The latest innovation for Woj as St. Bonaventure GM: Insurance

Washington Post

09-04-2025

SAN ANTONIO — Six months into his new life, Adrian Wojnarowski plugged in his phone and set it face down on the floor of a hotel conference room. It would stay that way for more than 30 minutes, buzzing alone, untouched.
Back in the fall, Wojnarowski — widely and colloquially known as Woj — traded an attachment to his phone as a preeminent NBA news-breaker for an even deeper attachment to his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University in western New York, where he became the general manager of the men's basketball team. He was at the Final Four this past week to help the program in ways normal and not. Sure, he mingled with coaches, spoke at a conference, talked hoops over dinner. But he also took dozens of photos with fans, signed memorabilia for future auctions and squeezed in a mini press tour.
Little is normal about what St. Bonaventure is trying to do with its mid-major resources. And little is normal about having a GM with 6.4 million followers on X who became famous for his reporting with ESPN.
'I'm trying to get high-major players for mid-major money,' Wojnarowski said in an interview Saturday, his first season finished, his first transfer portal cycle almost wrapped, too. The Bonnies went 22-12, including 9-9 in the Atlantic 10 (good for seventh out of 15 teams). But in the past month, two desired big men — Frank Mitchell and Joe Grahovac — committed to the program, something that might have seemed impossible before Wojnarowski arrived.
Mitchell, who has signed with the Bonnies, played at Canisius and Minnesota. Grahovac, a 6-foot-10 redhead from Fullerton College, a junior college in California, is expected to sign next week. To close the gap between what St. Bonaventure and what most other programs can offer in name, image and likeness (NIL) money, Wojnarowski has been creative. In the fall, at least one rep from every NBA team will attend a practice on campus, his way of tapping connections to promote the players to pro evaluators. Beyond that, he gives a hard sell for longtime coach Mark Schmidt, who he said is at a Hall of Fame level. St. Bonaventure also is using insurance policies.
Yes, insurance policies.
Division I sports are amid a period of rapid, uncertain change. That Wojnarowski is the Bonnies' GM is one example. Another is that he used insurance policies to build next year's roster. All of it is done through a company called Players Health. The insurance works in two ways: First, the Bonnies will have critical injury insurance for their entire payroll in 2025-26. And second, depending on the player and contract, the team has insurance policies on performance incentives, allowing the Bonnies to offer more money than they actually have to spend.
This is all new for college hoops. In Wojnarowski's first year, St. Bonaventure, like all programs, relied solely on donors and other third-party deals to pay its players. Soon, though, pending a major legal settlement, schools could be permitted to pay athletes directly for the first time. But whatever the situation is moving forward, Wojnarowski believes insurance is an edge for his mid-major team.
With the critical injury insurance, the Bonnies can sign players to contracts that aren't fully guaranteed to be paid by the school. If a player is injured and misses a certain amount of time, a bulk of his agreed-upon salary would be paid out by the insurance policy, meaning the Bonnies would save some cash for a future roster.
With the insurance on performance incentives, think of this way: If Wojnarowski is going for a player and another school is offering $10,000 more — $10,000 the Bonnies don't have — he can offer $10,000 in insured performance incentives to make up the difference. Maybe the premium, paid to Players Health, is $1,000. But if the player is first-team all-A-10, he could make that $10,000 in incentives, all paid out by the insurance policy. The school would have bet the $1,000 premium to land him. The insurer would have bet, too, seeing as it would have collected the $1,000 premium if the player didn't reach the incentive.
Everyone is hedging and calculating what's worth it. Wojnarowski believes that, more than anything, the incentives helped close the deal on players who want to find a reason to pick St. Bonaventure. As for what the incentives are for, he said it ranges from individual accolades (all-defense teams, newcomer of the year, etc.) to team success (a certain number of wins, making the NCAA tournament, etc.). The Bonnies are not doing stat-based incentives, wanting to avoid a player pushing himself through injury or going outside the system for numbers. Plus, he doesn't think that would be within the rules. Overall, he said, these insured incentives have been a major factor in recruiting and retaining players in this cycle.
'The third one that I'm fascinated by, and I don't have the money yet to invest in it, is [transfer] portal insurance,' Wojnarowski said, 'where you would pay a premium, probably a higher premium … [to] protect yourself against the player leaving in the portal, to be able to get back that player's money.'
Now for a critical wrinkle: As of this week, Wojnarowski is a brand ambassador for Players Health and a member of its NIL advisory board. That means he'll promote the company and its college sports services. In turn, there are significant benefits for the Bonnies, including that Players Health will cover all of the critical injury insurance policies for next year's roster and payroll. And whenever he brings a new program to the company, Players Health will pay a referral fee to St. Bonaventure's NIL collective, the booster group that has funded any salaries to this point.
This is the Woj Effect at work. Before the season, Schmidt, the Bonnies' coach, said that in the 24 hours after Wojnarowski announced his career change, the program got the most exposure it will in the next 50 years. To raise NIL money, the Bonnies recently auctioned off some of his old work phones. (The one he used in March 2020 to report that the NBA had suspended play early in the coronavirus pandemic sold for $3,250.) His partnership with Players Health is in that vein, though it could double as a competitive advantage. And the partnership also explains why he's being so open about a new team-building strategy.
'Even though I'm sharing it with people in our own league, that creates a stream of revenue,' Wojnarowski said. 'I'm willing to live with that because I need that revenue in a really difficult climate for us. So I'm trying to be as creative as I can be with a lot of these marketing deals.
'I made a decision when I came back that I'm going to try to parlay my whatever it is to fund our team,' he continued. 'This is another way for me to do it.'
Whatever it is is what the rest of us would just call fame.