The Big 12 commissioner and former Iowa athletics director spoke to Iowa students on Wednesday.

By Ian Murphy
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Big 12 Commissioner and former Iowa Athletics Director Bob Bowlsby took time away from running one of the Power 5 NCAA conferences to meet with sports-management students on Wednesday.

Among the topics Bowlsby discussed in an hourlong question and answer session  was the recent opening of the Texas AD job, the lack of a conference championship game in the Big 12, and problems he saw in the landscape of college athletics.

But he also fielded questions on a more local scope.

One international student asked how to bring fellow international students to more sporting events. Bowlsby had to answer similar questions at Stanford.

“About 20 percent of the population on campus is nonresident students, and they’re from literally every country in the world.” Bowlsby said. “Some sports, like soccer, are a lot easier to get people to engage in.”

With declining student attendance in football and men’s and women’s basketball around the nation, answering that question will be paramount in the future.

“Part of it is that you don’t like being off the grid for five to six hours when you’re in the stadium,” Bowlsby said.

Current Iowa Athletics Director Gary Barta noted that football attendance was indeed down from previous seasons but joked with the students he expected to see them all at Saturday’s game.

“If it’s a good time, and it’s a lot of fun, the fan base grows,” Barta said. “So this weekend, everybody will be there, right?”

Bowlsby, an Iowa graduate, served as the athletics director at the University of Northern Iowa from 1984-1990, the athletics director of the Hawkeyes from 1990-2006, with his most notable hiring being head football coach Kirk Ferentz and men’s basketball coach Steve Alford.

Both Stanford, where he served as athletics director from 2006-12, and the Big 12 sought out Bowlsby, and he said he would not have left either of the previous jobs had the new opportunities not come calling.

“When I took the Big 12 job, I had just signed a contract until age 68 with Stanford, and I’m 63 now,” Bowlsby said. “I left Stanford largely because I wanted to make an impact on the national level.”

He served on a committee in 1987 that voted to give players a stipend, though the proposal was voted down.

Bowlsby also discussed an expansion of the college-football playoffs. The new system, implemented last year, was a compromise.

The committee had to work with both conferences and bowl games to ensure the playoff system would work.

“We wanted to make September better … we wanted to keep October and November just as good as they could be,” Bowlsby said, noting that college football has one of the best regular seasons in sports. “Beyond that, we wanted to try to embed it into the bowl games.”

The session was mostly composed of situational questions for the commissioner, but towards the end of the session, one student asked what the average day of the top man in the Big 12 was like.

“I’ve been at this for 40 years, and I’ve never had an average day,” Bowlsby said. “Every new job I’ve taken, I’ve had a point where I’ve thought, ‘What the devil did I get myself into?’ ”