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The news started as one final Woj bomb, but for Adrian Wojnarowski, the move to leave ESPN is all about going home.
The venerated NBA news-breaker is leaving the sports media giant halfway through an estimated five-year, $35 million contract to become the GM of the men’s basketball program at St. Bonaventure, his alma mater.
To the uninitiated, this might seem like a deeply odd move, especially to Wojnarowski’s stunned colleagues back at ESPN. Why leave millions on the table to work at one of the smallest schools in Division I athletics, located in a remote part of western New York, and one still figuring out how to compete in a fundamentally changed and more financially driven world of college sports?
But Wojnarowski has been deeply entrenched with the school, and particularly its basketball program, in the three-plus decades since graduating. He’s been a major benefactor to St. Bonaventure, was the school’s commencement speaker in 2022, is a regular sounding board for men’s basketball coach Mark Schmidt, and most recently, has played a leading role in forming and building the Bonnies’ NIL (name, image, and likeness) collective, Team Unfurl.
The Bonnies also enjoy one of the most committed alumni groups of any school in the country. Full disclosure: I, too, am part of that alumni base, and am very familiar with that fervor. I overlapped for one year at St. Bonaventure with Wojnarowski. My wife and I worked at the school newspaper with Wojnarowski and his wife, Amy, and my daughter is currently a senior there.
Now, the 55-year-old Wojnarowski is jumping at the chance to take that alumni passion to an entirely different level.
“After all these years of reporting on everyone’s teams, I’m heading back to my own,” Wojnarowski tweeted Wednesday.
Changing Landscape
The new position for Wojnarowski, meanwhile, also leans heavily in to a rapidly evolving GM role for college sports programs—a spot that did not broadly exist until just a few years ago. Historic shifts in NIL and media rights, realignment, and the transfer portal, however, have prompted a fast-growing number of schools to create such a position. At St. Bonaventure, Wojnarowski’s duties will include not only managing NIL opportunities, collectives, and the transfer portal, but also fundraising, aiding in recruiting, and helping oversee the program’s relationships with the broader basketball community.
“Woj is the perfect person to fill this new role, combining his intimate knowledge of St. Bonaventure and our Franciscan values with a deep network of relationships he has built across the worlds of professional and intercollegiate basketball,” said Bob Beretta, St. Bonaventure athletic director. Beretta, also an alumnus, started in the role in June. “The fact that the preeminent journalist in his field is willing to walk away from a lucrative media career to serve his alma mater in a support role is a testament to his love and passion for Bona’s.”
