference' applied to us. Our student‑athletes are powerful, they've proven it, they've competed and they've won. They're going to continue to do so.
We as a conference take nothing for granted. We know we face challenges. We move forward with optimism and great energy. We do so knowing that our student‑athletes come first, that providing them a platform for growth and development, the highest level of competition, is paramount.
We celebrate today their power and their success. We look forward to a great football season and may we win our share.
Thank you all.