The central lesson taught by Mike Bohn of USC and Kevin Warren at the Big Ten
In many ways, the common thread between former USC athletic director Mike Bohn and former Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren is that they both started something but didn’t finish it.
Both men participated in hammering out the deal which sent USC and UCLA from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten Conference last year, but neither man will be around for the actual beginning of that new era in college sports, a new era for both USC and the Big Ten.
There’s a lesson here.
To be very clear, the ways in which Kevin Warren neglected his job with the Big Ten Conference aren’t nearly as severe or as troubling as what Mike Bohn is alleged to have done at USC. An increasing collection of reporting from multiple news outlets continues to add detail to a picture in which Mike Bohn treated a lot of people poorly within the USC and Cincinnati athletic departments. That’s extremely bad. Kevin Warren has not been reported to have done anything close to that.
However, Bohn and Warren can still be connected in that they were both very sloppy on the job and did not earn the full respect of the people they worked for. Warren, as Pete Thamel of ESPN has reported in recent days, did not finalize television contracts and did not communicate specific details to member athletic departments, which has caused a mad scramble throughout the conference’s schools. Budgetary projections have to be revised. Allocations of resources have to be re-examined. Kevin Warren no longer works for the Big Ten, but he has made life more difficult for a lot of people who work at Big Ten schools.
What we have here with Mike Bohn and Kevin Warren — even though the severity of their actions exists on different levels — is a clear-enough reality in which both men knew they had registered fundamental achievements. Bohn hired Lincoln Riley, which he and everyone else in college sports knew was a game-changer for USC football and USC athletics. The move to the Big Ten was similar. Kevin Warren knew that landing USC as a new Big Ten member, and then arranging the framework (though not finalizing all the details) for massively lucrative TV deals, would print money for Big Ten schools.
The ways in which Bohn and Warren neglected their respective jobs were different. Again, Bohn behaved very poorly, whereas Warren did not — they’re in two very different moral universes in that regard. However, in one specific way, the two men are fundamentally the same: They surely thought or realized that they were making a lot of money for themselves and for their respective institutions. They knew they had increased the value of the places they worked for.
They neglected various other aspects of their jobs: Bohn not treating people well and not showing up for meetings, Warren not communicating to Big Ten athletic departments and not finalizing TV contracts. They both got sloppy. They both coasted to a degree. They both are somewhere else now. Bohn is disgraced. Warren, though not disgraced, is now working with the Chicago Bears and doesn’t have to deal with the Big Ten anymore, leaving others to clean up his mess.
There’s a very clear lesson here: Just because someone makes a lot of money for himself and/or others, that doesn’t mean one can or should coast on the job and get sloppy. It’s not a reason to neglect parts of one’s job description. Yes, the checks are going to cash. USC will get paid for joining the Big Ten. Kevin Warren and Big Ten schools will get paid for these TV deals Warren set in motion (but which current commissioner Tony Petitti has to finalize).
Yes, Bohn made money for USC and Warren made money for the Big Ten. We can acknowledge that. It doesn’t mean what either man did afterward was okay or acceptable.
Making money doesn’t mean moral, ethical, or professional failures are somehow made acceptable. That’s the lesson taught by Mike Bohn and (to a lesser but still real degree) Kevin Warren.
