— Reporting by Max Olson, Matt Fortuna and Nicole Auerbach
The drive from Burlington, Vt., to Brant Lake Camp in upstate New York stretches about 70 miles and requires at least 90 minutes. That’s all it took for a young Brett Yormark to leave a lasting impression on future Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany.
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It was the early 1980s, and Delany was running the Ohio Valley Conference at the time. He had a summer house near the camp, so he’d asked his friend and camp owner Richie Gersten for a lift from the Vermont airport. Gersten asked his counselors for help, and Yormark, then a student at Indiana University, raised his hand.
Delany told The Athletic that he remembered Yormark well and fondly recalled that drive. Yormark spent the trip asking question after question about Delany’s work in college sports.
It would be easy to frame that chance encounter with Delany, who would rise to become one of the most powerful leaders in college athletics, as a formative moment. And it certainly might’ve been for a college student with a love of sports who was studying business. But few could’ve predicted the career path Yormark chose would someday lead him to become a college commissioner himself.
Now he’s in charge of the Big 12. The conference announced his hiring on Wednesday. The 55-year-old executive will succeed Bob Bowlsby, the league’s leader for the past decade, starting on Aug. 1.
“Brett was a smart and ambitious guy who has had a remarkable career in professional sports entertainment, media and sales,” Delany said. “I certainly wish him and the Big 12 well going forward.”
While he and Delany go way back, this was the immediate response among Big 12 athletic directors on Monday night when Yormark’s name first emerged as the target: We’ve never heard of this guy.
“Candidly, not anybody that I know or have ever crossed paths with,” Baylor AD Mack Rhoades said Tuesday.
“I had to Google him,” added another AD.
Who is Yormark and why was he the choice? The Big 12’s presidents and chancellors believe he’s the innovative dealmaker they need in these turbulent times. If you’re willing to concede the future of college athletics at the highest level will increasingly resemble pro sports, you’d want a guy like Yormark leading you there.
Yormark likes to describe his career as a progression ladder. Every move he’s made up to this point helped him level up, gaining the skills and experience necessary to become an effective CEO. And he figured out his calling early on.
After his junior year at Indiana, Yormark landed an internship with Salomon Brothers investment bank in 1988. Back then, he thought he’d end up working on Wall Street. After his three-month experience in that world, he understood it wasn’t actually his passion.
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“At that point, I realized I’m going to pivot and truly chase my passion and dreams, which was to be in sports,” Yormark said earlier this year in an interview on The Jon Schultz Podcast. “At that moment, I realized that was my true calling.”
The New Jersey native got his start in the Nets ticket office that same year. He was given a cubicle and a pad and pencil and told to get to work. The front office was a smaller operation in those days and he learned every facet of the business, even working in game operations on game nights. But he was a natural when it came to the commercial side: selling tickets, selling sponsorships, driving revenue.
Yormark learned to sell at the local level. Then he moved to Chicago in 1991 to work for Katz Communications and learn regional sales. He came back to the NBA in 1992 as a senior account executive for the Detroit Pistons before returning to the Nets in 1994, becoming their senior VP of corporate marketing by the age of 29. There, he learned management skills in a major market.
“I ultimately realized as I was going up that progression ladder, I was going to stay in sales but I needed a national Rolodex,” he said. “I needed to network nationally.”
So he made a big change in 1998. He took a job with NASCAR as managing director and then VP of corporate marketing, helping a growing regional sport develop national popularity during his eight-year stint. He opened a New York office on Park Avenue and chased rapid growth, working with their drivers, teams and tracks to secure $25 million in sponsorship deals within his first two years. Along the way, he earned the trust and admiration of teams and drivers through a work ethic that colleagues at every stop of his career have described as second to none.
Then came the big deal in 2003: a $750 million, 10-year pact with Nextel to become the new primary sponsor of NASCAR’s premier series, the largest naming rights deal in the history of American sports at the time. He closed a 10-year deal worth $80-100 million with Sunoco, their official fuel sponsor, two months later. Both were key for aiding NASCAR’s long-term stability and growth.
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“It was challenging,” Yormark told Sports Business Journal in 2003. “I certainly spent a lot of nights awake thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to get this done?’”
The challenge was similar in scale when the Nets brought him back as their CEO in 2005, as the franchise had intended to relocate from New Jersey to Brooklyn. The build toward a new location while trying to maintain local fans was a tricky balance, especially as the Brooklyn project was delayed multiple times.
“When he took the Brooklyn job, everybody in New Jersey said, ‘You’ll never be able to get it done or build in Brooklyn. It’s a cesspool. No one will go there,’” said a former Nets executive who worked closely with Yormark. “I give him a lot of credit. He kept that project alive by selling the vision, selling Barclays on the deal, selling Budweiser on the deal. Every time [former Nets owner Bruce] Ratner was gonna throw in the towel, he’d come in with another $20 million sponsorship. He kept that vision going. Privately, we said, ‘Will this happen?’ Because we had 30-something lawsuits against us. God bless him, he kept us going. Privately there were doubts. Publicly, this is full-speed-ahead.
“That’s how he’ll be there. He’ll take that conference and you’ll think it’s the Big Ten.”
The Nets underwent a massive rebrand under Yormark, who landed a 20-year deal with Barclays worth nearly $400 million for the name of the franchise’s new arena. Yormark worked for multiple owners and oversaw the franchise’s growth from a regional outpost to a global entity, forming Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, which is the parent company of the Nets and their affiliates.
There were some hiccups along the way, most notably the relocation of the NHL’s Islanders from Long Island to Brooklyn from 2014 to 2020, but the Barclays Center soon became a destination venue for headlining acts. The arena opened on Sept. 28, 2012 with a Jay-Z concert, a date and act specifically picked by Yormark for his 46th birthday.
“It was the most memorable moment of my life,” he told SBJ in 2019. “It was everything coming together and sharing it with my family. What’s better than that?”
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Former Nets general manager Billy King remembers finding out after being hired that Yormark took his whole staff to Barclays Center every Sunday during the arena’s construction process.
“He’d take his whole team, walk the building and point things out,” King told The Athletic. “He did that until it was finished. … The whole building. The bathrooms. He’d check the paint. Like, ‘That’s not the right color, the one we wanted.’
“He is a stickler for the little details.”
It was that kind of attention to detail — and demanding that everyone care about those details the way he did — that enabled the move to Brooklyn in the first place. King recalls how Yormark ran the Nets’ business and operations in Newark while trying to figure out everything required for the move, from the logos and colors to tickets and concerts and everything in between. “The hardest thing going into that market is the Knicks have been in your market forever,” King said. “They had a brand. We had to introduce a new brand and do it right, because you only get one chance to introduce a brand.”
When owner Mikhail Prokhorov’s sale of the Nets and Barclays Center to Joe Tsai closed in 2019, Yormark jumped right into his next endeavor. He teamed up with Jay-Z and Roc Nation, working as COO with his twin brother Michael Yormark, a fellow longtime sports exec. That move kept him in the sports and entertainment business but taught him far more about “different areas of the sandbox” in managing athletes and artists.
Throughout his rise, the three-time “Forty Under 40” honoree developed a reputation for his hard-charging, relentless pace. Yormark was known for starting his days with 4 a.m. workouts and 5 a.m. calls. Ratner liked to joke Yormark gets more done in a day than he does in a week. The trait that got him this far, working tirelessly through the challenges faced at every stop in a 30-plus year career in pro sports, was operating with great conviction.
“You’ve got to have great belief in what you’re doing,” he said. “Not that you want to convince yourself it’s gonna happen, but you’ve gotta make sure that on the merits of the story, the merits of this vision and mission, that you can get there.”
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The question he has everyone wondering now: What sold him on the Big 12’s story? What made this conference the next rung on his ladder?
“Brett wants to be the best,” King said. “That drives him. Whoever he is leading, whatever organization it is, he wants to be best in class in everything he does.”
The shock on Monday night, among people inside the Big 12, wasn’t just that they had no history with Yormark. It’s that their Board of Directors, chaired by Texas Tech president Lawrence Schovanec, went the nontraditional route with this critical hire.
The search process, run by TurnkeyZRG and the executive committee of Schovanec, Baylor president Linda Livingstone and Kansas chancellor Douglas Girod, ran fairly leak-free until Monday night. So much so, in fact, that when a Sports Illustrated report emerged that Yormark was the target, the presidents hadn’t yet informed their athletic directors.
On April 5, when Bowlsby announced he’d step down, Schovanec told The Athletic the ideal candidate would have the right mix of college athletics experience and media landscape savvy. But he made it clear that day he had higher ambitions for the conference as a national brand.
“The Big 12 represents tremendous inventory,” Schovanec said. “One of the presidents I spoke with made a comment that I thought was very appropriate. He said, ‘We are a conference for the country, the entire country.’ We need to seize on that strength and we need to capitalize on that as we engage in conversations with our media partners.”
Tim Pernetti, the COO for IMG Academy, and Alex Martins, the Orlando Magic CEO and chairman of the UCF Board of Regents, were also finalists for the job, sources told The Athletic. More traditional candidates were considered, including Colorado athletic director Rick George and Alabama AD Greg Byrne. Pernetti did previously serve as Rutgers AD from 2009 to ‘13. But in the end, the decision made by the presidents and chancellors of the eight remaining Big 12 members came down to three outsider candidates.
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“We have chosen a highly adaptable leader who thrives in dynamic times,” Schovanec said Wednesday. “The landscape of college athletics is evolving to look more like the world Brett has been leading.”
Is it fair to say Schovanec and the board aimed to find the next George Kliavkoff?
“Definitively yes,” one Big 12 source argued.
“They needed a businessman,” another Big 12 source said. “Somebody who has an ability to get deals done. I think that’s what they got.”
Yormark impressed the board with his high-energy personality and extreme preparedness in interviews. The connections, ideas and enthusiasm he brought to the table won them over. No one who knows him well finds any of that surprising. But it is fair to wonder why Yormark would want to leave New York, move down to Dallas and embrace this opportunity.
“Watching Brett walk into that first board meeting with cowboy boots and hats while he’s got on his Armani suit is gonna be funny,” the former Nets executive joked.
“How is he going to play in Manhattan, Kan.?” one Big 12 source asked.
The Big 12 needs a leader who can maximize its value, and the hire reflects that reality. Negotiations on their next TV contract will begin in 2024. The conference distributed $42.6 million in revenue to each member school for the 2021-22 fiscal year, and that sum could approach $50 million in the final year of the contract. No one can afford to take a hit on the next deal.
The defining challenge for Yormark early on in his tenure will be the Big 12’s media strategy. How does he sell this league as it replaces Oklahoma and Texas with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF? He needs to build the relationships and strike the right partnerships so the Big 12 is as well positioned for the future as possible with linear and streaming distribution. As one source pointed out, Apple’s recent $2.5 billion deal for MLS rights inspires hope that a big payday from a streaming partner might be possible.
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Yormark has plenty of experience in this arena. Maybe he also likes the challenge, knowing that some estimates project the SEC and Big Ten will be making twice as much money as their Power 5 peers by as soon as 2026. Can he make all the right moves to help his underdog league close the gap? As Bowlsby has said plenty of times, the value of media is only worth what anybody will pay you for it.
There’s another potential deal Yormark will have to consider from Day 1: a divorce settlement with Oklahoma and Texas. What would it cost each school to join the SEC before 2025? Bowlsby believed the value of their grant of rights far exceeded an $80 million exit fee. The Big 12 is not motivated to let them off the hook for a discount. “We need to get every nickel out of them,” one source said. It’ll be fascinating to see how Yormark assesses that standoff.
But these days, the role of conference commissioner entails so much more.
Big 12 athletic directors spent Monday night scrolling and learning what they could about their new leader. One joked that he figures he might now have an “in” to get Beyonce tickets.
But there was legitimate surprise from the group at large. They live in college towns and work on college campuses, dealing with the realities of an ever-evolving college athletic model on a daily basis. They also understand how bureaucratic the NCAA can be. They have experienced dysfunction at that level and even among FBS commissioners who couldn’t agree on expanding the College Football Playoff last year or playing a football season in 2020. Several ADs thought hiring someone well-respected from within college athletics was the best way to position the Big 12 for short- and long-term success.
Like others, Delany noted the Big 12’s choice, much like recent commissioner hires in the Big Ten and Pac-12, was nontraditional. But maybe it should be considered traditional now.
“We should all view these as the new normal as conferences seek to address new business and cultural challenges,” Delany said.
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Kevin Warren, Delany’s successor in the Big Ten, came from the Minnesota Vikings. Kliavkoff, who is approaching his one-year anniversary as Pac-12 commissioner, was previously the president of entertainment and sports for MGM Resorts International. Neither had worked full-time in college sports before taking their jobs. Yormark hasn’t either, although he has worked with college basketball leaders over the years to bring various high-profile games and events to Brooklyn.
Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, said he thinks it makes sense that conferences have looked at candidate pools with diverse experiences, particularly in a changing environment with athletes allowed to make money off of their names, images and likenesses (NIL), potential NCAA governance reform and myriad other issues from College Football Playoff expansion to antitrust concerns.
“I don’t think it’s any secret — most acknowledge this in our business — that this is probably the most disruptive time in the history of college athletics,” Gavitt told The Athletic. “It just makes sense to consider other perspectives. … (But) if you don’t have deep experience in our business, it’s important to have relationships and the ability to get up to speed quickly because there are some intricacies in college athletics, historically, that are challenging if you don’t have any sense or appreciation for them.
“My sense is Brett is smart enough and has had enough engagement at IU and other places to understand how some of that works. He’ll be able to navigate it. But, like George and Kevin, there will undoubtedly be a learning curve. There will be some serious studying that has to be done to figure out how to navigate a different way.”
Gavitt called Yormark a great networker, someone able to build both professional and personal relationships with ease. He believes that Yormark’s list of college sports contacts may be more extensive than people in the industry realize, between Yormark’s connections to his alma mater and his friendship with Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari.
Years ago, Yormark reached out to get to know Gavitt and to let him know the Barclays Center was very interested in hosting a round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which it did for the first time in 2016. The two have stayed in touch, and Yormark contacted him last summer to learn more about NIL and what Roc Nation could or couldn’t do in that space.
“He wanted to make sure to do it the right way and in the smartest way,” Gavitt said. “I’m sure I was not the only one he called, but because we’ve had a friendship and a relationship, he trusted me. He wants to learn. He wants to be smart. He wants to rely on people who he trusts and think will have insight, and then he’ll go back with his own team and figure out how best to proceed.”
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Those who have worked with Yormark felt he had one big career move left in him. King said he talked to Yormark about two weeks ago and got the sense that he might be ready and willing to leave Roc Nation – but only for something that truly challenged him.
“And I look at college sports, and it’s a challenging time right now,” King said. “If you look at his career path, he took over the Nets, moved to Brooklyn, built a brand. That was a challenge. He went to NASCAR, and it was a challenge to create sponsorships and be different.
“I think this is a great move because college athletics is a big business. They need someone who has a big vision of where it’s going to go. With NIL and the transfer portal and all the new media opportunities coming, you can’t think the old, traditional way. … You’ve got to think outside of the box, and that’s why I think it’s a great move for the Big 12.”
(Photo: Kathy Willens / AP)