Sports fans were surprised by the Woj bomb to literally end all Woj bombs on Wednesday, September 18.
ESPN senior NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski, known as the authority on all breaking NBA news, has announced his retirement from reporting. Wojnarowski, 55, will leave ESPN to become the general manager for the St. Bonaventure University men’s basketball team, according to a post he shared via X.
Wojnarowski, better known simply as Woj, graduated from St. Bonaventure in 1991 and received an honorary doctorate from the university in 2022.
“It is a thrill of a lifetime to be able to return to a university and community that I love in a role of service to our student-athletes, coaches and institution,” Wojnarowski told ESPN. “I am hopeful that I can bring value in a lot of areas to our basketball program and open doors for our young men’s futures in ways both professionally and personally.”
Wojnarowski is a native of Bristol, Connecticut, the same town as ESPN’s headquarters. He began his career at the Hartford Courant and rose to prominence in the sports world as a columnist at The Bergen Record in the late 1990s. He joined Yahoo! Sports in 2007, where he became known as one of the most trusted news breakers in the NBA, leading fans to label his scoops “Woj bombs.”
Wojnarowski joined ESPN in 2017, spearheading the network’s NBA news coverage and expanding his role to TV. One of his most famous moments came during the 2018 NBA Draft, which aired on ESPN. The company prohibited him from reporting draft picks ahead of time and spoiling the show, which led Wojnarowski to cheekily tweet what he was hearing without explicitly reporting the pick.
“Boston is tantalized by Robert Williams with the 27th pick,” read one of his tweets that night, teasing the Celtics’ eventual pick.
Now, Wojnarowski takes on a new role entirely. The general manager position is relatively new in college basketball, established with the introduction of name, image and likeness (NIL) rules to college sports. Typically, the GM helps players oversee their NIL opportunities and coordinates with the university compliance department to make sure all endorsement opportunities comply with NCAA rules.
“Woj is the perfect person to fill this new role, combining his intimate knowledge of St. Bonaventure and our Franciscan values with a deep network of relationships he has built across the worlds of professional and intercollegiate basketball,” St. Bonaventure athletic director Bob Beretta said in a statement. “The fact that the preeminent journalist in his field is willing to walk away from a lucrative media career to serve his alma mater in a support role is a testament to his love and passion for Bona’s.”
Wojnarowski is the second prominent basketball reporter in two weeks to leave journalism for a job in college athletics. The Athletic senior college basketball reporter Dana O’Neil left the publication last week to take the position of Senior Associate AD for Strategic Communication at Villanova University.