Adrian Wojnarowski Makes 99 Percent Less Than He Did At ESPN

Sports fans had two immediate questions to ask after Adrian Wojnarowski announced his shock retirement from ESPN in September. 1) Why? 2) Who in their right mind would walk away from all that guaranteed money?

As fans knew, Wojnarowski had about three years remaining on his current deal with ESPN, at $7.3 million per year. He walked away from at least $20 million – plus the money he would have received upon his next deal, one that would have probably edged him closer to $10 million annually.

Wojnarowski left media behind to assume the newly created position of general manager of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball program. Due to the novelty of the position--most of us didn't know college teams had GMs--it was unknown how much the team would pay Wojnarowski. Fans suspect that, while not $7 million a year, the job would still be lucrative.

Not exactly.

OLEAN, NY - St. Bonaventure General Manager Adrian Wojnarowski in action during a photo shoot at the Reilly Center. (Photo by Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) 

Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix published a profile of Wojnarowski this week for an article titled,"Why the preeminent NBA news breaker walked away." In the profile, SI revealed that St. Bonaventure pays Wojnarowski, wait for it, $75,000 a year.

You read that correctly. Wojnarowski willingly chose to leave his $7.3 million salary at ESPN for another full-time job that pays $75,000 per year, a pay cut of 99 percent.

Is he nuts?

Maybe.

But Woj says he still makes more than he thought he would when he first stepped away from ESPN. "Honestly," Woj said, "I thought it would be $50,000."

Mannix, a longtime friend of Wojnarowski's, said while the former NBA insider has made millions of dollars in his career, he hasn’t spent them. "He still lives in the same house in New Jersey that he bought shortly after returning to work for The Record."

Granted, Wojnarowski has new expenses. He rents an apartment above The Burton Hotel, where college students frequent for discounted beer. He pays $1,500 a month to rent the place.

The apartment is far from, uhh, luxurious. Take a look:

Wojnarowski attributes his decision to retire from ESPN to a combination of burnout and a prostate cancer diagnosis in March, leading him to remember that "time isn’t in endless supply."

"The NBA grind was getting to him," Mannix wrote.

While the prognosis is, as Woj says, "good," it provided him clarity. "I didn’t want to spend one more day of my life waiting on someone’s MRI or hitting an agent at 1 a.m. about an ankle sprain," he explained.

Wojnarowski told SI that he traveled to Rogers, Ark., in May for a memorial for Chris Mortensen, a longtime NFL insider who died in March from throat cancer, and something struck him. Though many ESPNers made the trip to Arkansas, Woj couldn't help but notice how many did not.

"It made me remember that the job isn’t everything," Woj recalled. "In the end it’s just going to be your family and close friends. And it’s also, like, nobody gives a s---. Nobody remembers [breaking stories] in the end. It’s just vapor." 

And therein lies the reason Adrian Wojnarowski gave up fame, fortune, and status for a $75,000-a-year job and an apartment that can't fit a sectional couch, located somewhere near the city of Olean, New York.

Honestly, good for him.