John Calipari got the ball – and thought Brett Yormark’s career – in his hands.
It was the mid-1990s, and New Jersey Nets executives needed help from the team’s coach. Yormark, the Big 12’s commissioner on, was on sponsorships again and then trying to close a deal with Pathmark CEO Jim Donald.
“He’s a young man. We’re both pretty young,” Calipari told CBS Sports Yormark. “He used me to help him sell [a] sponsor. I thought, ‘You know what? If he has enough balls to walk here and say,’ I need you to help you sell this sponsor, ‘I’m going to implement.”
It’s not easy at all. Calipari didn’t play patsy, beating Donald 10-1 in a one-on-one.
“I have to give him, or we’ll lose the account,” said Calipari, now a hall-of-fame coach in Kentucky. “It ended up being our biggest account.”
A bond is formed. Yormark and Calipari remain their closest friends to this day.
With Calipari back in college matches from since 2000 and Yormark going to start his first attempt at intercollegiate athletes, surely he will rely on his friends for advice when he sees a determined month in the room before August 1st.
The 55-year-old Yormark not only needs to learn his new job, he needs to understand the ins and outs of conference realignment-quickly. With USC and UCLA surprisingly heading into the Big Ten in 2024, college football has begun a second round of realignment for several years.
Enter Yormark, who was unfamiliar with many in the Big 12 before being named to replace Bob Bowlsby. Halis had been appointed when he got the job despite some valuable ties with the league or profession. A New York guy with a Big Ten (Indiana) degree working for Jay-Z after with a career worth of experience in professional sports doesn’t seem to fit the Big 12 profile.
But Larry Scott, and now George Kliavkoff, came from outside to guide the Pac-12. Former Minnesota Vikings executive Kevin Warren, a force with two West Coast powers, is on the cusp of negotiating a monster media rights deal for the Big Ten.
Like it or not, a significant part of the future of college athletics is in their hands. Bal? Yormark needs them.
“I knew [Brett] would blow them,” Calipari said. “He should look around the room and say, ‘Guys, we need something different.’ It’s not that he doesn’t understand TV and marketing and sponsorship. But what the Big 12 needs now is, ‘We need to think differently. How do we move forward to jump in and for us to be a nuisance?’ “
In the Big 12, it’s up to Yormark to plan a strategy whether its league stands with its 12 -team lineup in 2025 or accompanies – what industry sources call – realignment to look down with the Pac -12.
On Saturday afternoon, two days after the announcement of the big Big Ten, problems were still hanging in the breeze. The Big 12 presidents did not meet formally to address the expansion. Of course, that can change in the heart tag.
The Pac-12 is already on record saying it will aggressively pursue “all expansion options.”
The Big 12 should know more than a league that is not proactive in expansion. It was less than a year ago this month that Texas and Oklahoma shocked the world by scampering out to the SEC.
If ESPN assumed anything last summer sent the Big 12 in danger of collapse – as Bowlsby suspected – then Fox should assume the same thing about the Pac -12.
“No. 1, we need to stay together,” said one Pac-12 administrator. “No. 2, we have to find a way forward.”
Same for Yormark and the Big 12. The new commissioner met with its athlete director Friday via Zoom. The reviews were glowing.
Now, there should be a strategy for the realignment process that can be implemented before Yormark takes office within a month.
