Back in early July, I wrote about how the Big Ten’s abrupt decision to go with a conference-only schedule might engender rancor among the various leagues. I won’t say it’s been all sunshine and roses since then, but it hasn’t panned out exactly as I thought it might. It’s turned out that everyone is so preoccupied with their own business that worrying about what the others are doing in anything other than broad strokes (e.g. are you playing or not, do you have a non-conference game or not) just not that big a deal.
Where the rancor has turned out to be is within the Big Ten itself. It was clear on the day the conference canceled its season that it was not a unanimous choice, as had been the case in the Pac-12. As I told you last week, testing backlogs in California pretty much forced the Pac-12’s hand, so it was much more of a judgment call up north. Since that announcement, we’ve seen Justin Fields try to use a petition to reverse the cancelation, and leaks and on-record quotes criticizing the process have come from everywhere in the conference. It’s a bad look to put out a schedule and then cancel the season less than a week later, after all.
It’s hard to lay the blame anywhere but at the feet of new commissioner Kevin Warren.
At least in the media I consume, there has been a lot of empathy for Warren. He only took over as full-time commissioner in January. This year has been a rough trial by fire for everyone, and having to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic in your first few months on the job is a nightmare.
Warren played college basketball, his brother played college football, and his father both played college and pro football and was president of the Fiesta Bowl for a time. He worked as a lawyer with sports-related cases, including schools facing NCAA penalties, and mostly worked in the NFL after that. He mostly worked at a high level for the Minnesota Vikings organization, and according to Andy Staples on a recent episode of his podcast, was very well-liked and regarded for his work there. Sports are in his blood.
One thing he didn’t have any experience in was administration in big-time college sports. He did work with former SEC commissioner Mike Slive in one of his legal jobs, but that was back when Slive was commish of Conference USA. Warren himself played basketball first at Penn and then closer to home at Grand Canyon University. He did teach for a short time at Notre Dame and was an agent for a while. That was all back in the early-to-mid ’90s, though. He’s been out of the world of major college athletics for a while.
That’s the risk of bringing in a complete outsider. There’s a nice idea that such a person can bring fresh perspective, but the learning curve is real. The Pac-10 brought in a complete outsider when it hired Larry Scott, thinking the then-head of the Women’s Tennis Association might help them with their upcoming television ambitions. His tenure has been uneven, to put it nicely.
And now, the Big Ten is going through growing pains at the worst time with Warren.
On Saturday, there was a big feature in the Omaha World-Herald. Nebraska AD Bill Moos is quoted extensively in it, and it paints a picture of a fractured process.
Moos described silos, where Warren would meet with university presidents, athletic directors, and medical experts, but never at the same time. It’s a puzzling decision from the perspective of someone who’s been immersed in college athletics for a while, because major decisions always happen on multiple levels. ADs do the day-to-day operations and often advise the presidents, who don’t get involved regularly.
It may not sound entirely out of left field for an NFL organization, the world Warren came from. Those tend to be comparatively small in terms of power brokers, and they’re single organizations. They’re not a collection of 14 potentially fractious organizations with occasionally competing priorities and several levels of deciders within them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the issue is just figuring out how to work remotely. When decisions of this scale happened in the past, it was easy to put people in a room and hammer it out. I’m sure that’s how it worked with the Vikings, where everyone’s right there in one building in Minneapolis. You could envision a Big Ten commissioner calling a representative from each school to B1G HQ in Chicago. That kind of model doesn’t work in this pandemic. I’ve seen countless stories this year, from both media and people I know, of dysfunction stemming from leadership who have no idea how to run an organization without seeing people in-person. Someone accustomed to dealing with far-flung conference members would have an easier time of it, but again, Warren came from outside the college world.
While I don’t think Greg Sankey has been as good a commissioner as his predecessor on a lot of things, he was Mike Slive’s No. 2 when he got the job. Slive was a hard act to follow as one of the best conference commissioners there’s ever been, but Sankey at least was immersed in how these leagues work. There is room to debate the SEC’s choices through all of this year, but the process has not left anyone puzzled or feeling like their voice wasn’t heard.
It’s possible for outsiders to get it together as a commissioner, at least as a wrangler of cats. There’s been a lot of speculation about how long the Pac-12 might keep Scott on the job, but from a communication and organizational standpoint, his league has hung together and spoken with one voice. Some of his choices may be highly suspect, but he got there as an administrator.
Warren doesn’t have a decade to figure it out as Scott has had. Presidents, ADs, and players have been going rogue on him and putting out competing narratives and openly questioning everything he’s doing. He’s got to figure out a way to get everyone on the same page quickly or risk seeing lasting damage done to his conference.