The Big Ten is looking for its next boss, but the search has the potential to affect more than just one Power Five conference.

Kevin Warren spent more than three years heading up the Big Ten. Among his highlights as the league’s commissioner are a historic media rights deal struck late last year and helping the conference reach beyond its geographical footprint with the recent addition of Southern California and UCLA as part of the latest round of league realignment.

Now he’s in the NFL. Warren in January was hired as the president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Bears, leaving behind some big shoes to fill. And if the conference’s search goes in the direction some believe it could, the ACC might also need a replacement at the top of its organization.

Jim Phillips is reportedly among the leading candidates to succeed Warren, and understandably so. Phillips is just a little more than two years into his tenure as the ACC’s commissioner, but he’s also a Chicago native who has deep ties to the Big Ten and the Midwest region of the country that the majority of its member institutions call home. A graduate of the University of Illinois, Phillips was the athletic director at the University of Northern Illinois in the mid-2000s and had a decade-long run as the director of athletics at Northwestern University before the ACC came calling in 2021.

There’s also the more solid footing the Big Ten has within the evolving landscape of major college athletics. The SEC got the ball rolling on realignment when it poached name brands Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 last summer. Those expansions, effective in 2024, brought with them new television contracts for the Big Ten and SEC that further widens the financial gap between those leagues and the ACC, which, at least for the time being, is stuck in its grant-of-rights deal with ESPN through 2036.

Should those all be reasons enough for Phillips to leave the ACC assuming the Big Ten makes him its primary target, the ACC would be losing one of its biggest ambassadors both publicly and privately.

Phillips helped form an alliance with the Big Ten and Pac-12 with the idea of giving the three leagues a louder voice in the proverbial room, though what was essentially a gentlemen’s agreement among them ultimately failed. He listened to the concerns of his own administrators, coaches and student-athletes when it came to expanding the College Football Playoff, which was one of the reasons why the ACC initially voted against expansion before eventually coming around.

With the ACC’s future seemingly in peril, the league will need just as strong of an advocate at the forefront should it come to that, and it doesn’t figure to be much longer until the league finds out whether or not it will. Rutgers athletic director Pat Hobbs recently told The Knight Report podcast that there is “confidence” within the Big Ten that its next commissioner will be in place by the end of May.

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