Adrian Wojnarowski retires from ESPN, joins St. Bonaventure as GM

The Woj Bomb to end all Woj Bombs. Literally.

NBA newsbreaker extraordinaire Adrian Wojnarowski announced on Wednesday morning that he was retiring from ESPN, journalism, and newsbreaking. In his next chapter, he’s returning to his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University, as the men’s basketball program’s general manager.

Woj, who graduated from the small, remotely located A-10 school in 1991, has been in sports journalism since and even before arriving in Olean. In the late-90’s, he emerged one of the top young sports columnists in the country thanks to his work at The Record in New Jersey.

Thanks to the advent of social media, Woj’s connections allowed him to grow his own profile by being the first to report NBA stories. Through his time at Yahoo and ESPN, his profile only grew and grew, becoming an unavoidable and essential part of the NBA.

Despite this, he never grew too big for his alma mater.

St. Bonaventure, both in spite of and because of its small enrollment numbers, has built a reputation for having a fiercely loyal alumni base. The community around the school is, in general, extremely proud of its connection to the school, and stays connected in many different ways.

For Woj, he’s been a consistent fixture at the Reilly Center. Recently, he became the public face of SBU’s NIL collective, of which he’s one of the top donors.

Across the country, more and more programs are hiring general managers to help take a roster building and NIL management load off of their head coaches. However, none of those other programs have the ace up their sleeve that Mark Schmidt and AD Bob Beretta pulled today.

In fact, Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports reported that another program offered Woj a similar spot after hearing rumors of the move, but he turned it down.

It was the Bonnies or nobody.

While most programs hiring GM’s are targeting candidates adept in analytics or economics to help uncover diamonds in the rough and manage a budget, Woj brings a different angle.

Thanks to his near-endless connections with agents and other influential people in the sport, Woj can have a major impact on St. Bonaventure’s ability to recruit talented players. Even though it may be hard to imagine him showing up in a random high school open gym, somebody that he knows is in basically every gym in the country, from the lower levels up to the NBA. Now, the Bonnies have a vast network of connections available to them to help find players and sell them on attending…