Defining piece of Kevin Warren's legacy as Big Ten commissioner hasn't played out yet | Opinion

Kevin Warren acted as the vanguard for a series of unconventional hires at the Power Five commissioner level when he was tapped to succeed Jim Delany in 2019.

Warren was the next commissioner hired after the SEC elevated Greg Sankey, Mike Slive’s deputy, four years prior. Unlike Sankey, Warren was an outsider to college sports, having spent most of his professional career in the NFL. He would prove the first of a few — when the Pac-12 and Big 12 went looking for new leaders in subsequent years, they, too, hired outside the insular world of college athletics.

Now, Warren heads back to the NFL. After three tumultuous years in the hot seat in Park Ridge, Illinois, Warren will move across town to run the Bears. Behind him, he’ll leave a complicated legacy, one by no means decided yet.

“The Council of Presidents and Chancellors (COP/C) for the Big Ten conference is grateful to Commissioner Kevin Warren for his valuable service to the conference and its member institutions over the past three years,” a conference statement released around 1 p.m. Thursday read in part. “Commissioner Warren was pivotal in the expansion from 14 to 16 academic and athletic member institutions and leading the media rights negotiations for the conference. He has been dedicated to building inclusion and equity in the conference while championing mental health and wellness. We thank him for his service and wish him the very best in his new endeavor.”

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The statement, released hours after Warren’s official confirmation as the Chicago Bears’ next president, makes little pretense about what the Big Ten will see as Warren’s enduring achievements.

He delivered the billion-dollar media rights deal everyone expected to shift the paradigm for television revenues in college sports. He was a central figure in College Football Playoff expansion. And he oversaw the largely smooth process of swiping Southern Cal and UCLA out of the Pac-12 and expanding the Big Ten all the way to the West Coast, countering the SEC’s move for Texas and Oklahoma with the only two brand-name players not already in one of the country’s two most-powerful conferences.

That is how the Big Ten will frame Warren’s tenure. It’s fair and understandable. It’s also an incomplete story.

Warren will be rightly praised for some secondary strengths, like his aggressively forward positions on diversity and inclusion, and student-athletes’ rights. He’ll rightly be criticized for the conference’s missteps around the COVID season, and the perception that the Big Ten office could be at times aloof to sports beyond football.

But a lot of that will wind up ephemera. The angry dysfunction of the 2020 season has already faded, for example.

Warren’s enduring impact on the Big Ten will be the delivery of a 16-team, coast-to-coast league and a media rights package to match it. Toss in Playoff expansion — something Warren ensured the league remained at the heart of — and he’s cleared the decks on virtually every major issue on his desk when he started in this job in January 2020. To do all that while navigating the unexpected chaos of a global pandemic deserves some credit.

If his remit was simply to navigate those big issues and keep the conference strong, on his way out the door, Warren can point to the future and the bottom line, and say job well done.

What if the Los Angeles move isn’t the windfall we expect? What if the decision to break free of ESPN and lump the conference’s fortunes in with Fox turns out to be misguided? What if revenue sharing, the next logical step in athlete compensation, wipes out a big chunk of that media rights deal?

That’s the pessimistic view. The optimistic one would be the opposite: Expanding to the West Coast gives the Big Ten the greatest leverage in future CFP expansion (or replacement), Fox possesses more than enough juice to wedge its way past ESPN and when revenue sharing does arrive, the Big Ten can manage the financial fallout better than most competitors because Warren ensured the conference remained so well-heeled.

Choose your own adventure. The next decade is going to transform college sports in ways we could not have fathomed 10 years ago. And as it searches for its next leader, with a COP/C greatly changed and not nearly as established as the one that hired Warren, the Big Ten will probably think outside the box again. The NCAA, for example, just hired the governor of Massachusetts as its next president. No reason one of America’s most-influential conferences wouldn’t at least consider being so bold.

Warren’s successor will walk into a job that should be easier than the one he inherited. A lot of that was the pandemic. Some of it was crises of his own making. Some of it was issues on his desk the day he arrived.

The wildcard in all this is the fallout from Warren’s handling of the biggest of those issues. How much of that turns out to be an advantage for the conference will define his tenure.

The most important chapter of Kevin Warren’s legacy will be written after he’s left the office to the next Big Ten commissioner, for better or worse.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Kevin Warren's Big Ten legacy isn't finished as he leaves for Bears