College Athletics Has Two Distinct Types of Conference Commissioners Now

In his 2021 book It’s Better to be Feared, ESPN’s Seth Wickersham proposed, roughly, that there are two classes of modern NFL owners: the traditionalists and the capitalists.

The traditionalists are the Maras and McCaskeys, the descendants of families who boarded the league elevator on the ground floor in the 1920s (or the decades thereafter while pro football gradually picked off competitor after competitor). The capitalists are figures like incoming Seahawks owner Vinod Khosla, a tech mogul whose primary credential is his net worth—around $16 billion in all. Both groups want to make money, but each has a different relationship both with money itself and, recursively, with the relationship between money and football.

And so it goes in college athletics, which is becoming more and more like the NFL by the day. On Saturday, the Big East reportedly hired ex-MLB executive Tim Brosnan as its new commissioner. Like all commissioners, Brosnan is neither 100% capitalist nor 100% traditionalist, but his hire shines light on the specifics of the cold war that threatens to tear college athletics asunder.

A point for the capitalists: Brosnan comes from the intersection of sports and making gobs of money

Who are the capitalists in college sports? Tony Petitti of the Big Ten is in some sense the ur-capitalist, having come from such diverse enterprises as CBS, Major League Baseball and Activision Blizzard. The Big 12’s Brett Yormark, a point man on the Nets’ move from blue-collar New Jersey to gentrifying Brooklyn, is another. The SEC’s Greg Sankey came up through a more traditional college-sports pathway, but carries himself with Glengarry Glen Ross airs.

Here’s where Brosnan is of use to the college sports establishment. Reports have placed him in foundational roles with MLB Network and the World Baseball Classic, two of baseball’s more lucrative ventures this century. He was in the running to become commissioner of baseball in the mid-2010s, losing out to Rob Manfred.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, college sports has sought to leave no revenue stone unturned, and the Big East stands to benefit from some of the industry’s more suspect ideas (such as expanded NCAA basketball tournaments). If Brosnan can keep the basketball machine humming while mining the conference’s formidable roster of urban centers—Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and others—he’ll make a successful heir to a historically creative league.

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A point for the traditionalists: Brosnan is not entering college sports blindly

Who are the traditionalists in college sports? The ACC’s Jim Phillips, the athletic director at Northwestern for over a decade, is the poster child. A notable traditionalist outside the power-conference ranks would be Gloria Nevarez, who rose from San José State’s compliance office to become commissioner of the Mountain West in 2023.

Brosnan would immediately become the only “big five” commissioner with an undergraduate degree from the conference he currently runs; he is a Georgetown alum (Petitti, Phillips, Sankey and Yormark went to Haverford, Illinois, SUNY Cortland and Indiana, respectively. Nevarez went to Massachusetts). He has experience helping the Hoyas with their name, image and likeness approach, and while that approach hasn’t led to basketball success (they still haven’t made either NCAA tournament since 2021), it shows that Brosnan can use money as a means to an end—the end being on-court success, the object of the game.

College sports’ warring factions have yet to find a middle ground from a values standpoint—a sustainable framework that embraces growth while maintaining college athletics’ soul. It’s hard to count on any conference commissioner in this day and age, but perhaps Brosnan will offer a third way. His career has shown that the blueprint is there, if forces above and below him let him follow it.

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