Why Does College Sports Keep Hiring Baseball Guys?

The Big East's latest commissioner hire left me asking a bigger question: Why is college sports looking to professional leagues for its future?

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Here goes again. An all too often recurring bitch fest about the direction of college sports from yours truly.

The Big East has hired Tim Brosnan, a longtime Major League Baseball executive, as its next commissioner.

My first reaction?

Damn It? Not another one!

Seriously...why are we so convinced that professional sports executives are the answer to fixing college athletics?

This isn’t just the Big East either.

The Big Ten hired Tony Petitti from Major League Baseball.

The Big 12 hired Brett Yormark from the professional sports world.

Now the Big East follows the same blueprint.

Apparently the hottest qualification for running a college conference is...not having spent your career in college sports. If you view sports as purely a way to make money, it looks like you are now qualified to run things.

And maybe that’s because the old college sports establishment completely blew it.

Let’s be honest.

For decades they sat on billions of dollars while refusing to modernize the system. Television money exploded. Coaches started making eight, ten, even thirteen million dollars a year. Athletic departments built palaces. Administrators kept telling everyone the athletes were “amateurs.”

Meanwhile, the people actually creating the product couldn’t even monetize their own name.

I’ve screamed about this for years.

College sports should have always been run as a nonprofit enterprise. The goal should have been creating educational opportunities for young people, not becoming another professional league. If there were billions to spend, those resources should have gone back into scholarships, athlete support, academic services, health care, and the people generating the revenue.

Instead, everyone else got rich. Like usual. People suck. Especially, people with power. I will believe as long as live that people who want power, should never have it and the people who don’t want it should be put in charge by hook or crook.

Then came the Alston decision.

Everything changed.

Now we have NIL, the transfer portal, revenue sharing, collectives, and a sport that looks more like free agency than college football.

So I understand why conferences looked outside the traditional college world. I don’t like it and I am flat out against it but based on how things have evolved against my will, I understand it.

But here’s where I get stuck.

Why Major League Baseball?

Have you looked at Major League Baseball lately?

The league has become the poster child for competitive imbalance.

The Dodgers seem capable of signing anyone they want. Every offseason another superstar ends up in Los Angeles. This week they added Tarik Skubal to a roster that already looked like an All-Star team. Whether you’re a Dodgers fan or not, it’s fair to ask whether the economic system is producing enough competitive balance.

Even beyond the Dodgers, MLB and the Players Association continue to face major labor tensions, with many observers already warning about the possibility of another work stoppage when the current collective bargaining agreement expires.

So let me get this straight.

College athletics—which is desperately trying to figure out governance, competitive balance, athlete compensation, and long-term stability—is looking to executives from a league wrestling with many of those same issues?

That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t really about Tim Brosnan.

By all accounts, he’s respected. He’s smart. He has decades of executive experience. He may wind up being an outstanding commissioner.

This is about the philosophy.

Why have we decided that the future of college athletics should look more and more like professional sports? Can’t we hit the stop button!

Every hire seems to move us another step in that direction. Every conversation turns to private equity. Investment firms. Commercialization. Media rights. Revenue optimization.

Somewhere along the way we’ve stopped talking about campuses, students, traditions, marching bands, rivalries, and what made college sports different in the first place.

That’s the part that bothers me.

Because here’s my dilemma.

The old college administrators got us into this mess. They ignored reality for too long. They refused to evolve. They fought every change until the courts forced them to change.

But now the replacement seems to be executives whose entire professional lives have been spent maximizing revenue in professional sports. Neither option feels right.

It’s like choosing between two quarterbacks you don’t trust on fourth-and-goal. One drove the car into the ditch.

The other wants to replace it with a race car.

And maybe that’s why I’ve become such a UEFA guy.

I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous. No governing body is perfect. But lately, they’re about the only major sports organization that seems willing to say, “Maybe not every decision should be about squeezing out another dollar.”

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino pushed the idea of selling off commercial rights to the World Cup through outside investment, UEFA was one of the biggest forces pushing back. More recently, UEFA announced ticket pricing plans for Euro 2028 that are designed to keep a significant number of seats affordable for actual supporters instead of turning every marquee event into a luxury experience.

Imagine that.

Protecting fans.

Protecting the sport.

Protecting the idea that not everything has to be monetized to the absolute limit.

Maybe I’m becoming a European soccer romantic, but I respect the hell out of that philosophy. If preserving the integrity of the game makes me a UEFA fanboy, so be it. I’ll dedicate my life to their cause. (Okay...maybe not my life. But you get the point.)

That’s what I keep searching for in college sports—a governing philosophy that remembers the sport exists because people love it, not because private equity firms or television executives see another revenue stream.

And I’m not convinced either gets us where college sports should be.

Maybe this is just nostalgia talking.

Maybe I’m chasing something that can never exist again.

But I miss the feeling college football used to have.

Take me back to 1995.

Northwestern is making its improbable run to the Rose Bowl. Saturdays felt magical. Rivalries mattered more than television inventory. Sure, there were under-the-table payments. Sure, there were stories like Eric Dickerson and the gold Trans Am. The sport was never completely clean.

But it still felt like college.

Today, it often feels like a professional league wearing school colors.

And every time another conference hires another executive from professional sports...

I can’t help but wonder if we’re moving even farther away from what made college athletics worth loving in the first place.

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How do you feel about the hiring of pro sports guys as leaders in college sports? Let me know in the comments!