College Sports’ Rapid Winds of Change Blow Through the Big Ten

SAN ANTONIO — Here at the NCAA convention Thursday, college administrators listened to a goodbye address from outgoing president Mark Emmert and got a hello appearance from replacement Charlie Baker. Several hours earlier, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren was announced as the new president of the Chicago Bears.

This was a vivid, single-day snapshot of the breakneck pace of change in college athletics. The impermanence of recent years isn’t just a phase; it’s an ongoing way of life. From players to coaches to administrators, it feels like everyone is on the move, while the enterprise as a whole careens in no coherent direction. (Other than to the feet of Congress, begging for intervention to solve several of its issues.)

Emmert handing the baton to Baker was announced weeks ago, which makes Warren’s departure the bigger news of the day. His tenure was just three years, which by the old standards of commissionership is an eyeblink. It was a wildly momentous three years, with his league serving as one of the prime forces pushing the tectonic plates of college sports in conflicting directions.

With Warren’s departure, the tenures of the current Power 5 conference commissioners will be: eight years for Greg Sankey in the Southeastern Conference; 23 1/2 months for Jim Phillips in the Atlantic Coast Conference; 21 months for George Kliavkoff in the Pac-12; and 6 1/2 months for Brett Yormark in the Big 12. Outside of Sankey, the most powerful people in the industry are still trying to figure out their building security codes and learn everyone’s names. And outside of Sankey and Phillips, they arrived without college sports backgrounds.

The trend away from college lifers to off-campus business leaders carries its own risk/reward. Lord knows the industry needs new vision and ideas. But outsiders who aren’t invested in the welfare of college sports or don’t understand its esoteric quirks and challenges might also be quicker to bail out. Which serves to accentuate the churn.

Warren was involved in other recent job searches previous to landing the Bears presidency. And there has been conjecture here this week among industry leaders about another current commissioner exploring options. Does anyone want to lead this enterprise?

With Warren, there are questions of whether he ever had both feet in at the Big Ten, and/or whether he was jumping before being pushed. This much seems certain: The league’s presidents and chancellors weren’t sprinting to extend his contract, despite him positioning the conference for unprecedented wealth and geographic reach.

Warren’s tenure as Big Ten commissioner ends with a lot of strong feelings in his wake. He leaves big fans, big detractors and strong conflicting emotions around college athletics.

Warren’s supporters point to the massive developments in the summer of 2022: grabbing up the Los Angeles market in one fell swoop with the expansion to include USC and UCLA; and the subsequent whopper media-rights deal that will bring in more than $7 billion over seven years. They credit the first Black commissioner of a Power 5 conference with not just breaking a barrier, but then acting upon an ambitious vision for the future.

Warren’s detractors haven’t forgotten the ham-handed cancelation and un-cancelation of the league’s 2020 fall football season at the height of the pandemic. They also will credit others—primarily Fox—for making Big Ten expansion work. He’s been labeled arrogant by some, mistakenly thinking he could sail into college sports from an NFL background and outsmart everyone.

Warren is a charismatic one-on-one communicator who isn’t great speaking to large audiences, which might have hindered his ability to connect with the vast Big Ten constituency. He took the job at the worst possible time, at the onset of the pandemic, and endured irrational blowback from some fans during that time—including death threats that left him wary about parking his car at conference headquarters. Heading into 2022, that rocky period was the defining stretch of his commisionership.

Then Warren, Fox and the Big Ten executed the cold-blooded raid of the Pac-12, fracturing a so-called “alliance” between those two leagues and the ACC. The alliance was borne out of resistance to College Football Playoff expansion—or, perhaps more honestly, out of a fury at the SEC for grabbing Texas and Oklahoma in 2021 while playoff expansion talks were ongoing, and destabilizing the landscape.

Ultimately, Warren might have linked arms between those two leagues simply to buy time before raiding one of them. When his league got what it wanted, he reversed course and favored the expanded playoff (as did everyone, eventually). It exposed a level of shrewdness and cunning some weren’t sure Warren possessed.

In the 6 1/2 months since adding USC and UCLA, the realignment waters have calmed—but they aren’t completely still below the surface. This remains a volatile period, with several dynamics still in play. Among them:

• The Pac-12 media rights deal, which was being negotiated for months in 2022, still hasn’t been announced. It’s expected to happen early in 2023, but until that happens and everyone can digest the revenue numbers, some uncertainty hovers over the league’s future.
• Notre Dame, the ultimate realignment lever, will be the next big deal-maker (or deal-breaker). The expectation is that the Fighting Irish will enhance their overall revenue to the extent that they can remain independent in football, but that also will be a wait-and-see development.
• The 14-school ACC, locked into an ESPN deal until 2036, continues along in an uncomfortable status quo. There has been considerable discussion about a group of schools trying to challenge the media grant-of-rights deal and force their way out, but it would take at least seven, which is a hard number to reach. If that somehow comes to pass, many industry observers believe North Carolina and Virginia would be the hottest expansion targets not named Notre Dame, possibly triggering an SEC-Big Ten turf battle to add them.

While all that simmers, the Big Ten has to get down to the business of finding a new leader. Two athletic directors within the league would seem like logical candidates: Ohio State’s Gene Smith and Illinois’s Josh Whitman. The conference already passed once on Phillips, who used to be the AD at member school Northwestern; could he get it on the rebound?

Or the league could dive back into the non-campus pool. Fox Sports president Mark Silverman, who helped guide the Big Ten Network to prominence, would be a logical choice there—especially after the two entities linked arms for the next seven years.

Whoever gets the job, he or she isn’t likely to reprise the 30-year run of former commissioner Jim Delany. That kind of permanence might be gone forever in college sports, as the pace of change and search for direction intensifies.