One Wednesday last month, Adrian Wojnarowski made the three-hour drive from his home in northern New Jersey to Pennsylvania to see his St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team play at Bucknell. Wojnarowski is the St. Bonaventure general manager, but until recently he made his very public living by breaking news stories about the N.B.A. and then talking about them on ESPN. He was recognized by the first person he saw at Bucknell, a school official who pronounced himself a “big fan.” More encounters followed. At halftime, he tried to catch up with a childhood friend who was attending the game. Their conversation proceeded fitfully, interrupted by strangers introducing themselves and asking for selfies. Wojnarowski was invariably obliging. “I’ve become his photographer,” the friend told me.
By then, St. Bonaventure’s Bonnies were ahead, 38-16. The rout underway was not entirely unexpected. Though Bucknell’s undergraduate enrollment of 3,900 makes it twice as large as St. Bonaventure, the Bonnies play in the Atlantic 10, a more competitive conference than Bucknell’s Patriot League, which includes similarly sized schools like Lafayette and Holy Cross. A successful Atlantic 10 team should be able to win this matchup, even in Bucknell’s home gym.
And St. Bonaventure is successful, especially considering its size, which limits everything from alumni fund-raising to the amenities it can afford to provide to students. Back in 1970, it reached the N.C.A.A.’s Final Four; of the 99 schools that have achieved this feat, it is the smallest. And since 2007, when Mark Schmidt became head coach, the team has won two regular-season titles and two conference tournaments.
But in 2021, the N.C.A.A. abandoned most of its restrictions against compensation for student athletes. This has transformed college recruiting largely into a matter of how much a team and its outside supporters are willing to pay. In 2022, the Bonnies reached the semifinals of the postseason National Invitation Tournament by beating Colorado, Oklahoma and Virginia. Four of their five starters announced their intention to return. Then the offers of name, image and likeness payments started pouring in. Such payments, known as N.I.L., allow college athletes to make money from product endorsements, donations from wealthy alumni, even contributions from ordinary fans. Within days, those four starters were all gone, off to larger state schools whose teams are often highly ranked. “I’ve never seen a good team with bad players,” Schmidt muses now. “And in order to get good players, you need money.” That’s where Wojnarowski comes in.
At his old job, the one that paid him $7.3 million annually, his mobile phone buzzed with texts from morning until deep into night. Some of them came from N.B.A. owners. Some came from general managers, head coaches or sources in the league office. Others came from college coaches or agents. Occasionally he would hear from one of basketball’s top players — Russell Westbrook, say, or Donovan Mitchell. Some texts were more important than others. When Wojnarowski was expecting an especially crucial one, a confirmation of a trade or a major free-agent signing, he wouldn’t leave his house or hotel room.
For more than a decade, as an ESPN reporter and podcaster (and as a columnist at Yahoo before that), he was so determined to beat every other reporter to every bit of N.B.A. news that he made it a priority to take overnight flights because news usually doesn’t happen overnight. In recent years, as the pressure for him to break stories intensified, he stopped driving anywhere more than a few minutes away and relied on a car service — he didn’t want to be on a highway and risk losing an exclusive when a source had news to break. Whenever he had a scoop, he would post it on Twitter and Instagram for his millions of followers. Wojnarowski is universally referred to as Woj, and those postings became known among even casual basketball fans as Woj Bombs. Almost immediately, they would appear across the ESPN networks, featured on the crawl at the bottom of the screen: according to Woj … Woj reports … sources told ESPN’s Woj.
Afterward, he would go on SportsCenter to discuss the news. Then he would write about it in detail for the website. But the Woj Bombs were what mattered to ESPN, and they were what mattered to Wojnarowski. The day in 2019 when the Brooklyn Nets acquired Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan set off a series of Woj Bombs. When Wojnarowski reported that the N.B.A. had suspended play in 2020 because of the pandemic, that became a significant Woj Bomb. And this past September, when he posted that he was leaving his ESPN job to accept a position as the general manager of the basketball team at St. Bonaventure, his alma mater, that was maybe the biggest Woj Bomb of all.
The general manager of a college basketball team is a relatively new position, not merely at St. Bonaventure but around the country. Duke hired the first one in 2022. At the start of the current season, there were only about a dozen, mostly at perennial basketball powers like Villanova and Syracuse. St. Bonaventure is not such a power. But when Bob Beretta became the school’s athletic director last summer, he realized that someone who could coordinate N.I.L. payments to players, while helping with recruiting and perhaps even finding ways for the program to generate more revenue, would be a valuable addition to his basketball staff.
Wojnarowski met his future wife, Amy, when they were students at St. Bonaventure, and he remains intensely loyal to the school. Throughout his professional career, he has been a visible and vocal supporter of its basketball program. Once N.I.L. became permitted by the N.C.A.A., he made annual donations of $100,000 to $200,000 to a fund set up to pay players. Last July, Beretta asked him to use his extensive network of contacts to help find a worthy general manager. At 55, Wojnarowski was tired of contorting his life to ensure that he never missed a text. He suggested himself.
Wojnarowski earns $75,000 at St. Bonaventure, about 1 percent of his former income. He rents an apartment above a bar near the bucolic campus, which is just outside Olean, N.Y., and does little each day beyond looking for ways to keep the Bonnies competitive. “If Woj had put his name into the transfer portal, it’d be Kansas, Duke and Carolina,” says Schmidt, referring to three top programs that might have gone after him. “That’s how big a deal this is. He’s like a five-star recruit, with his connections and the trust that people have in him and what he can sell these kids.”
At Bucknell, the Bonnies coasted to victory. Afterward, Wojnarowski stood in the stands and chatted with alumni. Then he set out on a four-hour drive through a snowstorm to Buffalo, where he planned to get some sleep before continuing to Toronto. In the car, his response to the game was muted. The Atlantic 10 is a conference with national aspirations, strong enough that its teams occasionally go deep into the N.C.A.A. tournament. Beating a Patriot League team was hardly cause for celebration.
Yet as the league’s smallest school, St. Bonaventure is hardly a typical Atlantic 10 team. It has fewer living alumni in the world, for example, than the nearly 40,000 students currently enrolled at George Mason, a conference rival. Historically, the N.C.A.A.’s restrictions helped the Bonnies overcome some of that disparity. But in today’s open marketplace for recruits, heft matters.
That worries Wojnarowski, who believes that competing at an elite level in men’s basketball represents an almost existential requirement for the university. Without it, he asked me, how would St. Bonaventure be any different than SUNY-Geneseo, the N.C.A.A. Division III school we passed on the road at 2:30 that morning? What else would draw alums back to campus or entice contributions? “Without Bonaventure being competitive in the Atlantic 10, I think most people would agree, it puts the entire institution at some level of peril,” he said at one point. “It’s that vital to the landscape of the school.”
Celebrity status has a half-life, especially when much of your fan base consists of teenage boys. Now that he no longer appears on ESPN, Wojnarowski figures he has maybe five years to parlay his own name and image into enough revenue to assure the Bonnies’ status in the future. When he is asked why he would walk away from $20 million still left on his ESPN contract to spend his days driving through the snow to half-empty arenas, this is what he tries to explain. A reporter his entire adult life, he has immersed himself in other people’s teams. St. Bonaventure basketball is his team. And as the ground continues to shift beneath college sports, perhaps only he can save it.
Wojnarowski was raised in Bristol, Conn., which happens to be where ESPN is based. He played baseball in high school, enthusiastically but without distinction. He also wrote sports stories for The Hartford Courant. He attached several of those stories to his St. Bonaventure undergraduate application in an effort — successful, as it turned out — to offset what he describes as “deficiencies” in his academic record. After graduating in 1991, he worked at daily newspapers in Waterbury, Conn.; Fresno, Calif.; and Bergen County, N.J. In 2007, he moved to Yahoo to cover the N.B.A.
By then, the internet was changing how sports coverage is consumed. Being the first to report something that nobody else knew — even something that would be announced within minutes, like the next selection in the N.B.A. draft — became a matter of paramount importance for a cadre of young journalists who were hard-wired to compete in that sort of way. Wojnarowski had a reputation as something of a stylist. But he also had a knack for establishing relationships, a drive that pushed him to break more news than anyone else — and eventually to try to break all the news — and an appreciation of the value that would bring to his employer. Other people were doing a version of the same job at various competitors, but nobody did it like Wojnarowski. “Woj had the foresight to see what was coming,” says Tom Thibodeau, now the head coach of the New York Knicks. “And he knocked it out of the park.”
Before the annual N.B.A. draft or as the league’s trade deadline approached, Wojnarowski would sleep maybe three hours a night. He would travel to the N.B.A. playoffs but spend the actual games holed up somewhere else, working his sources. “His willingness to make the commitment was just incredible,” Thibodeau says. When Wojnarowski moved from Yahoo to ESPN in 2017, his reach grew significantly. Within months, everyone who cared about the N.B.A. knew exactly who he was. Noel Brown, who plays center for St. Bonaventure, says now that whenever one of his friends revealed any surprising news or gossip, Wojnarowski would be invoked — even if it wasn’t basketball-related. “We’d be like: ‘Whoa! Woj Bomb!’”
In 2022, Wojnarowski hosted a dinner at a Las Vegas resort for his closest industry connections. “Some of the most powerful guys in the N.B.A.,” Schmidt says, describing the attendees. “Woj just called them up. And they all showed up. I’m like: ‘How did you do this? Why would Jerry West come to something like this?’ And part of it was, they needed to come because of who he is.” In the days that followed, Wojnarowski heard from one contact after another, wondering why they hadn’t made the list. “That’s why I never did it again,” he says. “I mean, I invited 40 people. How many people was I supposed to invite?”
Wojnarowski no longer has the platform that gave him such power, but he still has his contacts. On the drive to Bucknell, his calls included several agents and a former N.B.A. Executive of the Year. One conversation involved scheduling a game in an N.B.A. arena against a marquee opponent. Another was about adding value to St. Bonaventure’s Adidas contract by persuading an N.B.A. star to authorize the use of his personal sneaker model. “I’ve been pretty tight with Donovan Mitchell since he came into the league,” Wojnarowski said on the call, invoking the Cleveland Cavaliers guard. If Mitchell, his first choice, didn’t work, another possibility was Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Wojnarowski didn’t know Edwards, but Bill Duffy, one of his agents, is a friend.
Later that night, as we worked our way toward Buffalo through the snow, Wojnarowski spoke with contacts on the West Coast. Eventually even those shut down, but Wojnarowski didn’t. He recounted for me his pursuit of a German player who had been recommended by an agent. Then he explained what he would be doing in Toronto, a trip that by this time would begin in just a few hours. Masai Ujiri, the president of the Toronto Raptors, was throwing a pregame reception at Scotiabank Arena for Giants of Africa, an organization that runs clinics, builds courts and connects African players with U.S. colleges. Wojnarowski hoped to position St. Bonaventure as a possible destination for those players. He also had ideas on how to grow the Bonnies’ presence in Toronto. “You draw a hundred-mile map around Bonaventure, I don’t now know how many Atlantic 10-level players there are,” he said. “But you draw that circle up around Toronto, and there’s exponentially more.” The idea animated him. “We’ve had our share of them,” he said. “But I think we can do more.”
By then, it was 2 a.m. It occurred to me that Wojnarowski’s lifestyle had hardly changed since leaving ESPN. Sure, the trappings were different. The daily stress level wasn’t as high. He had more time for phone calls with his daughter, who lives in New York, and his son, a college senior in Colorado. But his utter immersion in what he was doing, often to the exclusion of meals and sleep, seemed a lot like his life as a reporter, when his professional existence was centered on the daily barrage of texts. At least there would be fewer of those these days, I assumed. “Nope,” Wojnarowski said. “I get just as many.” He didn’t seem unhappy about that either.
Maybe you wonder what the general manager of a college basketball team actually does. So do plenty of other people, including some general managers themselves. The position is evolving, and at different schools it is evolving differently. The one thing it isn’t yet is what you might expect it to be: an executive who gets dressed up for work and makes executive decisions, as a G.M. in professional sports might.
In college basketball, general managers report to the head coach. They tend to wear polos or pullovers with team logos. (A dry cleaner recently asked Wojnarowski’s wife why she no longer brings in her husband’s suits.) They might negotiate a contract or identify a potential recruit. They also might pick up someone from the airport. “The job title of ‘general manager’ usually means one bucket of things in the N.F.L. or N.B.A.,” says John Currie, the athletic director at Wake Forest. “In college sports, it’s all over the map.”
A few schools had football general managers when Rachel Baker joined Duke’s men’s basketball team in June 2022. Baker spends much of her time now helping players develop their personal brands, which makes sense, because she worked at Nike for nearly a decade. Tony Bollier, the general manager at Butler, had two stints in the N.B.A.’s offices and ran the Milwaukee Bucks’ developmental team. Now he helps oversee finances for men’s basketball, attends practices and sits on the bench during games. Alex Kline, who was a talent evaluator for the New York Knicks, today plays the same role at Syracuse. Baker Dunleavy is the son of a former N.B.A. head coach; one of his brothers is an N.B.A. general manager, and another is an agent. He was the head coach at Quinnipiac when he resigned in 2023 to manage N.I.L. and the transfer portal for the men’s and women’s programs at Villanova.
What these G.M.s have in common is significant involvement with the recruiting process, which has become even more tumultuous than it is in college football. An entire roster can turn over from one season to the next. The potential for disruption is also far greater than in professional sports, where a team can draft standout players and count on having them under contract for several years. In college basketball today, everyone becomes a free agent every season. If a Bonnies recruit is All-Conference one year, he’ll almost certainly be gone the next — to somewhere like Syracuse or Kentucky (or even the N.B.A.). Lately, too, basketball’s N.I.L. money has reached the levels seen in college football. Last December, a Massachusetts high school forward named AJ Dybantsa chose Brigham Young over North Carolina and Kansas. His deals will be worth as much as $7 million next season.
For all but the wealthiest programs, the situation will soon get more complicated. N.I.L. money does not come directly from colleges and universities, though coaching staffs typically determine who receives it. As early as this fall, though, schools will also be permitted to pay salaries to their players. The funds will be distributed under a revenue-sharing structure expected to be capped at around $20 million per school. But not every athletic department has an extra $20 million — or even $1 million — to spend on athletes. The existing financial advantage for teams at big schools will grow significantly. “And at some point,” Wojnarowski says, “that’s going to show up on the court. It just is.”
To compensate, smaller programs must generate more N.I.L. money in a hurry. That can mean desperate solicitations to alumni and marketing efforts that might not previously have been considered appropriate. (One recent gimmick, done in conjunction with W.W.E.: the sale of wrestling belts emblazoned with team logos for more than $500.) But head coaches, who need to win games to keep their jobs, don’t have the wherewithal to focus on these things. Neither do athletic directors, who oversee as many as 30 sports. “There’s only so many hours a day to figure out this whole new element,” says Wake Forest’s Currie. “Our coaches are saying they really need an experienced, full-time guy, someone who’s dialed in on this all the time.” Someone like Woj.
Figuring out which players deserve that N.I.L. money is even more important. Wojnarowski watches basketball the way many of us do, with the eye of an enthusiastic amateur. “I don’t pretend to be an expert on player evaluation,” he says. The difference is that he has access to people who are. “I’ll share a video with friends of mine in the N.B.A.,” he says. “I’ll send it to the G.M.s, and I’ll just be like, ‘Hey, what am I looking at here?’” He’ll hear about a player in a European league or under the radar somewhere from an agent or a scout. Then he’ll start reporting. Has anyone else he knows seen the player? Have they met him? Eventually, when he calls the team to inquire, “the coach knows who I am,” he says. “The European team knows who I am. The player knows who I am — he follows me on Instagram. They’re into it. Now, does that mean that they’re coming to St. Bonaventure because they liked Woj Bombs when they were a kid? No. But it opens the door.”
Not many aspiring pros grow up dreaming of playing at St. Bonaventure. But just as a coach’s success at getting players into the N.B.A. has long been a recruiting advantage, presenting your school as a steppingstone to more nationally prominent programs can now be part of a pitch. “We may be your first stop on the way to somewhere else,” Wojnarowski says. “Maybe you took the N.I.L. Maybe you took the big-name conference. You picked weather. You picked geography. But it didn’t work out. Now, you may care less about the N.I.L. number or what the weather is like.”
Chad Venning arrived at St. Bonaventure in 2022 after two seasons as an overweight big man at Morgan State. He lost some weight, made All-Conference, then transferred to Boston College. “That’s a success story for us,” Wojnarowski says. “We got two really good years out of him. He transformed his career at St. Bonaventure. And he went to B.C., and he’s playing in the A.C.C. And he’s making a lot of money. And we can point to that with other players.”
Finding another Venning is what gets Wojnarowski out of bed in the morning — and back into the snow on the road to Toronto. Since 2003, hundreds of players from Giants of Africa’s programs have landed at American colleges. Masai Ujiri, a founder, is one of Wojnarowski’s close contacts. When Ujiri was seeking to get more Raptors games on ESPN, an ambitious undertaking given that most Raptors fans live in Canada and only American viewers are included in the network’s ratings, Wojnarowski brought him to Bristol and introduced him around. Now Wojnarowski was seeking the recruiting equivalent of Most Favored Nation status. “To have Masai sort of bless us to his greater group and say, ‘Let’s make sure we’re working with these guys, make sure we’re providing them with intel and help on guys,’” he said, “I don’t think anybody else has that.”
Shortly after noon, Wojnarowski met with Ujiri and Giants of Africa employees at their offices near downtown. Ujiri had everyone around the table introduce themselves. When his turn came, Wojnarowski said, “I’m Adrian, I’m the general manager of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball program and I’ve been there for three months.” He shrugged. “Here I am.”
Everyone laughed. “Trust me, they all know,” Ujiri said. His staff was excited to hear that Wojnarowski was coming. “They say: ‘Woj is here? What exactly does he do now?’” He laughed again. “We’re all still trying to figure it out.”
At the reception that evening, Wojnarowski worked the room. He reconnected with Raptors executives and met scouts who will attend Giants of Africa’s events. He also pursued a business angle, strategizing with an executive at a company called BallerTV about getting sports-related tech startups in front of league and team executives. In return for Wojnarowski’s help, the Bonnies’ N.I.L. collective would receive a small piece of equity in each company. “Look, you’re just trying to throw a lot of lines in the water,” he explained. “Not all of them are going to land with a fish on the hook, but maybe a couple of them might. You just keep trying.”
The trend across professional sports is to narrow the jurisdiction of head coaches to what happens during practices and games, then scaffold them with unorthodox thinkers who are basically willing to work all the time. Wojnarowski represents the logical extension of that at the college level. “I give credit to his approach,” says Ujiri, who has relationships throughout college basketball, “because it’s completely different.” At Yahoo and then ESPN, Wojnarowski took an amorphous job that hadn’t previously existed and constructed it in his image. Now he appears to be doing it again. “I think Woj will define what that position will become,” Thibodeau says. “It’s a critical position that will help determine the success of your program.”
Late last year, the retired N.F.L. quarterback Andrew Luck was hired by Stanford to oversee its football program. Unlike other general managers, he doesn’t report to the head coach. Instead, Luck has the power to fire him. His salary remains undisclosed, but it’s probably commensurate with what an executive would get in the N.F.L. As a four-time Pro Bowl selection and the son of a former N.C.A.A. executive, Luck offers value that is rooted in an entirely different place than Wojnarowski’s. But with similar levels of fame and contacts, Luck is as close as any school has come to hiring a Woj equivalent. So far, they are the only two college general managers that anyone outside their sport has ever heard of.
Before we left Scotiabank, it occurred to me that Wojnarowski was attending an N.B.A. game for the first time since leaving ESPN. That seemed significant. After I suggested as much, he stared back, uncomprehending. When it dawned on him what I meant, he made a face. “There’s nothing to be sentimental about,” he said. “It’s just an N.B.A. game.”
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