Irving, Texas • Bob Bowlsby said Tuesday that he will step away from his role as Big 12 commissioner later this year after a decade in that job.
Bowlsby will remain as the Big 12′s leader until a new commissioner is appointed. The expectation then is that Bowlsby, whose contract goes into 2025, will transition into a new interim role with the league.
“After more than 40 years of serving in leadership roles in intercollegiate athletics, including the last 10 with the Big 12, and given the major issues that college sports in general and the Big 12 specifically will address in the next several years, I have reached a natural transition point in my tenure as commissioner, as well as in my career,” Bowlsby said in a statement.
Bowlsby oversaw the Big 12′s addition of four future members, including BYU, last year. The Cougars, along with Central Florida, Cincinnati, and Houston, will all join the conference no later than the 2024-25 academic year.
“We have attempted to add the very best — and you can put it in a recruiting [context], the very best athletes that we possibly could,” Bowlsby said when BYU’s move to the conference was announced last September. “That certainly is emblematic of BYU and the history and success that the university has had and that the athletics program has had. In adding four members that we have, we will gain as much as we could possibly gain on the football field. We will arguably be the best basketball conference in the country. We will be a force to be reckoned with in a wide variety of Olympic sports.”
The 70-year-old Bowlsby has been the Big 12 commissioner since 2012. He came to the league from Stanford, where he was the athletic director for six years. Before Stanford, Bowlsby had been AD at Iowa since 1991, overseeing the athletic program where growing up he sold soda at football games.