Big Ten's Kevin Warren being aggressive inside college sports shifting landscape

Kevin Warren doesn't sound like a buttoned-up, low-key conference commissioner when he speaks these days.

Warren is carrying himself with the swagger of a corporate shark ready to pounce whenever the opportunity strikes. The Big Ten commish is becoming Gordon Gekko before our eyes.

"We will be innovative, we will be creative, we'll be bold, we'll be strong, we'll be powerful," Warren said at the league's football media gathering in July.

Fresh off plucking USC and UCLA from the Pac-12 starting in 2024, Warren has his sights on more.

In an interview with Bryant Gumbel for HBO's "Real Sports" that airs Tuesday night, Warren acknowledged that he can envision Big Ten membership increasing to 20 schools, and he also didn't dismiss the notion of college athletes being paid.

"Real Sports" provided advance excerpts of the interview with those two key points.

First, expansion:

Gumbel: You're at 16 teams now. Could you foresee 20?

Warren: I could. Yeah. I could see perpetual and future growth.

In other words, more expansion is on his mind, which probably means it's in the works behind the scenes. Growing to 20 schools makes sense for myriad reasons, especially if it includes the golden prize, Notre Dame.

If Notre Dame finally trades in its independence to get a cut of the Big Ten's new landmark media rights bonanza — a move that I predict will happen — Warren can and will find three other schools that extends the Big Ten footprint into new TV markets.

Oregon and Washington from the Pac-12 are logical options. Maybe Stanford or Cal. Kansas basketball and the Kansas City market would be attractive, though expansion is driven predominantly by football, and the Jayhawks don't offer much there.

Warren clearly is not settled at 16 schools, nor should he be if Notre Dame remains a possibility. College sports have become a game of every-conference-for-itself. That might sound callous and noncollegiate, but the TV money grab is a powerful force.

Here is how Warren explained this Realignment Era to Gumbel:

"I think during that period there's gonna be a lot of disruption, and that's OK," he said. "We need to embrace it if we want to make sure that we continually build college athletics in a position where it's here 100 and 200 years from now."

The money that is pouring into college athletics makes a mockery of the amateurism model. Let's just stop with that naivete. College leaders cling to amateurism idealism whenever the subject of athlete compensation comes up. Warren opened the door a crack with Gumbel:

Gumbel: Everybody's getting rich now off college sports, OK? The networks are getting rich from it, the administrators are getting rich, the schools are getting rich, the coaches get rich. You know who won't be getting rich off it? The athletes. When are you gonna start paying them?

Warren: One of the things I'm excited about is being able to have honest dialogue with our student-athletes. Have there been little changes that have been made? Yes. But we need to really sit down and start getting these issues on the table and start making some decisions.

Gumbel: Could you foresee paying your athletes?

Warren: Yes. Yeah.

One can almost hear the folks inside NCAA headquarters screaming at that answer. Nothing Warren said is ironclad, of course, but he didn't dismiss the idea either.

Talk is one thing, and we've seen college leaders use stall tactics to avoid addressing athlete compensation over the years, reluctant to budge until threatened with legal ramifications.

The Big Ten's new media rights deal is worth $7 billion minimum. That's billion with a "B." There is no way in good conscience that anyone in position of power — those who stand to gain the most financially — can argue that Big Ten athletes, essentially the workforce, do not deserve a cut of that expanding financial pie.

Warren said he intends to be "part of this conversation." The landscape is shifting fast, and Warren seems to recognize the opportunity that exists to make transformative changes. He doesn't sound like someone who is willing to sit and wait.