Wisconsin Badgers

Mitchell Pinta joined Wisconsin Athletics as Deputy Athletic Director in February of 2022. Pinta provides leadership for all external facing areas of Badger Athletics, including revenue generation, development, brand marketing, communications and legal affairs.

Pinta returned to UW after 14 seasons with the NFL and was most recently responsible for securing long-term partnerships with top brands. He and his team leveraged the goals and objectives of partners associated with the NFL across all business units, including the NFL's high-profile calendar events such as the NFL Draft and Super Bowl, the League's media properties (Thursday Night Football, NFL Playoffs and NFL Network) and Licensing.

During his two and a half years in this role, he produced over $185M in incremental revenue to the NFL and led negotiations of the League’s long-term partnerships with Cisco, TikTok, Best Buy, Align Technology and Diageo.

Prior to his role in Business Development, Pinta served as the Group Managing Director of Sponsorship and Partnership management where he managed over a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue across a diversified portfolio of key relationships including Anheuser-Busch, Bose, Verizon and Visa. Also, beginning in 2013 he oversaw all day-to-day aspects of the League’s partnership with Microsoft which included the successful roll out of sideline tablets during the 2014 season.

Pinta joined the NFL as a participant in the League’s rotational program where he spent time in various groups including Football Operations, Events, Consumer Products / Licensing and Player Engagement.

Pinta, a UW-Madison graduate, hails from Boston and is married to Jessica Palermo, a Madison native. The couple has two children.