An email from a stranger receiver with a pretty common last name arrived on a late February morning from Whit Babcock, the athletic director at Virginia Tech.
” 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.
Collegiate Athletic Solutions, a school sports-focused investment firm just formed by RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital, was soliciting involvement on behalf of the long-standing Big Ten judge’s child. Delany is the innovative venture’s senior vice president and just publicly known staff.
After attending the University of North Carolina, his family’s home school, Newman Delany had until recently resisted the pros–and problems –of following his brother’s feet into school activities.

Delany stated in his message to Babcock that he had joined CAS after spending 15 times in investment banking, which was obtained through a public records request. For the bulk of that period, Delany worked at Deloitte Corporate Finance, most just heading up its life science and health care team while based in Tampa, Fla., where Weatherford Capital is headquartered.
Beyond internet name-dropping, it’s unclear to what extent Jim Delany is involved in his brother’s present effort. The former Big Ten inspector, who previously advised both the Big Ten and the ACC and collaborated with the Montag Group on a auditing firm, continues to have influence in school activities.
Jim Delany did not respond to a request for comment sent via the Montag Group, and Newman declined to be interviewed for this account through a RedBird Capital director.
College athletics is so often a family occasion, with sons and daughters of instructors typically playing and later training, 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 delayed visiting.
” I did n’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 soon realized that everyone I knew from school sporting was my home, and I longed to be close to them.
Slive Harwood accepted a place with the Chicago-based branding firm Leo Burnett following the demise of Arthur Andersen in 2002 brought on by the Enron scandal. She claims she waited nine weeks before she said she would stop. Slive Harwood was then in her late 20s when she made the decision to participate in graduate school at Northwestern and pursue a career in school sports. From that, she accepted a low-level place in the sport division of Georgia Tech, an ACC class.

” I wanted to be near the SEC but not in the SEC, because I did n’t want anyone to have any ideas of nepotism”, she said.
Those emotions can be difficult to sit over. Consider the decades-old, conflict-of-interest discussion surrounding another Tar Heel father-son trio, John and Chad Swofford, which was revived earlier this year in Florida State’s complaint against the ACC.
In 2005, under John Swofford’s commissionership, the ACC extended a enrollment proposal to then-Big East part Boston College, where Chad Swofford was working at the time. Two years later, in 2007, Chad Swofford took a career at Charlotte-based Raycom Sports, a local TV broadcaster, which had an existing partnership with both the ACC and SEC. The SEC, which had decided to grant ESPN the rights to all of its content, had a major existential crisis hit Raycom the next year. Finally, Raycom issued a circular of cuts, which Chad Swofford survived.
As suggested by FSU’s complaint, Chad Swofford’s continued career at Raycom was a factor in the much-maligned Screen offer the ACC struck with ESPN in 2011. A split sub-licensing partnership between Raycom and ESPN was required by that agreement.
John Swofford had particularly told ESPN that he was in favor of a package that may help maintain Raycom stayed in company, according to a Sports Business Journal article.
According to FSU’s amended problem,” The Raycom Sports Partnership has cost each ACC associate several million dollars and continues to undercut the value of their advertising freedom, as well as the cost and success of their fame system.”
Chad Swofford, who did not respond to a request for comment, later served as Raycom’s vice president and general director of ACC online, before being promoted to his present position: VP of business development and general manager for straight networks. John Swofford, who retired as ACC director in 2021, also did not respond to a request for comment sent via an ACC spokesperson.
The Bowlsby school sporting reputation is being carried on by the original Big 12 judge’s two brothers, Kyle and Matt. Bowlsby Sports Advisors, a consulting company with a focus on professional research and proper analysis for sport departments, is now run by Kelly. Kyle Bowlsby, like his father, is based in Dallas, while Kyle works for FloSports, the sports streaming services, in Austin, TX.
At Northern Iowa, where Bob was serving as the university’s interim athletic director at the same time Bowlsby Sports Advisors was hired to find a lasting Advertising replacement, Kyle and Bob Bowlsby, who retired from the Big 12 in 2022, worked in tandem this past school year.
” Over the past year, we have worked with ( Bob Bowlsby ) on some strategic consulting projects, and he has been a part of our pursuit of some business,” said Kyle Bowlsby. He is “really interested in coming on table where I need him,” he said.
Kyle Bowlsby said growing up the child of an sport director-turned-commissioner encouraged him to want to function in school activities, but more on the edge. In the meeting, he recalled sometimes running into Newman Delany over the years, including at the 2003 Final Four in New Orleans, where they both served as charity ballboys.
After studying sports management at Iowa, Bowlsby, like Slive Harwood, decided he instead wanted to “blaze]his ] own path” after college. He relocated to San Diego, where he tried to work his way out in the depression of the post-recession. ” I thought I could get in at the bottom and split my teeth”, he said.
After four times, Bowlsby had plenty, and—again like Slive Harwood—decided to engage in Northwestern’s graduate program in sports control.
Our stepson and I have always desired to place our father in a difficult situation where others felt they were required to assist us, according to Bowlsby. ” But truly, when I was looking for work, I sat down with Jim Phillips at Northwestern, and went to the Big Ten office and letting people know that I am trying to get into activities”.
Bowlsby finally accepted the position of electronic media consultant for sports clients Property Consulting Group, which was later renamed 4FRONT and later acquired by Legends. He claims that his relationship to the business was due to his nephew rather than his father.
From that, Kyle Bowlsby went to work at Korn Ferry, the management consulting business, where he focused on college activities senior research projects. He launched his eponymous shop in April 2019, and he has since worked with several dozen college athletic departments. He claims to have submitted an application for work with a few college conferences that he did not know, but has not yet received one.
” Unfortunately, we have n’t won those proposals”, Bowlsby said. ” I think conferences like to align themselves with bigger, more established companies, which is fine. I believe that day will eventually come 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. Bob Bowlsby left the Cardinal in 2012 to become the Big 12 commissioner in Dallas. Four years later, Matt Bowlsby relocated to Texas to start working for FloSports, where he has since been involved in Big 12 deal-making.
” 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. Everyone should be able to make it on their own merits, in my opinion.
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 was n’t a job where my dad was n’t intimately involved in giving me advice”.
Slive Harwood left Georgia Tech in 2006 to become the director of the local organizing committee for the Final Four 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 was n’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 take over as vice president of The Colonnade Group, a premium seating and event services firm with whom Mike Slive’s conference and other college sports clients are connected. ” We made sure there was a Chinese wall for things that could n’t be discussed”, Slive Harwood said.
In 2015, Mike Slive retired from the SEC. He co-founded the Mike Slive Foundation, a prostate cancer charity, two years later. His daughter heavily participated in the effort to get the organization started, which Slive Harwood claims was originally going to be called the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama.
Slive Harwood remarked,” It took a lot of convincing for my father to put his name on it.” ” We did some focus groups … everything came back to using my dad’s name, but he was very ambivalent. However, he began to recognize the advantages of his name, the gathered sports connections, and the lives of those who knew and loved him.
Mike Slive passed away in 2018 from a recurrence of prostate cancer. 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 claims that she had encouraged him to write a book about his life years prior to his passing. She intends to write it right away.
” It’s just a question of when and how”, she said. It is such a unique story at a time when the world desperately needs those tales.