What About Bob? Will Bowlsby Be the Next Pac-10 Commissioner?

To answer the question in the headline of this post ... maybe. How's that for fine journalism?

The job of Pacific-10 commissioner is officially open on July 1.  Bowlsby, the athletic director from 1991 to 2006 at the University of Iowa, presently holds a similar job at Stanford University.

Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News lists several potential candidates at http://tinyurl.com/aj2zb6.

About Bowlsby, he wrote this:

Everyone I talk to believes Bowlsby wants the job, and yet he's on record saying he's not a candidate.

The way it has been explained to me: After the executive committee reviews the candidates provided by Bowlsby's committee, Hennessy turns to BB and says, essentially: “We're not sold on any of them. What about you, Bob?”

Bowlsby worked in the Big Ten and is considered very savvy in the ways of multimedia and TV and business matters.

But just as Al Gore didn't carry Tennessee in the 2000 presidential election and even the great Alex Rodriguez has been booed in New York, not every Stanford supporter is a Bowlsby supporter. Check the comments portion of Wilner's blog post to see what I'm talking about.

Speaking of which, here's the last paragraph of his blog item:

Again, everyone I talk to - Stanford folks, Pac-10 folks, non-Pac-10 folks - thinks the league will eventually get back to Bowlsby and offer him the job. Until there's reason not to, I'm going to take him at his word.

Bowlsby's not going to retire as the AD at Stanford. Running the Pac-10 may not be the dream of Condolezza Rice (see Wilner's article), but it's got to be a pretty good gig for career athletic-department people.