Returning to Nashville after 30 years, Jim Delany is enjoying his revitalized downtown neighborhood.Martin Cherry

Jim Delany settled into his favorite chair in his new Nashville condo, flipped on the TV and put up his feet on the ottoman in the living room. Clemson and LSU were about to kick off in the national championship game of the College Football Playoff last month, and Delany, the most influential figure in the past four decades of college athletics, was chilling at home, content to let college football’s marquee event play out in New Orleans without him.

“I’m not the commissioner anymore,” Delany said over dinner recently at The Southern in Nashville. 

“He’s not the commissioner anymore,” his wife Kitty added.

It’s going to take some time to sink in. A new era is beginning without him. For the past 40 years, Jim Delany has been the commissioner, first at the Ohio Valley Conference for a decade and then at the Big Ten for 30 years.

No one in college athletics has had a hand in more major decisions or wielded more influence on a range of transformational issues. Delany’s notorious competitive streak and love of a good debate often put him at the forefront of enormous change.

Delany has been an innovator, overseeing the creation of the Big Ten Network, and a guardian, staunchly protecting the traditions of the Rose Bowl and the bowl system as the CFP took shape. By always being a step ahead of the competition, especially on the media front, he steered the Big Ten to revenue heights no other conference could touch — $759 million in fiscal 2018.

“The job of commissioner has changed so much over 30 years, and Jim has adapted and evolved right along with it,” said Fox Sports President Mark Silverman, who worked side-by-side with Delany to launch BTN in 2007.

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Delany is happily retired now, but he’s still looking ahead at the busy future of college sports.Martin Cherry

Last year, Delany, 71, decided it was time to retire. He had contemplated stepping down three or four other times before, but there was always a challenge confronting college athletics that he was eager to take on. Finally, he decided, it was time for other voices to be heard.

His retirement became official at the end of 2019, and Delany decided he would give college sports a chance to breathe without him, one of the reasons he and Kitty decided to stay home instead of going to the CFP championship.

He’s not going totally cold turkey on college sports, though — Delany is consulting with Indiana on its athletic director search, and he told new Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren that he’s a phone call away.

But Delany’s unquenchable curiosity, the trait that made him a visionary and trendsetting commissioner, will almost certainly take him in new directions in this next phase. While he’ll consult on occasion, there are other things he wants to do while he’s still in good health, like climb to the Mount Everest base camp, write a book and go visit Roy Kramer, the former SEC commissioner that Delany grew to admire deeply.

“For the last 30 years, there’s always been something cooking, something around the corner,” Delany said. “I didn’t go to the Big Ten to shuffle papers. I wanted to make an impact. There’s been a lot of change during that time, but we slayed some dragons along the way.”

At some point, Delany likely will miss attending Big Ten meetings or the back-and-forth banter with other conference commissioners. He’s a serial debater, say those who have been in the room with him, a byproduct of growing up in a family with five children where “the First Amendment was vigorously respected around the dinner table,” he said.

“You could say the sky is blue, and Jim would say that it’s not as blue as you think,” Northwestern AD Jim Phillips said. “He would sometimes take a contrarian point of view, just to get you thinking about a different perspective. He could do that because he’s so smart and well-read.”

For now, Delany is energized by a new life in a new city, even if Nashville is in the middle of SEC country. They chose to settle there because Kitty is a Tennessee native and Nashville is where they met in the 1980s.

Delany enjoys his walks around the revitalized part of the city near his condo, which is within sight of Nissan Stadium across the Cumberland River. He takes great pleasure in discovering hidden gems like the Hermitage Café, a little diner that’s been there forever, or the Pinewood Social, a new spot overlooking the river.

Delany lived in Nashville during his 10-year run at the Ohio Valley Conference in the 1980s, and he’s intrigued by signs of its growth in the 30 years he’s been away.

Later this year, one of his two sons, Newman, will get married, adding another chapter to this new life.

Delany adapted quickly as a conference commissioner, getting out front on conference TV channels, media contracts, diversity initiatives, expansion and scheduling trends. So it’s no surprise to any of his friends that he’s adapting to change quickly in retirement as well.

“He still has another chapter to write,” said Jon Barrett, Delany’s longtime friend and attorney. “Jim is still very curious. He reads everything. That’s why I think he’s got so much to offer. He has this incredible memory, and he just draws from it.”

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Delany, speaking on a panel with ACC Commissioner John Swofford (right) at SBJ’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, was a champion for change and women’s sports.Shana Wittenwyler

Understanding Delany’s tough but fair-minded leadership style starts with his childhood in New Jersey, where there was no such thing as a victim or a bully. Delany grew up in Newark during the 1950s and ’60s, the son of a coach and history teacher.

Frank Delany, who excelled as a basketball and baseball student athlete at Seton Hall, became a high school basketball coach in Newark’s inner city. Most of his teams were made up of African American boys, and it was common for Jim’s dad to bring them home for spaghetti dinners.

The area around Delany’s home was a melting pot of immigrants from Italy, Portugal, Scotland, Ireland and Israel. They formed a working-class neighborhood where sports like backyard basketball and skate hockey were a way of life growing up.

Delany’s mother, Marion, was a teacher of sorts at home. She’s the one who used to tell Jim and his four siblings, “No victims, no bullies.”

“So, you were not encouraged to come home and complain,” Jim said.

Delany recalls scuffling with a bigger boy across the street when his mother opened the front door. Seeing that the bigger boy had young Jim down on the ground, his mother shouted, “Everything OK?” After Jim said it was, his mother replied, “OK, figure it out,” and closed the front door.

She also was the one who encouraged her five children to dream big and “be a full participant in life,” Jim said. Those lessons later inspired Delany’s willingness to take a risk and set the trend instead of following it, whether it was launching a conference cable network, expansion or creating job opportunities for minorities and women at the Big Ten.

Delany played on two Final Four teams at UNC.getty images

By the time Jim got to St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark — he was the third generation of the Delany family to go through the high school — it was evident that he was favoring basketball. Delany was all-city in Newark and with that came recruiting attention his senior year.

“My father always said of basketball, ‘Use it, don’t let it use you,’” Delany said.

Delany signed with North Carolina, which had a strong New York-New Jersey pipeline in the 1950s and ’60s. In his signing class were two New Yorkers who influenced Delany’s life — Charlie Scott, the first African American scholarship athlete at UNC, and Delany’s roommate Eddie Fogler — and have been his friends for more than 50 years now.

Delany’s relationship with Scott and his days growing up in Newark’s melting pot were driving forces for him as a commissioner when it came to promoting diversity. He succeeded in increasing the number of Big Ten female student athletes, administrators and sporting events televised on BTN, while also mentoring minority ADs such as Michigan’s Warde Manuel, who credits Delany with making diversity a priority before other conferences did.

“It doesn’t just happen,” Manuel said. “Jim made it important, not just in the conference office, but from campus to campus.”

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Like Roy Williams (left), Delany learned life lessons, and how to win, from UNC coaching legend Dean Smith.AP images

After graduating from law school and a four-year stint at the NCAA in enforcement, Delany was attracted to an opening at the Ohio Valley Conference to be the commissioner in 1979, even though he had little confidence he could get it.

Knowing that he was competing for the job against much more experienced athletic directors in their 50s, Delany, then 30, forged a plan that he hoped would intrigue the younger members of the search committee, like Murray State President Constantine Curris, who was in his late 30s.

Delany was allotted one hour to meet with the committee, but when he entered the room, he told the committee that he needed just 20 minutes to make his pitch.

“I’ll take the job on a one-year deal for $30,000,” Delany said he told the Ohio Valley Conference committee. “I can learn this job in a year. And look at it this way: If you’re going to make a mistake, make a young one, not an old one” because the older mistake will probably have a longer contract and cost more money.

Delany’s tactic worked. He was paged at the Nashville airport by someone from the committee telling him that he had gotten the job. Delany canceled his flight and stayed in Nashville. It was a turning point in his career.

Delany began to forge his reputation as a media expert at the Ohio Valley Conference by creating a syndicated package of Friday night games at midnight, a package that ESPN eventually acquired. Delany also made his way onto a couple of NCAA committees, including men’s basketball in the late 1980s.

Once the committee discovered how prepared he was and how well he knew the game, Delany was named chairman, a rare feat for the commissioner of a mid-major conference. Dave Gavitt, then-commissioner of the Big East, and Vic Bubas, then-commissioner of the Sun Belt, were two of Delany’s mentors, and they championed him as a committee chair, a position that ultimately helped him get the Big Ten job in 1989.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but the early years at the Big Ten were especially difficult. Delany tackled issues that were thorny, like expansion to add Penn State and increasing the number of female student athletes. Academic standards were toughened and scholarships for football and men’s basketball were reduced as part of an NCAA reform initiative. Think about discussing that news with coaches in the Big Ten, like Indiana’s Bobby Knight or Michigan’s Bo Schembechler.

“It wasn’t a strategy for a long-term tenure,” Delany said. “That kind of tension and conflict is a good way to make enemies.”

Delany can’t pinpoint a seminal moment that turned around his perception by the league’s athletic directors and coaches. “It wasn’t a home run; it was just a bunch of singles and doubles.”

A bronze football from the Rose Bowl honors Delany’s Big Ten leadership. Martin Cherry

Delany, undeterred by the early pushback, forged ahead with the addition of a season-ending Big Ten basketball tournament and the Big Ten-ACC Challenge, two against-the-grain ideas that didn’t generate a consensus among the Big Ten coaches.

“There was a lot of pushing and shoving, so to speak, in those early days,” said Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who was the AD at Iowa for the first 15 years of Delany’s tenure. “Some of the longtime coaches tested him. He might have had some bumps and bruises along the way, but he persevered.”

Delany stayed on the road constantly in those first few years, visiting presidents and athletic directors in an effort to get everyone working together. It wasn’t as sexy as conference expansion or starting a network, but the work he did to bring the conference closer was probably as important as anything he accomplished for the Big Ten’s long-term health.

Decisions in more recent years, like the addition of Maryland and Rutgers, were made easier because of the equity Delany had earned.

“It’s hard to stay in one place. You’ve got to move, you’ve got to grow,” Barrett said of the league. “Jim did that masterfully. Change is hard for some people, but it’s necessary to stay relevant. To see the Big Ten now, in terms of its footprint, the new institutions, the financial success, it’s well-grounded to meet any challenges that come its way.”

In a story that’s made the rounds over the years, Delany opted to start the Big Ten Network after ESPN made what he perceived as a low-ball financial offer for the conference’s media rights.

ESPN exec Mark Shapiro infamously told Delany about starting a network, “That would be a roll of the dice.” To which Delany responded, “Consider them rolled.”

The travails associated with launching BTN in 2007 were a testament to the job Delany did to keep the conference unified. That wasn’t easy, especially when an Ohio State game on BTN couldn’t be seen on local cable in Columbus in the beginning.

Delany, a dogged defender and hard-nosed competitor as a player who helped North Carolina reach the Final Four in both his sophomore and junior seasons, brought that same toughness with him into the commissioner’s chair. Those in the conference were struck by his determination as he drove from one Big Ten market to another to lobby for the network to gain more carriage.

But like his mother said, there will be no victims and no bullies. “Figure it out,” his mother told him. And that’s just what Delany did for the past four decades as the commissioner.

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Delany was frequently center stage for the Big Ten, this time surrounded by league institutions Joe Paterno (left) and Tom Osborne in Chicago in 2010.AP images

Even though he’s retired now, Delany still has a habit of looking around the corner. What he sees signals more change for intercollegiate athletics.

There’s a fork in the road coming, he said, “and everybody is not going to take the same road.”

The commissioner isn’t sure how football and basketball will be administered in the future, but he says it won’t look like it does now, especially when athletes begin monetizing their name, image and likeness rights.

“People have talked about spinning off football and basketball, maybe licensing them to a third party and the institution letting them use the stadium and the marks,” Delany said. “Other people might go all in on employees and unions.”

Some institutions will be more commercially motivated; others will maintain more of an educational mission, hence the looming fork in the road.

That most likely will be an issue for others to resolve.

“I’m not the commissioner anymore,” Delany reminds.

Thirty years ago, he went to the Big Ten to make an impact, and that’s exactly what he did.

Hear from Jim Delany in his own words at our recent Learfield IMG College Intercollegiate Athletics Forum conference: