Chansky’s Notebook: Delany's Journey Remarkable

This is today’s Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook as heard on 97.9 WCHL. You can listen to previous Sports Notebooks here.

Jim Delany is a most improbable most influential man in college athletics.

A list came out Thursday on CBSSports.com, where 12 of the supposedly smartest people around college sports picked the most influential of their peers. It’s a curious collection, because it omits giants like John Skipper, the UNC grad and president of ESPN who controls college basketball and football by what teams and what times they put on TV. And Kentucky’s John Calipari, who has almost perfected the one-and-done philosophy while changing the college game, is also left off.

The list is generally not sports specific, although Coach K, Nick Saban and Urban Meyer are named. There are more NCAA officials, conference commissioners like John Swofford, athletic directors, agents, apparel barons and attorneys litigating some of the biggest cases in sports. Judging from the caustic comments below the article, some think they got the list almost completely wrong. But another Tar Heel, Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany, is at the very bottom as No. 1.

Delany is mega-powerful, having started conference expansion and his own Big 10 Network, which helps his league spit off more money to its schools than any other, somewhere in the 40 million per-year range. And he’s not afraid to make bold statements, like his white paper on reinstituting freshman ineligibility in football and basketball – called a Year of Readiness – that has no chance yet is provocative given the academic improprieties rampant in college athletics.

But Delany’s professional journey is the most amazing. He was a reserve for Dean Smith’s Tar Heels who was mad at the coach for not playing him more. He slipped into law school and made it through, worked in the state attorney general’s office, as an NCAA investigator and became commissioner of the Ohio Valley Conference at age 31. When Wayne Duke retired and the Big Ten was ruled by power coaches Bo Schembechler and Bobby Knight, no one wanted the commissioner’s job. But Delany took it and 25 years later has become certainly one of movers and shaker in the college game.

Delany may not be No. 1 with everyone, but that he is even on the list and at the top after his improbable journey is remarkable in itself.