Bob Bowlsby to Big 12: Recapping Bowlsby's Time at Iowa

The Big 12 looks to have its next man in charge, as multiple reports indicate that Stanford athletic director Bob Bowlsby will accept the job of Big 12 Commissioner. Big Ten fans likely recognize that name as the former athletic director at Iowa, a position Bowlsby held from 1991 to 2006.

Now, while conference commissioner and school athletic director are obviously two different jobs, it would likely be worth a Big 12 fan's time to look back on what Bowlsby accomplished at Iowa.

Now, to many fans, an athletic director is only as good as the coaches he hires. To that end, Bowlsby accumulated a polarizing track record of hiring in his 15 years at Iowa. In men's basketball, he clumsily handled the departure of Tom Davis by simply letting the longtime coach's contract expire without renewal; Davis would go to the Sweet 16 that year.

Still, Bowlsby followed that debacle up with the hiring of Steve Alford from Southwest Missouri State (now simply Missouri State). That hire was, at the very least, lauded at the time.

Similarly, in football, Bowlsby made both friends and enemies in the Iowa fanbase. Hayden Fry retired among health concerns in 1998, and former Iowa player and assistant Bob Stoops was an obvious choice.

Somewhere along the way, after Bowlsby convened a hiring committee, that courtship soured (ask 10 Iowa fans how and they'll give you 10 different theories), and Stoops instead made his way to Oklahoma.

Bowlsby was then skewered for hiring the relatively unknown Kirk Ferentz, who had all of three years of head coaching experience (at I-AA Maine, no less) to his name, then giving Ferentz a contract extension after an inaugural 1-10 season.

Ferentz responded by turning Iowa completely around and guiding the Hawkeyes to a 96-66 record (6-4 in bowls) for his career; in particular, Iowa is 92-45 since 2001. Ferentz is also one of the highest-paid coaches in the nation, and his 13-year tenure at Iowa is by far the longest in the Big Ten at this point.

Bob Stoops, meanwhile, also has a 13-year tenure running at Oklahoma. It's impossible to imagine who'll be first to leave; both have been mentioned frequently for higher-profile jobs during their careers, and neither have budged.

In terms of actual administration, Bowlsby is particularly underrated. He engineered a $90 million renovation of Kinnick Stadium before departing for Stanford, a move that likely protected the stadium from being swallowed by Iowa's ever-expanding hospital complex across the street for the foreseeable future.

He effectively monetized the priority seats in both basketball and football, maximizing Iowa's athletic revenue. He helped turn Iowa's football program into a destination job for coaches and not a stop for coffee en route to bigger programs. He spent enough that it made the rest of the university mad (PDF).

Most importantly, under Bowlsby, Iowa left in-state rival Iowa State in the dust in terms of athletic department revenue; that gap continues today.

A lot of these accomplishments, both good and bad, probably won't translate very directly to being a conference commissioner. Bowlsby won't be hiring athletic directors or coaches. He'd be their ally, if anything (or so everyone hopes, anyway).

But the pattern that does emerge here is prudence in what makes a football program successful—something that continued at Stanford—and maximizing revenue, which is crucial for a conference that nearly dissolved over television deals. He is, as Marc Morehouse of the Cedar Rapids Gazette put it, a football AD. And now, he'll be a football commissioner. The Big 12 should be happy.