One morning in late February, Virginia Tech athletic director Whit Babcock received an email from an unknown sender with a very familiar last name.
“I know you worked with my father, Jim Delaney. [I] “I would like to introduce myself,” the note from Newman Delaney said of his father.
The son of the longtime Big Ten Conference commissioner was soliciting interest on behalf of Collegiate Athletic Solutions, a college sports-focused investment firm recently formed by Redbird Capital and Weatherford Capital. Delaney is a senior vice president of the new company and its only publicly known employee.
After enrolling at the University of North Carolina, his father’s alma mater, Newman Delaney until recently resisted the benefits and conflicts of following in his father’s footsteps into college sports.
In an email to Babcock obtained through a public records request, Delaney explained that he joined CAS after 15 years in investment banking, most of that time at Deloitte Corporate Finance, where he most recently led the firm’s life sciences and healthcare group, based in Tampa, Fla., where Weatherford Capital is headquartered.
Beyond mentioning his name in emails, it’s unclear how involved Jim Delaney is in his son’s current endeavors. The former Big Ten commissioner remains influential in college sports, most recently serving as an adviser to the Big Ten and ACC and partnering with the Montag Group in a consulting business.
Through a RedBird Capital spokesman, Neumann declined to be interviewed for this story, and Jim Delaney did not respond to a request for comment sent through the Montag Group.
College sports is often a family business, with the sons and daughters of coaches often playing as players and then becoming coaches. Less well known is the hereditary nature of sports administration, from AD to conference boss, as exemplified by the succession of Delaney and his fellow former Power 5 commissioners Mike Slive (SEC), Bob Bowlsby (Big 12) and John Swofford (ACC). Sometimes, as in Newman Delaney’s case, it’s a calling deferred.
“I didn’t want to be ‘Mike Slive’s daughter,'” said Anna Slive Harwood, whose first job out of college was in marketing for accounting giant Arthur Andersen. “Growing up, I realized that everyone I knew in college sports was family. I missed that and being around a lot of people.”
In 2002, after the Enron scandal caused the collapse of Arthur Andersen, Slive Harwood took a job at Chicago-based advertising firm Leo Burnett. She stayed there for only nine months before deciding to quit. In her late 20s, Slive Harwood decided to enroll in graduate school at Northwestern University with an eye on a career switch to college sports. From there, she took a junior position in the athletic department at Georgia Tech, an ACC school.
“I wanted to be close to the SEC but not inside the SEC because I didn’t want anyone to have this idea of nepotism,” she said.
That impression can be hard to shake. Consider the decades-old conflict-of-interest controversy surrounding another Tar Heel father and son, John and Chad Swofford, which was reignited earlier this year in a lawsuit filed by Florida State University against the ACC.
In 2005, under the commissionership of John Swofford, the ACC extended a membership invitation to Boston College, then a member of the Big East. Chad Swofford worked at Boston College at the time. Two years later, in 2007, Chad Swofford went to work for Raycom Sports, a Charlotte-based regional television syndicator with ties to both the ACC and the SEC. The following year, Raycom lost its business with the SEC, which had decided to give all of its content rights to ESPN. Raycom then implemented a series of layoffs, which Chad Swofford weathered.
As FSU’s lawsuit suggests, Chad Swofford’s continued employment at Raycom was one of the factors in the ACC’s notorious television deal with ESPN in 2011. That deal included a separate sublicensing agreement between Raycom and ESPN.
be Sports Business Journal According to the article, John Swofford told ESPN that he supported a deal that would ensure Raycom’s continued existence.
“The Raycom Sports Partnership has caused millions of dollars in damages to ACC members and continues to undermine the value of media rights and the cost and success of prestigious networks to this day,” FSU’s amended complaint states.
Chad Swofford, who did not respond to a request for comment, served as vice president of Raycom and general manager of ACC digital before being promoted to his current role as vice president of business development and general manager of linear networks. John Swofford, who retired as ACC commissioner in 2021, also did not respond to a request for comment sent through an ACC spokesperson.
Bowlsby’s college sports legacy continues with the former Big 12 commissioner’s two sons, Kyle and Matt. Kyle now runs Bowlsby Sports Advisors, a consulting firm specializing in athletic executive recruiting and strategic analysis. Kyle Bowlsby, like his father, is based in Dallas but now works for sports streaming service FlowSports in Austin, Texas.
Last school year, Kyle and Bob Bowlsby (who retires from the Big 12 in 2022) worked together at Northern Iowa, where Bob served as the school’s interim athletic director while Bowlsby Sports Advisors was contracted to search for a permanent athletic director replacement.
“We’ve had (Bob Bowlsby) involved in some strategic consulting projects under the umbrella over the last year and he’s been involved in some business acquisitions,” Kyle Bowlsby said. “He’s not very involved, but he’s willing to step in when needed.”
Kyle Bowlsby said growing up as the son of an athletic director-turned-commissioner inspired him to want to work in college sports but in a more peripheral role. In an interview, Bowlsby recalled meeting Newman-Delaney on and off over the years, including at the 2003 Final Four in New Orleans, where the two served as volunteer ball boys.
After studying sports management at the University of Iowa, Bowlsby joined the ranks of Slive Harwood and became a “burning [his] He started “on his own path” after college, moving to San Diego and working his way up in commercial real estate during the post-recession downturn. “I figured I could start at the bottom and get some experience,” he says.
After four years, Bowlsby couldn’t take it anymore and, again like Slive Harwood, decided to enroll in a graduate program in sports management at Northwestern University.
“My brothers and I never wanted to put our dad in a position where he had to be helped,” Bowlsby said, “but when I was looking for a job, I talked to Jim Phillips at Northwestern and went to the Big Ten headquarters to let people know I wanted to go into sports.”
Bowlsby was eventually hired by Property Consulting Group, a Chicago-based digital media company that worked with sports clients and was later renamed 4FRONT and eventually acquired by Legends Inc. Bowlsby said he got connected to the company through his brother, not his father.
Kyle Bowlsby then went to work for management consulting firm Korn Ferry, where he focused on recruiting executives for college sports. In April 2019, he launched his eponymous company, which has since worked with dozens of college athletic departments. He said he has bid on jobs with several unnamed college conferences but has yet to win any.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t won those proposals,” Bowlsby said. “I think the conference would prefer to partner with a larger, more established company, and that’s fine. I think that day will come for us someday.”
Matt Bowlsby’s first job out of college was with Purdue Sports Properties in Learfield. He then went to business school at Stanford, where his father was the school’s athletic director, before joining the upstart Pac-12 network. In 2012, Bob Bowlsby left the Cardinal to become commissioner of the Big 12 in Dallas. Four years later, Matt Bowlsby moved to Texas to take a job with FloSports and has been involved in contract negotiations with the Big 12 ever since.
“There’s always a little bit of awkwardness in those interactions,” Matt Bowlsby said in an interview. He said his father would not be involved in conversations or decisions about FlowSports “to ensure there’s no conflict of interest.”
Matt Bowlsby said Bob has served as a sounding board throughout his career, but “that’s the extent of his involvement. I think everyone wants to succeed on their own merits.”
Slive Harwood said of her father, “He was probably my closest advisor and confidant until I met and married my husband.” [attorney Judd Harwood].”
She added: “There was no job that my father didn’t give me advice on.”
In 2006, Slive Harwood was “loaned” by Georgia Tech to serve as director of the local organizing committee for the Final Four in Atlanta. She then took a job at Host Communications, a college sports marketing company, which was soon acquired by IMG.
“Within a few months, I was back in corporate America,” Slive Harwood said. “I knew that wasn’t where I was ultimately headed.”
After three years at IMG as director of marketing and business strategy, she decided to get married and move to Birmingham, Alabama, where her father was working as an SEC commissioner.
Slive-Harwood left IMG in 2011 to become vice president of The Colonnade Group, an event-services and premium-seat company that had ongoing relationships with college sports clients, including Mike Slive’s conference. “We put up a Chinese wall around things we couldn’t discuss,” Slive-Harwood said.
Mike Slive retired from the SEC in 2015. Two years later, he co-founded a prostate cancer charity that would later be called the Mike Slive Foundation. His daughter was heavily involved in the foundation’s creation, and Slive-Harwood said it was originally going to be called the Alabama Prostate Cancer Research Foundation.
“It took quite a while to convince my dad to put his name on it,” Slive Harwood said, “we did some focus groups…We eventually went back to using my dad’s name, but he was very hesitant. But after a while he realised the benefits of his name and the connections he had made in the sporting world and all the people who knew and loved him.”
Slive died in 2018 from a recurrence of prostate cancer. The following year, Colonnade Group was acquired by private equity firm Thiel Capital, with Slive Harwood serving as the foundation’s first executive director. The current advisory board includes Bob Bowlsby, former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren (who succeeded Newman Delaney’s father), and Thiel Capital founder and chairman Ben Sutton.
Slive Harwood said her father had encouraged her to write a book about his life in the years before he died, and she now plans to do so.
“It’s just a matter of when and how,” she said. “This is a very unique story that happened at a time when the world needed these stories.”
