The Big East Conference announced Monday that it has hired Tim Brosnan as its new commissioner, a move that draws an unusual connection between college athletics and Major League Baseball's executive history.
Brosnan worked for MLB from 1991 to 2015, holding several senior positions including Executive Vice President for Business and President and CEO of Major League Baseball Enterprises. During his time with the league, he negotiated media contracts, helped found the MLB Network, and played an integral role in the creation of the World Baseball Classic. He was also one of three finalists considered to replace Bud Selig as commissioner when Selig's tenure ended.
The Big East is a conference that includes UConn, St. John's, and Villanova, among others. It does not sponsor football, which separates it financially from the major conferences that generate the largest television revenues in college athletics.
The conference's board chair, Rev. Brian J. Shanley, released a statement announcing the hire. According to Yahoo Sports, the statement opened with the following: "In our search for the next Commissioner of the BIG EAST, we prioritized finding someone with extensive experience in the area of revenue generation and who would best fit the mission and vision of our conference going forward."
The emphasis on revenue generation was the first thing mentioned in the official announcement. The Big East is legally organized as a non-profit, and like other athletic conferences connected to educational institutions, operates under a stated mission focused on the academic and personal development of student-athletes.
Brosnan's background is almost entirely in professional sports business. His two-plus decades at MLB gave him experience in media rights, international expansion, and enterprise leadership, the kinds of skills that translate directly to the revenue challenges a football-less conference faces. The Big East competes in basketball and other Olympic sports, and without the television contracts that football programs bring in, it has operated with a smaller financial footprint than conferences like the Big Ten or SEC.
The hire comes at a moment when college athletics broadly is in a period of rapid financial and structural change. NIL deals, conference realignment, and ongoing legal challenges to the NCAA's authority have shifted how conferences and schools think about their roles and their money. Bringing in an executive whose entire career was built around growing a professional sports league's business signals a clear direction for where the Big East's leadership wants to take the conference.
Brosnan has been out of MLB for more than a decade, but his professional record in media and revenue development made him one of the finalists to lead the entire sport before Rob Manfred was selected. That level of experience is unusual for a conference that has historically operated with a lower national profile than the power conferences.
