Our criteria is pretty simple. We wanted something that look good and, obviously, said football. We wanted something crisp and clean and that wasn't very busy.

John wasn't out there and wasn't awful, but he obviously wasn't as crisp as we had seen him and as crisp as he was against the Yankees .

Not even close. Once we had the Thunder, the overwhelming choice of the football team was Lightning.

Obviously, with the success of basketball and football, his imprint is apparent. But he's also done a lot with the non-revenue sports and has helped bring the budget under control. Finding the right leader is imperative right now.

That's pretty good for someone who wasn't interested.

We'd obviously realized at this stage that if we wrote something in a show that got repeated, then we would get another fee for it without having to do any extra work. Now that looked like a good idea, and as the BBC didn't pay us very much in the first place- the ingrates-it was almost essential to have the thing repeated.