Barry Alvarez has apparently carved out a new role in his collegiate athletics career.
According to CBS Sports, citing a report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Alvarez is poised to assume the position of Big Ten Conference liaison to the league's football coaches, effective later this summer. Alvarez is retiring as University of Wisconsin athletic director June 30.
The 74-year-old Alvarez was named Wisconsin's head football coach ahead of the 1990 season, compiling a 120-73-4 record, and became the school's athletic director in 2004. Badger teams won 16 national championships on his watch.
"It has been an honor to be a part of Wisconsin Athletics and I take great pride in all we have accomplished over the last three decades," Alvarez said in a statement when he announced his retirement in April. "From championships, to improvements on campus, to impacting thousands of student-athletes, it's been a great ride. I'm grateful for the support, generosity, enthusiasm and loyalty of Badgers in the state of Wisconsin and beyond. Thank you."
As reported by CBS Sports, Alvarez was one of the inaugural members on the College Football Playoff selection committee in 2014, and spent three seasons in the role until he was rotated off after the 2016 season. He has been a proponent of CFP expansion and, in 2019, said that the selection committee wasn't using its selection criteria when choosing which teams to place in the four-team postseason. He also served as the Big Ten's return-to-competition task force last summer when the conference restarted its football season after initially announcing it would postponed to spring 2021.
