The new commissioner of the Big East is something of a curveball. The league declared on Monday the hiring of former Major League Baseball executive Tim Brosnan, a 68-year-old Georgetown grad who will replace outgoing commissioner Val Ackerman on Sept. 1.
Ackerman, a Hall of Fame executive, spent the past 13 years running the Big East and dedicated her life to basketball. From a résumé perspective, Brosnan is an ambitious swing in a different direction. He has minimal experience in the basketball sector, but his extensive knowledge in the world of sports business and finance made his candidacy all the more compelling to the Big East’s 11 school presidents, who collectively made the decision to bring aboard Brosnan over a variety of other candidates with backgrounds and track records in college sports. St. John’s p president Rev. Brian J. Shanley serves as the league’s Board of Directors chair.
“In our search for the next Commissioner of the Big East, we prioritized finding someone with extensive experience in the area of revenue generation and who would best fit the mission and vision of our conference going forward,” Shanley mentioned in a statement. “Over the course of his career, Tim Brosnan has shown to be a smart, highly respected leader with high personal and professional values rooted in his dedication to the service of others. His track record of forging highly successful partnerships will be critical in this new era of college athletics. Tim is a relationship-builder and, as a former student-athlete in the conference, cares deeply about the success of the young men and women who represent the Big East.”
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Brosnan graduated from Georgetown in 1980, where he was a four-year member of the Hoyas’ baseball team. He spent 24 years with MLB and was a candidate to be that league’s commissioner before Rob Manfred won the job nearly 12 years ago to the day (Aug. 14, 2014). Brosnan’s business connections and command of the financial sector in professional sports was a big sell for his candidacy to run the Big East, a basketball-first conference in a football-dominated world that will need to continue to keep pace financially in order to remain relevant and competitive nationally into the 2030s.
In addition to being CEO of Major League Baseball Enterprises, Brosnan was also, more recently, a key figure in running Georgetown’s NIL collective. Sports Business Journal has previously and frequently named Brosnan among its annual ranking of the “50 Most Influential People in Sports,” in no small part because he was at the table when it came to negotiating MLB’s media rights deals on multiple occasions.
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Replacing Ackerman will be a huge task. The Big East stabilized after conference realignment in the early 2010s threatened to downgrade the league. Instead, Villanova and Connecticut have won a combined four national titles in the past decade and helped keep the conference respectable. St. John’s recent resurgence has also been significant to the Big East’s renewed competitive push amid the backdrop of a constantly shifting economic landscape in college sports.
“The Big East is one of the most iconic brands in college sports, and I am grateful and deeply honored to have the opportunity to lead the conference into its next chapter,” Brosnan mentioned in a statement. “Together with our member institutions, and all of our Big East partners, we will continue to elevate the student-athlete experience, strengthen the conference’s competitive position, and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead while staying true to the values that have defined the Big East for generations.”
Brosnan also has been a Board of Regents member at his alma mater, in addition to a litany of other appointments in and around New York City. He beat out a deep and eclectic pool of candidates for the job, sources mentioned, with the final decision coming in late July. The choice has turned some heads in the college space, per sources who spoke with CBS Sports, as the decision should prove to be a critical one in this increasingly turbulent era of player empowerment and roster instability.
The hope is Brosnan’s business acumen and decades of involvement in brokering big deals will not just keep the Big East afloat in the years to come, but actually improve its financial and competitive standing in Division I.
