Big East Hires Former MLB Exec Tim Brosnan as Commissioner
Get the Sports newsletter
Daily sports — scores, transfers, the storylines from the leagues you actually follow. Free.
- Tim Brosnan, a 68-year-old Georgetown grad who spent 24 years with MLB and was passed over for the MLB commissioner role a day before Rob Manfred was selected on Aug. 14, 2014, was hired as Big East commissioner to replace Val Ackerman on Sept. 1.
- Big East school presidents — all 11 of them, with St. John's Rev. Brian J. Shanley chairing the board — selected Brosnan over candidates with college-sports track records, prioritizing his revenue-generation and partnership-forging experience for the league's 'next era.'
- Brosnan's résumé extends beyond MLB: he served as CEO of Major League Baseball Enterprises, was repeatedly named to Sports Business Journal's '50 Most Influential People in Sports,' and most recently ran Georgetown's NIL collective — the exact financial infrastructure reshaping non-football conferences.
- Ackerman's tenure stabilized the Big East after early-2010s conference realignment, with Villanova and Connecticut combining for four national titles over the past decade and St. John's recent resurgence reinforcing the league's competitive footing.
- The hire has 'turned some heads in the college space,' per sources cited by CBS Sports, given Brosnan's minimal basketball experience in a sport-first conference entering what the league calls its critical 2030s financial window.
- Brosnan also holds a Georgetown Board of Regents seat and a roster of NYC-area appointments, and beat out a 'deep and eclectic pool' of candidates with the final decision landing in late July.
Why it matters: The Big East is a basketball-first league that must compete in a football-dominated revenue economy, so its presidents swapped a Hall-of-Fame basketball executive for a 24-year MLB veteran whose specialty — media rights deals and NIL collective infrastructure — is precisely the revenue machinery a sport-only conference needs to keep pace. The Aug. 14 timing of the original MLB commissioner pick and the Sept. 1 start date hand Brosnan roughly two and a half weeks to transition before media-rights and NIL-revenue decisions compound.
Ask SkimNews
