PT: I am very pleased to announce that the member clubs have approved Houston as the NFL’s 32^nd franchise and Bob McNair as the owner of the Houston franchise. The clubs voted that there would be realignment of the league into eight divisions of four teams each and the specifics of the alignment would be done by June 2001. Houston will be an AFC team within that alignment so that Houston will represent the AFC within the state of Texas in the southwest. Houston will have a Super Bowl as soon as practicable after the opening of the stadium and the specifics will be worked out as we go forward. The key thing was both the qualities of the stadium, the fan interest in the NFL in Texas, and in Houston, the past support for the NFL in Houston by the fans and the quality of the ownership in Bob McNair.

BM: This is a great day for Houston and I hope a great day for football. Houston is in a hotbed of football activity as you all know. Texas is a great area for football. We’re just delighted that we’re able to bring the NFL back to Houston and we have a great partner in the livestock show and rodeo there. We’re going to have a world-class stadium second to none and one in which all the teams in the NFL are going to be delighted to play in. We’re just delighted with

this. It has been a long process but we’re happy that we could be a part of it and we can enjoy the success of the moment and we look forward to getting ready to play. It’s a great time; the sport is a lot more fun than the business side so we look forward to getting involved in the sport at this point in time.

PT: $700 million.

PT: The vote technically was 29 in favor with two abstentions. It was unanimous support for the proposition. The abstentions related to realignment where a couple of clubs were not prepared today to commit to eight divisions of four teams each and I think they abstained principally for that reason.

PT: Arizona and St. Louis. But there was unanimous support for both the quality of the stadium, the quality of the proposed operations as well as the ownership.

PT: We made ourselves clear back in March as a league that there were two outstanding groups of fans out there, two outstanding cities and areas. One was Los Angeles and one was Houston. The resolution we adopted in March committed our committee to recommend Houston if certain specified conditions were not met in Los Angeles. Our committee felt that those conditions had not been met. There were tremendous efforts made by a number of people in Los Angeles. We had proposals both from the Roski-Broad group with respect to the Coliseum and the Ovitz-Burkle group with respect to Hollywood Park. Both made good solid proposals but membership felt on balance the Houston proposal was superior. The one other thing that may be of some interest is that the clubs also committed that the expansion-stocking plan for Houston would be the same as used for the Cleveland Browns.

PT: Yes. I have said many times that I hoped we would come in here and get it resolved the first meeting we held after our September 15 benchmark date and that’s what we were be able to do and now we can move on to other opportunities.

PT: I would say there were concerns in both places about the distance that still had to be traveled down the road to insure that the stadiums would be state-of- the-art and would guarantee the success of the team. The committee emphasized that from the beginning we wanted not just a team in a market but we wanted a team that the fans would view as being successful, a team that would sell out on a constant basis where we would have all home games televised because there would be no blackout. Like I said, the committee felt both concepts were solid, the Coliseum as well as Hollywood Park. We had visited the Hollywood Park issue four years ago with the Raiders. But there were uncertainties and they could not be resolved now and there was no desire to delay.

So on balance, it was the quality of the stadium in Houston; the certainty that it will be built as it was proposed to us; a unique, one-of-a-kind retractable dome stadium designed for football for the NFL team, compatible and very well suited to the livestock show and rodeo; and the interest in the game in Texas, the number of players that come out of Texas, interest at the high school, college and pro level. The tradition of the Oilers, of course, is a great one; no one can ever forget Earl Campbell and Bum Phillips and others. The quality of ownership

in Bob McNair and those other factors sealed it for Houston and there were some uncertainties on some of those points in both Los Angeles proposals.

PT: No.

PT: They will start to play in 2002. On the name, as Bob McNair indicated, certainly he and I have not had any discussions on the name. I don’t know what he might be contemplating. I would like to have him speak to that point. The agreement I reached with Bud Adams was that the name Oilers would be retired with that franchise much like a jersey is retired for a great player and I think that would stay in place. So this team would have a new name. I’m sure Bob will do as good of a job in getting a name that the public will identify with as he has done in putting the franchise together and getting the stadium done.

BM: We would like to have a name that is reflective of the area of the country that we represent. We will go through that process and ask our fans to help us in that selection process and we will probably start that right away but at this point in time, we have not selected a name.

BM: It is an awful lot of money but there is an awful lot involved. Houston in our view is a wonderful sports city. There is tremendous fan support; we have over 20,000 high school football players participating in a program and the corporate community is very excited about this. We think we are going to have a very high level of support there. It’s the fourth largest city in the country. You have seen reports, which came out in terms of employment and growth of employment and in payroll, that Houston is in the top five in the country. We have a passion for football; we have a dynamic market; we have a large market in terms of media. If you look at it in terms of those cities that are closer to Houston than they are to any other NFL city and look at it as a regional TV market, it’s the third largest market in the country. So it’s a very large, vibrant, growing market and we think we have a tremendous product in the NFL and we have a wonderful stadium that is going to knock your socks off. It’s going to be dazzling and we think when you put all those things together we’re going to have a successful business enterprise. If it was not going to be successful, or we didn’t think we could do this, I would not be investing the money and I wouldn’t be asking other people to do that along with us.I don’t know that there was any one thing. I have been involved in a number of sizable transactions and people always ask me, ‘what was the secret? What was the mystery?’ Usually there is not any secret or mystery and you just have to make a lot of good decisions along the way and develop a

proposal that is very sound in all facets, I think the owners were aware that what we were doing was very well-founded, well-thought through; we have done our due diligence; we have done our homework; everything is in place and it becomes obvious to everyone that this was a very solid proposal. At what point it all comes to a conclusion I think, after a while, we all just sort of got tired and it was time to make a decision, but it was a culmination of many factors.

BM: It was certainly more than I ever anticipated but I think that we can have a successful football operation and if I didn’t think we could do that I would not have submitted that kind of bid. I think in terms of expectations of people, certainly it raised those expectations to a new level and hopefully that is a sign of things to come.

BM: We knew we had to differentiate ourselves and that is what we were attempting to do. We wanted to do something that would be so outstanding that we would break though this period of indecision so that it would be clear to everyone that this was a superior proposal.

PT: From our perspective, we felt that having the Super Bowl in Houston would be extremely positive for the league and the franchise and that they could do a great job with it in this stadium in the total complex that is being developed here. We felt it was an excellent site for a Super Bowl but this is just such a great stadium and a great complex. That was a big factor that was unique to Houston relative to Cleveland and Washington. Plus it is a multi-purpose stadium with the ability to be an outdoor stadium with the right kind of weather and an indoor building that can be used hundreds of days of the year. Neither of those factors were present in Washington or Cleveland and so we felt that was something we needed to address candidly with Bob. That was something that was so exciting about this project.

As I said earlier, we made it clear in March that we would leave no stoned unturned to try and get a team in Los Angeles. We have got to look at the totality of what we do. We have to have the kind of great football we had last season and the first four games this season. We’ve got to serve our fans in a real smart way with broadcast TV and all the ancillary TV we have, the ESPN package and

satellite service. All those things are critical and we hope we can keep delivering excellent NFL football in the Los Angeles area and hopefully we’ll see at some point whether it can resolve itself with a team.

PT: This is a very different package from our perspective. There is a Super Bowl here committed if they do the kind of job that we feel they will do. I think they could anticipate that there will be future Super Bowls down the road which will have to be done on a competitive basis with other areas. So from our standpoint, and from Bob’s presumably because we did agree on the number, the value here and the package of assets here is substantially greater than both Cleveland and Washington, so you would expect there to be a price difference.

BM: We fully expect to have the stadium ready by the 2002 season.

PT: Our focus right now in places like Arizona, Chicago and Minnesota is to get state-of-the-art stadiums in those areas and we think there is a good opportunity to do that. One thing we did agree early on in our committee going back to our meeting in July was that we were going to make a choice here eventually between Los Angeles and Houston. We decided as a committee that we would not get into a Cleveland-type formula where it could be either an expansion team or a relocated team. Right now we are in the business of keeping teams where they are, committing them to their current fan bases and getting stadiums built in our existing markets. It was agreed that whichever city we were not able to place a team in now, that would have to be a future issue. It was not something we were going to try and anticipate and chart a course for right now.

PT: It’s number of things. Number one is the perceived competitive unfairness of having six teams in some divisions and five in other divisions. Secondly is the knowledge that there are some opportunities for realignment that are not jarring and that with some additional effort we could have some realignment that makes sense. It might not be a global realignment, it might not be satisfactory to everybody but there are some things you could do that would make good sense that are not jarring. There was a lot of discussion on that coming into the meeting. People felt this was an opportunity to get a consensus on eight divisions of four and that consensus was there.

PT: It’s really speculative. One thing was clear, we were not just making a decision based upon price. We were making a decision based upon price, quality of what we’re getting in terms of the stadium, proposed franchise operations and ownership. They all go together. If we would have had fewer uncertainties in Los Angeles in terms of where we are and where we need to get to have a state-of-the-art stadium actually built, I’m sure we would have more discussion. We probably would have a majority view and a minority view but that’s all speculative because that’s not where we were.

PT: We had discussions with both Los Angeles groups last night, with Ed Roski representing his group and Michael Ovitz representing his group. Our message was simple. We thanked them very much for a tremendous amount of effort they put in to try to get a stadium done and a franchise concept done that we could

accept. Secondly, it was not an issue of one part of Los Angeles versus another part of Los Angeles. It was an issue of Houston and the opportunity in Houston of all the things we talked about; fan base, stadium and ownership and so forth as against Los Angeles. The third thing that was clear was the quality of the stadium and the projected operations. It didn’t have anything to do with a perceived negative or positive on either the Coliseum or Hollywood Park on a comparative basis. It was the overall sense that this was virtually certain to be a guaranteed success and we didn’t have that kind of proposal in Los Angeles.

PT: We had indications from both Ed and Michael Ovtiz that they feel there is a very strong interest in the NFL in that area. That has been my feeling all along, and they said they would be interested at the right time in the future in coming back and working with us. Both people will feel like they need a few nights sleep as most of us do and just step back a bit. It was a very strong and genuine thank you, a strong recognition that we're not choosing among Los Angeles sites, we were choosing between Los Angeles and Houston and at some point in the future we look forward to working with them because they represent quality groups.

PT: No we did not. I felt and Jerry Richardson and Robert Kraft felt that we might well have a divided committee report. I certainly felt that we might have

members of the committee who felt that we should take another month to look at some of the Los Angeles opportunities and come back and address this at our November meeting. There was some recent action by public officials relative to the Coliseum on tax increment financing that some people felt we should look at further. There was the obvious fact that Ron Burkle and Michael Ovitz came to Hollywood Park late; their preferred site was Carson. But as it turns out this morning after committee members slept on it over night, everyone came to a unanimous consensus that we shouldn’t delay, it would have more negatives than positives, and we should unanimously go with the Houston proposal.

PT: No, I don’t think so. We have six more years after this season. On our TV contracts. TV technology is changing so rapidly, it’s hard to anticipate today. We might at that point have broad-band on the Internet and you might be carrying live games on the Internet. So the future of TV is robust for us because we have a great product and hopefully we’ll keep it that way. We have mass appeal in every area of the population and I believe we will have opportunities in TV down the road, So that was not a consideration.