Associate AD Jason Cook talks SEC Network, new Kyle and more
Notes from Jason Cook interview
* Coach Rick Stansbury was the associate head coach when I was at Mississippi State as a media relations student. If you can go into Mississippi State and build a perennial NCAA tournament team, you can recruit anywhere.
* Stansbury knows how to win; I could not be more excited to have another familiar face here.
* I’ll tell you one thing, he could not be more excited to be here in Aggieland.
* Rick knows all the back roads throughout the SEC, he knows it, he’s lived it, and he’s been there.
* These last couple of weeks, just being in Reed Arena, there’s a different vibe.
* Ole Miss is a really big series for Texas A&M Baseball and we want to play in both the SEC and NCAA Tournament. At the end of the day this is what SEC baseball is all about every weekend.
* You look back at last year, Mississippi State barely made the tournament, got hot and made it to the championship at the college world series.
* Tonight the game will be on ESPN3, tomorrow night's game will be on ESPNU, and Sunday nights is back on ESPN3.
* Everyone talks about football and that’s due to the visibility of it, but you look at sports like softball where we don’t make the SEC tournament, yet we will be a 2 seed at the NCAA tournament.
* In women’s tennis we were 3rd in our conference and 5th in the nation, that tells you how tough the SEC is. This league kills you, but by the time NCAA tournaments roll around you are battle tested.
* It’s interesting timing trying to launch a network right now with all that is going on between the four major carriers.
* I knew we would be talking about a lot of things happening over the summer, but I didn’t know we would be talking about all these mergers. Gut feeling, I think it is a positive thing for us. When these things happen, these companies are going to err on the side of the consumer, much like the airlines did, which I think is a good thing.
* Yesterday, we announced the volleyball and soccer schedule, the coverage is going to quintuple.
* On 12th Man TV, we’re going to broadcast 4 additional soccer matches and 3 volleyball matches through the SEC network online.
* TV and video is the new arms race and the schools that are investing in this are going to pay off in the long run, but in the short term its all about the visibility.
* These negotiations cannot be taking lightly; we still need people to go register on getsecnetwork.com. Alabama has more subscriptions than we do and I know Texas A&M does not like to lose online polls. So we need the 12th man to help us catch up.
* We’ve had some good conversations with local Suddenlink people but it’s still a negotiation.
* Kyle Field is all everyone around the country is asking about. You go out there and see the south end zone closed in and you get a feel for what we were missing. The sound was just going out of the stadium.
* It is always important to play in the state of Texas, for recruiting purposes, but also to maintain those regional ties.
* We have outsourced concessions so they will be a complete redo, the east and south concessions will be new. Overall, the concession experience will be much better.
* There will be one traditional press box and that is on the east side and will be done in 2015. The only thing that will be on the west side is broadcasting booths for ESPN, CBS, and the SEC network.
* There are some benefits to being last in apparel contacts because everyone will have already played their cards.
* Now that we have all these ribbon boards and high definition TV, do we want noise meters? You guys tell me, because we can definitely do that.
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