Power Progeny: Delany’s Son Joins Fellow Commish Kids in the Family Biz

On a morning in late February, Whit Babcock, the athletic director at Virginia Tech, received an email from an unfamiliar sender with a very familiar last name.

“I know you have worked with my father, Jim Delany, but [I] wanted to introduce myself,” read the note from Newman Delany, referring to his old man.

The longtime Big Ten commissioner’s son was soliciting interest on behalf of Collegiate Athletic Solutions, a college sports-focused investment company recently formed by RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital. Delany is the new venture’s senior vice president and only publicly known employee.  

After attending the University of North Carolina, his father’s alma mater, Newman Delany had until recently resisted the pros–and conflicts–of following his dad’s footsteps into college sports.

In his email to Babcock, which was obtained through a public records request, Delany explained that he had joined CAS after spending 15 years in investment banking. For the bulk of that time, Delany worked at Deloitte Corporate Finance, most recently heading up its life sciences and health care group while based in Tampa, Fla., where Weatherford Capital is headquartered.

Beyond email name-dropping, it’s unclear to what extent Jim Delany is involved in his son’s current endeavor. The Big Ten’s former commissioner continues to hold sway in college sports, having recently served as an advisor to both the Big Ten and ACC while also partnering with the Montag Group on a consulting business.

Newman declined to be interview for this story through a RedBird Capital spokesperson, and Jim Delany did not respond to an request for comment sent via the Montag Group.

College sports is so often a family affair, with sons and daughters of coaches often playing and eventually coaching, themselves. Less recognized, but no less the case, is the hereditary nature of athletic administration, from ADs to conference bosses, as exemplified by the successors of Delany and his fellow former Power 5 commissioners—Mike Slive (SEC), Bob Bowlsby (Big 12) and John Swofford (ACC). In some cases, as with Newman Delany, it’s been a deferred calling. 

“I didn’t want to get into a career where I was ‘Mike Slive’s daughter,’” said Anna Slive Harwood, whose first job out of college was in a marketing role with accounting giant Arthur Andersen. “I realized as I grew up that everybody I knew in college sports was my family, and I missed that and I missed being around all these people.”

After the collapse of Arthur Andersen in 2002, brought on by the Enron scandal, Slive Harwood took a position with the Chicago-based advertising company Leo Burnett. She lasted only nine months before she says she decided to quit. By then in her late 20s, Slive Harwood decided to enroll in grad school at Northwestern, with an eye on a career shift into college sports. From there, she accepted a low-level position in the athletic department of Georgia Tech, an ACC school.

“I wanted to be near the SEC but not in the SEC, because I didn’t want anyone to have any ideas of nepotism,” she said.

Those impressions can be hard to live down. Consider the decades-old, conflict-of-interest controversy surrounding another Tar Heel father-son duo, John and Chad Swofford, which was revived earlier this year in Florida State’s lawsuit against the ACC.

In 2005, under John Swofford’s commissionership, the ACC extended a membership invitation to then-Big East member Boston College, where Chad Swofford was working at the time. Two years later, in 2007, Chad Swofford took a job at Charlotte-based Raycom Sports, a regional TV syndicator, which had an existing relationship with both the ACC and SEC. Raycom faced an existential crisis the following year when it lost its business with the SEC, which had decided to give ESPN the rights for all of its content. Afterward, Raycom issued a round of layoffs, which Chad Swofford survived.

As suggested by FSU’s lawsuit, Chad Swofford’s continued employment at Raycom was a factor in the much-maligned TV deal the ACC struck with ESPN in 2011. That agreement entailed a separate sub-licensing agreement between Raycom and ESPN.

According to a Sports Business Journal story, John Swofford had specifically told ESPN that he favored a deal that would help ensure Raycom stayed in operation.

“The Raycom Sports Partnership has cost each ACC member several million dollars and continues to depress the value of their media rights, and the cost and success of their prestige network through today,” FSU’s amended complaint stated.

Chad Swofford, who did not respond to a request for comment, eventually served as Raycom’s vice president and general manager of ACC digital, before being promoted to his current position: VP of business development and general manager for linear networks. John Swofford, who retired as ACC commissioner in 2021, also did not respond to a request for comment sent via an ACC spokesperson.

The Bowlsby college sports legacy is being carried on by the former Big 12 commissioner’s two sons, Kyle and Matt. Kyle currently runs Bowlsby Sports Advisors, a consulting firm that specializes in executive search and strategic analysis for athletic departments. Kyle Bowlsby, like his father, is based in Dallas, while Kyle works for FloSports, the sports streaming service, in Austin, TX.

This past school year found Kyle and Bob Bowlsby—who retired from the Big 12 in 2022— working in tandem at Northern Iowa, where Bob was serving as the school’s interim athletic director at the same time Bowlsby Sports Advisors was contracted to find a permanent AD successor.

“Over the last year, we have involved (Bob Bowlsby) under our umbrella in strategic consulting projects and he has been part of going after some business,” Kyle Bowlsby said. “He is not highly involved but willing to come on board where I need him.”

Kyle Bowlsby said growing up the son of an athletic director-turned-commissioner encouraged him to want to work in college sports, but more on the periphery. In the interview, he recalled occasionally running into Newman Delany over the years, including at the 2003 Final Four in New Orleans, where they both served as volunteer ballboys.

After studying sports management at Iowa, Bowlsby, like Slive Harwood, decided he instead wanted to “blaze [his] own path” after college. He moved to San Diego where he tried grinding it out in commercial real estate during the post-recession doldrums. “I thought I could get in at the bottom and cut my teeth,” he said.

After four years, Bowlsby had enough, and—again like Slive Harwood—decided to enroll in Northwestern’s grad program in sports management.

“We have never wanted—my brother and I—to put our dad in awkward situations where people felt they had to help us,” Bowlsby said. “But certainly, when I was looking for jobs, I sat down with Jim Phillips at Northwestern, and went to the Big Ten headquarters and let people know that I am trying to get into sports.”

Bowlsby eventually was hired by Property Consulting Group, a Chicago-based digital media company that worked with sports clients and was later rebranded 4FRONT and eventually acquired by Legends. He says his connection to the company came courtesy of his brother, as opposed to his father.

From there, Kyle Bowlsby went to work at Korn Ferry, the management consulting company, where he focused on college sports executive search projects. In April 2019, he launched his eponymous shop, where he has since done work with several dozen college athletic departments. He says he has bid for work with a couple of college conferences he did not identify, but has yet to land one.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t won those proposals,” Bowlsby said. “I think conferences like to align themselves with bigger, more established companies, which is fine. I think that day will come eventually for us.”

Matt Bowlsby’s first post-collegiate job was with Learfield’s Purdue Sports Properties. He then went to business school at Stanford—where his father was serving as the school’s athletic director—before joining the upstart Pac-12 Network. In 2012, Bob Bowlsby left the Cardinal to take the Big 12 commissioner job in Dallas. Four years later, Matt Bowlsby also moved to Texas for a job with FloSports, where he has since been involved in negotiating deals with the Big 12.

“There is always a touch of awkwardness during those encounters,” Matt Bowlsby said in an interview. To “ensure there was no conflict-of-interest,” Matt Bowlsby said his father would excuse himself from any conversation or decision involving FloSports.

Throughout his career, Matt Bowlsby said Bob has served as a sounding board, “but that is the extent of his involvement. I think everyone wants to make it on their own merits.”

Slive Harwood describes her father as “probably my closest advisor and counsel until I met and married my husband [attorney Judd Harwood].”

She added, “There wasn’t a job where my dad wasn’t intimately involved in giving me advice.”

In 2006, Slive Harwood was “loaned out” from Georgia Tech to serve as director of the Final Four local organizing committee in Atlanta. Afterwards, she took a job with Host Communications, the college sports marketing company, shortly—and unexpectedly—before it was acquired by IMG.

“Within a few months, I was back in big corporate America,” Slive Harwood said. “I knew that future wasn’t where I would end up.”

She spent three years at IMG, working as director of marketing and business strategy, before getting married and deciding to move to Birmingham, Ala., where her father was working as SEC commissioner.

Slive Harwood left IMG in 2011 to become vice president of The Colonnade Group, an event services and premium seating company, which had an ongoing relationship with Mike Slive’s conference among other college sports clients. “We made sure there was a Chinese wall for things that couldn’t be discussed,” Slive Harwood said.

In 2015, Mike Slive retired from the SEC. Two years later, he co-founded a prostate cancer charity that came to be called the Mike Slive Foundation. His daughter was heavily involved in the effort to launch the organization, which Slive Harwood says was originally supposed to be called the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama.

“It took a lot of convincing my father to put his name on it,” Slive Harwood said. “We did some focus groups … everything came back to using my dad’s name, but he was very ambivalent. But after a while he recognized the benefits of his name and the collected sports connections and all the people who knew and loved him.”

Mike Slive died from a recurrence of prostate cancer in 2018. The following year, The Colonnade Group was acquired by private equity firm Teall Capital, and Slive Harwood left to take over as the foundation’s first executive director. Its current advisory board includes Bob Bowlsby, former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren—the man who succeeded Newman Delany’s father—and Ben Sutton, Teall Capital’s founder and chairman.

Slive Harwood says that in the years before her father’s passing, she had encouraged him to write a book about his life. She now plans to write it.

“It’s just a question of when and how,” she said. “It is such a unique story at a time when the world needs those stories.”