Minnesota Vikings executive Kevin Warren is the new commissioner of the Big Ten, the conference announced Tuesday.
Warren becomes the sixth commissioner in conference history and will take over Sept. 16 in a transition role. He succeeds Jim Delany, who will leave the job on Jan. 1.
Warren said he wants to "make sure to take time and energy to be great listener and observer" and "build" on Delany's success.
"I'm energized," he said at Tuesday's press conference in Rosemont, Ill. "But most of all, I'm grateful."
"Kevin is a visionary leader, an experienced, successful and highly respected executive, and a skilled communicator who is uniquely positioned to continue the traditions of excellence that have become synonymous with the Big Ten Conference," said Michael A. McRobbie, president of Indiana University and chair of the executive search committee, said in a statement.
As for becoming the first African-American commissioner of a Power 5 conference, Warren said: "It is definitely not lost on me."
He told reporters Tuesday that on his office walls he has photographs Curt Flood, Jackie Robinson, the Texas Western basketball team and Martin Luther King.
In 2015, Warren became the first African American chief operating officer of an NFL team. Shortly after, University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler appointed Warren to help select the school's athletic director, a search that yielded Mark Coyle.
Warren played basketball at Penn and was a member of the Quakers' 1981-82 Ivy League championship team before transferring to Grand Canyon University in his native Phoenix. He earned an MBA from Arizona State and a law degree from Notre Dame.
Warren's name didn't publicly surface until Monday. He was not among the nine candidates mentioned in an April report in Sports Business Journal.
