Kansas State Athletics Director John Currie and head coach Frank Martin took questions from the crowd at the Manhattan Catbackers event on Wednesday. As expected, Currie addressed issues regarding the upcoming new-look Big 12 Conference while Martin discussed the Wildcats' post game and broke down the incoming freshman class.
Currie
Kansas State Athletics Director John Currie
Can you talk about the interest from Houston to join the Big 12?
CURRIE: "The general question is about conference expansion and you know what, we like the 10 that we've got. As long as there's no compelling reason to add anybody else, we're going to continue along with this 10-team super conference -- because it is a super conference of 10 outstanding universities. Our league's going to play a double round-robin in basketball and will probably play a full round-robin in football with nine conference games. It is the toughest league in America without a doubt. It is absolutely the toughest league in America in football and in basketball. There are no days off in the Big 12 in any of those games. So, we'll continue with this. That's certainly the consensus of the membership.
"Now, some day in the future if there's a compelling reason to add somebody to our mix, to invite somebody to join our league -- right now I think everybody is very comfortable with 10."
Are we, or are we not going to give some money from Nebraska and Colorado's departure to Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma?
CURRIE: "Outstanding question. That issue has been so distorted. The bottom line is this: Over a long period of time there are some assurances that five schools made to three of the schools. If you look at the numbers -- basically, if you look over a long period of time with the projections, there are a couple years out there, depending on how things go, where you could have to utilize some of the revenue, some of the new revenue we're going to earn at Kansas State. I think it's very unlikely that it will ever happen.
"When you look at league revenues, remember that when league revenues are reported about 60 percent of all league revenue is television and 40 percent isn't television. So we're going to have some increases, for instance, for this coming year, because we have new bowl contracts with our bowl partners. So even with no changes, we were going to have a share because we share bowl revenue equally in our league. So as other schools are successful in our league, it's very likely, I think, that those things will go along and we'll always have our own piece of the pie, so to speak, and everyone else will, too. The important thing for us in the process was grow the whole pie so everybody else has a bigger piece. Under the scenarios we see in market analysis and television growth, etc., that's going to happen for us. We'll be in a much-enhanced position over time.
"It all falls back to, 'Why are we doing this?' We're doing this to continue to provide opportunities to our student-athletes. When you see some of these wild figures out there it's really easy to say all of our problems are solved. But the reality is everybody is getting their piece so we have to continue to elevate ourselves and do a great job of providing the right resources for our head coaches and student-athletes."
