Kevin Warren Is Ready to Lead the Big Ten Into the Future

A tumultuous 2020 behind him, the conference’s commissioner has rapidly won over support and turned his league into a powerhouse.

INDIANAPOLIS — Kevin Warren had taken off his suit coat, tugged his blue tie down and undone a couple of buttons on his white dress shirt. Sitting casually in a chair in a field-level suite at Lucas Oil Stadium, the commissioner of the Big Ten was relaxed yet animated.

His duties at the podium leading off Big Ten media days were over Tuesday, and it was here behind the scenes that Warren let his engaging personality shine through. This was a man in a far different place from his impossible first year on the job, when he was pilloried when his conference fumbled its way through the pandemic. In the span of time it took him to plunder the Pac-12 and expand his league from sea to shining sea, Kevin Warren and his league have a newfound authority at the vanguard of college athletics.

“I think it’s changed the narrative on the Big Ten Conference,” Warren told Sports Illustrated in a wide-ranging interview. “We shrunk the United States in one announcement.”

For Warren, that’s an incredible transformation from the fall of 2020. Back then, the Big Ten’s initial decision not to play football (which it reversed weeks later) resulted in vicious backlash toward the new commissioner.

“I didn’t drive for two years, I had so many death threats,” he said, explaining that the Big Ten office parking lot, at the time, lacked a security fence. If someone saw which car was Warren’s, it wouldn’t have been overly difficult to sabotage it. “My wife said, ‘Kevin, your car only has 400 miles on it.’ Yeah, because I didn’t drive it for two years.”

Among the threats that were turned over to law enforcement by the Big Ten office: one fan who posted on social media that he was putting a $5,000 bounty on Warren’s head; another said that if he had three bullets and the chance to shoot Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and Warren, he would use all three bullets on Warren. All because of football.

The racial epithets came in torrents for the first Black commissioner of a Power 5 conference. Even his executive assistant, who worked with Warren previously for three decades, was subjected to some of those. So was his family.

AP Photo/Darron Cummings

“It’s one thing to get hate mail—you suck, get rid of divisions,” Warren said. “When people start threatening your life, all it takes is one … That was interesting. But that time, that lonely time, helped me to do a lot of the projects I was working on.”

The next project, soon to be completed, will usher in a new level of prosperity for the Big Ten. In the coming weeks the league will announce its new media-rights deal, one that will factor in the revenue windfall of adding USC and UCLA from the West Coast in 2024. Projections have put the total worth of the upcoming contracts at $1 billion or more.

That would further differentiate the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference from the rest of Division I college athletics, and specifically from the rest of the Power 5. It’s a move that threatens all of college sports as we now know it, but Warren is in the business of strengthening his league—even if it’s at the expense of others.

And that might mean more expansion to come. Warren left open the possibility of growing beyond 16 members.

“I don’t think you can [close the door on future expansion],” Warren said. “From a strategy standpoint, this is not the old college athletics. … For the individuals and the conferences and schools that are not thinking that way, they’re going to be Sears and Roebuck [a onetime retail giant that filed for bankruptcy in 2018]. That’s straight, blunt. That’s where this deal is going. We have about three or four more years of perpetual disruption. During that period, either you’re going to embrace change and build a business and get stronger, or not.”

The Warren who addressed the media Tuesday in Indy seemed to bear little resemblance to the man who was caught flat-footed by the SEC’s power move of 2021 to add Texas and Oklahoma. Nor did he resemble the fresh-from-the-NFL neophyte whose 2020 was consumed by COVID-19 disruption. How much credit he personally should get for the addition of USC and UCLA is open to debate—Fox Sports likely had a hand in it, and simply saying yes to a couple of attractive new members wasn’t that difficult—but it’s inarguable that Warren is growing quickly on the job.

“He inherited a nightmare,” said Barry Alvarez, the former Wisconsin athletic director and current special advisor for football to the league. “You come into a pandemic and there’s no book you can go to. … I really think he’s grown with the league, and he’s grown with time and understanding and knowing the people. The fact that he had consensus from his ADs and chancellors and presidents, and kept it quiet, I think that speaks volumes.”

Indeed, a Big Ten source said that if Warren had tried to orchestrate such a blockbuster move in 2020, the lack of league support and cohesion surrounding him would have made it impossible to keep it under wraps and might have killed the deal.

While Warren is bullish on the future of not just his league but all of college sports, not everyone shares that complete confidence. Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald described the entire enterprise thusly: “We’re on the interstate of change, heading to the off-ramp to chaos. We’re like five miles from there.”

For that reason, Fitzgerald said it’s premature to even discuss College Football Playoff expansion before getting a firm grip on what the conference landscape looks like. Warren said he is “100% in favor of playoff expansion,” and mentioned that it could grow to as many as 16 teams. “A couple people brought (a 16-team playoff) up to me in the last two, three weeks,” Warren said. “In 36 months, that’ll be clear. The market is going to dictate a lot of this stuff, which freaks people out.”

What will the Rose Bowl’s place be in an expanded playoff, and with a weakened traditional partner in the Pac-12?

“I talked to the Rose Bowl [executives] twice [in recent weeks],” Warren said. “I am committed to the Rose Bowl long term. I’d sign a 100-year contract with them, they’re part of the fabric of college football. Now, they’re going to have to evolve with college football, like everyone else, but their relationship with the Big Ten Conference is paramount.”

Speaking of relationships: How would Warren assess his current status with his fellow Power 5 commissioners? He spoke respectfully of counterpart and rival Greg Sankey of the SEC, jokingly referring to him as “G-Sank” and saying they share a lot of the same traits.

“Greg and I are more alike than we are not alike, which I respect,” Warren said. “He doesn’t think like a long-term college administrator. … He’s not scared. He does not care what people think about him.”

On new Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark: “I really like him. I’m looking forward to working with him. He’s a marketing wizard, a smart guy.”

On Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner Jim Phillips: “I saw Jim for a minute in Selma [where the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 took athletes on a civil rights history tour earlier this month, as part of the ill-fated 2021 alliance between the three conferences].”

On Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, the freshly aggrieved party in the Big Ten expansion power play: “I think my office is working on me talking to him after media days.”

A year ago, some people in the Big Ten wondered whether Warren might be a weak link among the Power 5 commissioners. On Tuesday, he conveyed newfound strength and stature within that realm of college sports leaders. There was some unconscionable abuse to endure along the way, but Kevin Warren has fully arrived now.