Sources: Petitti to be next Big 10 commissioner

7:14 PM ET Pete ThamelESPN The Big Ten is expected to hire previous MLB and tv executive Tony Petitti

as the conference’s next commissioner, sources told ESPN. A statement is anticipated in the upcoming days.Petitti emerged from a group of finalists who interviewed in the past 2 days and was picked Tuesday after a vote of the league’s presidents and chancellors, sources said. Petitti brings a varied background in both sports and media. He is the former COO of Major League Baseball, where he succeeded existing MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in that role in 2015. His media experience originates from working for ABC Sports, CBS and the MLB Network. His deal with college sports consists of helping create the Bowl Championship Series back when he was with ABC and dealing with the NCAA competition while at CBS. He likewise worked extensively with the NFL while at CBS.Editor’s Picks

Petitti also supervised the daily operations of CSTV, the network that would eventually end up being CBS Sports Network, for a four-month stint in 2008. He left right after to become the head of the MLB Network, charting his course to turn into one of MLB’s leading executives.Petitti’s hiring continues the trend of nontraditional hires from outside the college sports space in the college commissioner set, consisting of in the Pac-12( George Kliavkoff), Huge 10 (Kevin Warren )and Big 12(Brett Yormark ). Only the ACC’s hire of Jim Phillips in December

2020 from his task as the athletic director at Northwestern would be considered a standard recent hire of a prominent commissioner.Petitti is presently the co-CEO of the 33rd Team, a football think tank and nascent media company founded by previous NFL executive and existing ESPN analyst Mike Tannenbaum. He has worked for the 33rd Team for the previous year.Petitti takes over the Huge Ten at a time when the league is seeking stability and an agreement home builder. Warren’s period was irregular, as he had difficulty with the set up of college athletics as a cumbersome and non-linear organization where commissioners mainly do not have unilateral power of professional commissioners.Warren left unexpectedly in January with numerous years left on his contract to end up being the president of the Chicago Bears. He is expected to finish his tenure this month and begin with the Bears on April 17. Petitti rises instantly into among the most powerful roles in college sports during a tenuous time in college sports, as the Big 10 and SEC have tv deals that are anticipated to outpace the other prominent leagues by $30 million yearly as soon as those offers come into place in the upcoming seasons.Petitti graduated from Haverford in 1983 and Harvard Law School in 1986. He told the Haverford College website in 2005:” I enjoyed the

Haverford experience, and being at a little school, however it was interesting to me to take a trip to these college games throughout the country and see 80,000 individuals in the stands week after week.”