Ohio State AD Ross Bjork on the state of Buckeyes athletics, football recruiting and more

With 36 Division I sports and one of the largest budgets in the country, Ohio State is among the biggest brands in college athletics.

That usually means the athletic director is one of the most influential people in the sport, as well, and that’s the case for Ross Bjork, who recently finished his second football season on the job.

But while Ohio State is mostly about football, Bjork’s time is also spent juggling the other 35 sports, sitting on committees and ensuring Ohio State is in line with the ever-changing world of college athletics.

With football in the offseason and both basketball teams making a postseason push, Bjork sat down with The Athletic to discuss those two sports, the Olympics and the state of college athletics as a whole.

Here is part one of the Q&A.

Note: Conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

With football season, you started 12-0, but had an abrupt ending there. You played the two teams in a championship. Does that change how you, as the AD, kind of look at it? 

You can reflect (in) a lot of different ways. In talking to (coach Ryan Day), you really have to break down just how young we were in key spots, and then when you play, these sort of high-level, high-leverage matchup games, that’s the term he uses, matchup games, right? And you play against older teams, then youth can show up.

I know the returning players, the coaches, they’re motivated by what we left on the field, because we had a shot. We could have won those games. Not saying we should have, but we could have.

So look at Ohio State, yeah, I think everyone wants to win one every year. That doesn’t happen, right? 2024, 2014, 2002. But the previous one before that was, what, 1970, right? But in the modern era, being the most consistent program, you want to finish on top, the best you can. And then if you don’t, you regroup, you learn from it, you analyze, you try to get better. We have the resources, we got the right guy leading our program with coach (Ryan) Day. So then you just kind of help go through that process of analysis.

Fourteen NFL draft picks last year, and there are 13 projected this year. That’s 27 draft picks in two years. Just fathoming that number is crazy. How do you rebuild from that? 

It just speaks to the consistency that coach Day brings to the table. And then making sure that even if you have some staff turnover, you’re at least bringing in guys that are either better than what you had before, or can do it at a high level. And obviously, having two former NFL head coaches on our staff now as coordinators speaks to the development piece. It speaks to the recruiting piece. We have the best young men from a character and a leadership standpoint.

So that part’s just fun to watch these guys evolve. Getting to know (safety) Caleb Downs as an example. I mean, he kept talking to me about (how) he wants to be an AD, about job shadowing, man. And I’m like, “Caleb, you’re gonna be in the NFL for 10-plus years. I think you could worry about job shadowing later.” But it just speaks to character, and what I always say here is we don’t have to take shortcuts. We will never shy away from recruiting the best high school players. You can’t do that.

One, we can get them here at Ohio State. Two, that is sort of continuity and consistency. And then if you can develop them early, you’re gonna bear the few fruits of that success. So, to me, everything rises and falls on leadership. And when you have the right coach, who sets the standard in every single bucket, you’re gonna have this kind of result, with draft picks and success on the field, and it’s pretty amazing to watch.

With Brian Hartline changing jobs, play calling shuffling around, it all seemed chaotic at an inopportune time. I know you’re not the one in there calling plays or calling Chris Henry to recruit him, but how do you, as an AD, kind of help out with that? 

You can’t control when somebody has an opening. You can’t control when they want to talk to one of your coaches. I guess people could say, “No, don’t talk to me yet,” but then you may lose out on an opportunity, and no one wants that to happen to anybody. And so the timing of the calendar, the portal, the signing day that’s the part that we have to fix as a structure within college athletics.

My role in that is just, “Hey, coach, what do you need? Is there anything I can do in the moment?” And, you know, given that week, there really wasn’t. I mean, he had to organize staff meetings. He had to organize play calling. He had to get everybody in the building to say, “Hey, remain calm, we’re going to have a plan,” but it’s also a short turnaround. I mean, it’s Wednesday morning when all of this is happening, and the fact that no one can explain to me even today why we moved signing day from the middle of December to the first week. I don’t understand why we did that last year.

So that added another layer of complexity, and when you’re trying to sign these guys, and obviously, there were a couple that just came down to the wire, because of what happened. So, look, it’s no one’s fault. I think we managed it the best we could.

But everyone’s human, and there’s only so many hours in the day to put all this back together. So it definitely had an impact, but we also had a chance to win the game. And we didn’t. So you learn and chalk it up and move on.

Men’s basketball has been up and down. I’m curious, your thoughts on the job coach Jake Diebler has done, and I know they’re on the bubble now. What would a successful year look like for this year? 

Ohio State men’s basketball, we should be in the (NCAA) Tournament. So I don’t like the fact that we’re sort of caught in the middle where one day we’re in, the next day we’re out, you know. We win a game, we’re in, we’re the last four in. I want to be squarely in the dance every year.

I think coach Diebler’s doing a great job on the recruiting side of things. Look, putting a roster together the last two years, where the first year it was sort of really last minute and trying to put pieces together, and the (name, image and likeness) landscape was evolving. This year had more time, but we have not had a consistent roster, pretty much since December. But how do we build more depth so we can overcome when guys get hurt? How do we recruit more consistently in the portal and high school kids? We have an amazing class coming in of high school kids next year. And again, that speaks to the coach, his relationship.

So, look, we want to be more consistent.  I think we’ve done a good job in lots of pieces, and then we’re still evolving in others, but the expectation is that we’re a tournament team, and then we make a deep run. We’ve done it before. I’ve described it before as, look, we’ve, in the modern era, Ohio State basketball’s been at the forefront. We want to get back to that. So I think there are a lot of pieces and parts to it, but we want to support coach.

Where are you on expanding the NCAA Tournament? 

If you look at the structure where you have, what do we have, 36 at-large teams, 32 automatic qualifiers. And you look at how many Division I programs we have, 350, 355. You know, 10 percent at large? Is that enough? Probably not.

There’s probably room for expansion, but again, where does it fit in the calendar? What do the first and early rounds look like? Those are all the things that I don’t know if enough people have really mapped that out. I know the NCAA has said, “Hey, we’re going to kind of put the conversation on pause.” There’s a lot of things happening in the TV world that we have to monitor as well, with companies changing hands, buyouts and things like that. So hit the pause button. I do think it can expand. Does it have to, you know, go to a super big number? But if you’re at 68 now, is it 76? Is it 80 somewhere in there?

That probably feels right. Just because there are so many quality teams in the at-large space that get left out, and I think you can rectify that with a little bit of expansion. I don’t think you have to go crazy, though.

You look at the Olympics. Ohio State led all colleges with 12 players on the women’s hockey teams and a player on every semifinal team. What’s it like to see that, and what does it mean for the women’s hockey program?  

There was one match I was watching, and it was like an infomercial for Ohio State. Incredible exposure. Our women’s ice hockey team has really exploded (over) the last five to seven years. So to me, this adds fuel to the explosion of our program. We’re trying to get an ice arena built and funded, so hopefully this creates some momentum around that.

But it speaks to (coach) Nadine (Muzerall) and what she’s done. It’s just a lot of fun to watch, and obviously, we want to get the ladies back for the stretch run postseason here. And then we’ll have time to celebrate them at the right moments and make sure they get a lot of attention and display those medals. So it’s a really cool moment for the university.

You mentioned the rink. Where is that? I know you talked about moving along before the football season. 

We are making a lot of progress behind the scenes. Hopefully, this spring, we can go public with, “Here’s the building, what it looks like, here’s how much money we have, here’s what’s left and here’s the time frame.” At least get a campaign out there in the public space.

Same thing with the Woody Hayes project. So it’s really the Woody Hayes and the Ice Arena are the two priorities for us that we want to get off the ground, public interest, public notice, timeline and funding. So we’re getting close. We’re getting close to making all that public sometime this spring.