Longtime ESPN insider and newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski announced Wednesday that he’s retiring from ESPN and returning to his alma mater, St. Bonaventure, as general manager of the Bonnies men’s basketball program.
So, uh … what exactly does that mean?
The job of a college basketball general manager — and even the specific title — varies dramatically from school to school, which should be expected considering how new the concept is. After all, Rachel Baker was the first such hire in the sport’s history, and that was only in May 2022, shortly after Jon Scheyer replaced retiring head coach Mike Krzyzewski. Baker’s hiring, at the time, sent shockwaves throughout the industry, especially given her background at Nike and with the WNBA. More schools, like DePaul and Howard, followed shortly thereafter, taking advantage of new NCAA rules that allowed for larger coaching and support staffs.
But this offseason, the trend of college programs hiring general managers grew to new levels. Syracuse, Arizona and Butler, among others, have made similar additions, under a variety of job titles. Arizona’s Matt King, for example, is officially the Wildcats president of basketball operations. Those hires, importantly, have come from a variety of former jobs and underscore just how much the job itself varies from school to school. King, for instance, came from Position Sports, a brand marketing firm that specializes in event management and scheduling. Meanwhile, Alex Kline (Syracuse) was a former NBA scout for the New York Knicks, specializing in talent evaluation. Butler went a different route entirely, hiring Tony Bollier from the Milwaukee Bucks. Bollier served as the franchise’s director of basketball operations and as the general manager for the Bucks G-League affiliate, the Wisconsin Herd.
At some schools, the position overlaps more acutely with coaching — or, in DePaul’s case, they’re one in the same. Former Butler head coach LaVall Jordan joined Chris Holtmann’s staff in April as an assistant coach and general manager. When Jordan was hired, Holtmann explicitly referenced both Jordan’s “great experience in developing guards for the NBA and his skill teaching,” but also how the former head coach “will assist us greatly and play an instrumental role in the NIL space and roster construction.”
If there is any overlap for many of these newly created positions, it’s largely dealing with those two buckets: roster management and NIL consulting. Texas Tech general manager Kellen Buffington, a former grassroots basketball organizer, said those are the things that occupy most of his time working for Red Raiders coach Grant McCasland.
“Probably just trying to figure out the salary cap. I would say roster construction — identification, evaluating high school players and evaluating your own guys and trying to figure out where to slot financially based on production plus what the market will pay for them,” Buffington said. “You’re always trying to figure that out. I use a lot of analytics to do that, to kind of check my work. But it is really trying to figure out who you want to retain and how much you can afford to pay them, knowing you still got to go out and get pieces to put with them out of the portal and high school.”
And these are just schools with in-house general manager hires. Other programs — like North Carolina, whose collective hired former Kentucky director of player development TJ Beisner last September — have intentionally made hires outside of the university structure, allowing those positions greater flexibility under the collective’s umbrella.
All of which is a long way of saying that the job itself depends on the place and the particular hire’s best attributes. Buffington said he met Baker at the Final Four last season, and “what she does is completely different than what I do, but it is the same type of effect. That’s what her program needs her to do.”
So, what does that mean in Wojnarowski’s case with St. Bonaventure? Expect his deep Rolodex and connections throughout the basketball universe to immediately pay dividends. That starts with his established relationships with many prominent agents. With agent influence in college basketball at an all-time high, having someone who already knows those people — and, importantly, how to interact with them — is of critical value. Along those same lines, while Wojnarowski hasn’t directly negotiated any of the countless NBA deals he broke at ESPN, he is deeply familiar with their workings and can help the Bonnies structure their resources in the best possible way.
Buffington added that since St. Bonaventure is an Atlantic-10 school, and therefore not receiving massive television distributions like high-major programs, he anticipates a large part of Wojnarowski’s role will be revenue generation.
“I’m sure they got some money, but Woj probably knows some people,” Buffington said. “He’s an alum from there. Probably more so marketing and fundraising.”
Ironically, if there is an immediate downside to St. Bonaventure hiring its most famous alum, it’s this: Wojnarowski, per NCAA bylaws, won’t be allowed to financially contribute to the Bonnies program, something he’s regularly done in the past.
How he counteracts that and leverages his network to compensate for it is a different and allowable measure.
(Photo: Joe Murphy / NBAE via Getty Images)
