The Big Ten made plenty of headlines last year when the conference announced its new media rights deal with CBS, NBC and FOX, but apparently, as the new contract gets set to go into effect, there have been questions raised about former commissioner Kevin Warren and how the deal was negotiated.
Warren recently stepped down as commissioner of the Big Ten and accepted a job to be the president of the Chicago Bears. On ESPN 1000 in Chicago, hosts John “Jurko” Jurkovic and Carmen DeFalco were trying to figure out how the problems persisting in the conference with the media rights deal correlate to Warren’s ability to do his job with the Bears.
“Am I supposed to care about any of this?” DeFalco asked on Monday. “I’m not even being facetious.”
Jurkovic said one of the main reasons Warren was hired by the Bears was to help the franchise with its plans to build a new stadium in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb. Warren was instrumental in the construction and development of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis when he was the COO of the Minnesota Vikings.
“If Minnesota was crying about their facility being built, or how it was built, and they had some complaints about the way Kevin Warren handled that, that would be of greater concern to me than what the Big Ten wants to cry about now,” Jurko said.
DeFalco wondered if he should consider the story more worthy of discussion, but he wasn’t sure.
“Maybe I should be more concerned than I am. I’m just not that concerned right now,” he said. “Maybe I’m dismissing it too much.”
Jurko said that Warren probably got tired of having to cater to leadership at all the member schools on top of everything else that comes with running a college conference. He probably welcomed any chance to get back into the NFL.
“Let me paint you a picture,” Jurko said. “You’re the commissioner of the Big Ten. What do you think you have every Monday morning, or every Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, every Saturday night after college football games and everything? What do you think he gets? He gets 14 athletic directors bitching, moaning and crying and then he gets 14 presidents crying and moaning and bitching about this and that.
“At what point do you think Kevin Warren was like, ‘You know what, I gotta get the H outta here when I can,'” he added. “And when the Bears opportunity probably presented itself he was like, ‘Thank God!'”
