At home

Sports journalist, writer and podcast host Bomani Jones is best known for the thoughtful, witty and occasionally blistering takes on sports, politics and current events he delivers across multiple platforms and networks.

While he delivered plenty as the 2025 Writer-in-Residence for UD’s Roger Brown Residency in Social Justice, Writing and Sport, Jones also leaned into his upbringing in a collegiate environment. He talked about spending significant time on university campuses where his parents were professors, and shared fond memories of their students coming by his home to babysit or play video games.

Visiting UD felt like coming home, he said. During his residency Oct. 20-22, Jones visited classrooms, held open chat sessions with student groups and delivered a lecture on the modern sports media environment and the future of college athletics.

“I feel colleges raised me,” Jones said during his public talk at the Roger Glass Center for the Arts. “I feel a measure of paying it forward to students, and I’ve been very surprised by how willing and generous students here have been in giving me their time and attention. I’ve gotten great questions from them.”

Jones hosts The Right Time with Bomani Jones podcast and was a co-host on ESPN’s Highly Questionable and High Noon. He was also a regular panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn, hosted Game Theory with Bomani Jones on HBO and has made appearances on CNN and MSNBC.

The Roger Brown residency honors the late Brown, a former UD student-athlete, professional basketball player and member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1961, Brown was caught up in a national gambling scandal, dismissed from the University and barred from playing basketball in the NCAA and NBA, despite never being charged or having any involvement in fixing games. Overcoming what are now recognized as injustices, Brown eventually had a standout career in the American Basketball Association with the Indiana Pacers.

In 2019, UD initiated an effort to honor Brown through the lens of social justice.

"Brown’s name lives on in an inspiring three-day academic experience for our students. We hope this focused look at the intersection of sports, writing and the issues of the day will lead them to work toward a more just and equitable world.”

“Roger Brown overcame enormous challenges to achieve professional success, and for too long we, as a University, did not recognize that," President Eric F. Spina said. "Brown’s name lives on in an inspiring three-day academic experience for our students. We hope this focused look at the intersection of sports, writing and the issues of the day will lead them to work toward a more just and equitable world.”

The inaugural writer-in-residence was Wil Haygood, known for his 2008 Washington Post article that was the basis for the film The Butler. He also wrote Tigerland about the legendary rise of an all-Black segregated high school in Columbus, Ohio, that won two state championships the year following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jessica Luther, an investigative journalist, author and podcaster who’s written extensively on the intersection of sports and violence off the field, especially college football and sexual assault, was the second resident in 2024.

During Jones’ public conversation at the Glass Center, he took questions from interviewer Alex Mikos, UD’s coordinator of branding and communications for track and field and cross country, and from the audience. Questions ranged from concerns about the rising cost of attending live games to the unanswered question that forever remains in the minds of the Flyer Faithful.

“If COVID didn’t happen, who wins the 2020 men’s basketball national championship?”

The audience shouted their unanimous answer, and Jones responded with a smile.

“I agree,” he said.

photos by Sylvia Stahl ’18