Ohio State AD Ross Bjork: OSU spending all it can? Should college football have no spending limit?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to the Bill & Doug Show. Doug LaMaurice and Bill Landis joined by a very special guest today, Ross Bjork, the Athletics Director of The Ohio State University, giving us some of his time. Ross, thank you for joining us here on the Bill & Doug Show.
Absolutely.
Thank you guys for having me on. All right. Let's dive in. We're going to talk about some of this. What's the word? NIL stuff, building rosters, the portal, the modern world of college football. Bill Landis, why don't you start us off?
Sure. Ross, I was I was watching the the interview you did with Adam King and Tim Hall on 10 TV the other day. And you mentioned something I think a couple of times that caught my ear. It was this idea that the. Sport, and primarily college football, has already outpaced the $20.5 million revenue sharing cap. And I'm wondering, one, do you have an idea of what you think it should be raised to? Have there been any discussions about that? I know it's supposed to go up 4%, I think, the next two years and then be re-evaluated. And what would a raised cap mean for Ohio State if that were to happen in some kind of significant way?
Yeah. You know, what do they say? History repeats itself. You know, there's probably lots of phrases around things that happened in the past. And, you know, I'm I love history. You know, I love your, you know, Jim Thorpe picture back there that we were talking about off air. And, you know, actually in the very first intercollegiate athletic event was a rowing race in 1852, Harvard and Yale. And there was a railroad baron who gave away prize money, gave away sponsorship money, was giving away cabins, and was basically inducing people to either one, come to the race or participate in it. Later, it was discovered that some of the rowers were not students. They were hired to try to what? Win the race, right?
At Ohio State in the early 1950s, we got put on probation because we had football players that were supposed to show up for a job. They didn't show up, but they got paid. And there was a report that came out from a professor here, Professor Fullington, that said, you know what? It's time to pay the athletes some of the upside. That was 1957 is when that report was published. So the point is, anytime there's been money and anytime there's been restrictions in college athletics around benefits, money,
How has college football revenue sharing changed recently?
Whatever it is, what do people do? They find a way to get around it. It just is, right? And so what we've done with the house case settlement is we put a cap on it. It's 22% of all these revenue buckets. The average across the autonomy for conferences is a little over 100 million. That produced 20.5 million this year. It goes up 4% a year based on the settlement terms. And then there's look-in periods based on, let's just say we do expand the CFP and there's new revenue. Bam, you'd redo the calculation. Let's just say the Big Ten or whoever redoes their TV deal, you redo the calculation. So it's across all autonomy for conferences that creates revenue. But what happened is when we introduced collectives, when we introduced boosters, when we introduced donors, and we were all racing to this point.
When we introduced front loading last year, where everybody was racing to get the biggest amount of money to solidify your roster before June 30th of 2025. The market outpaced the 22%. It just did. That 22% number was calculated about three years ago. Well, what's happened in the last three years, right? And so I just feel like anytime we've tried to restrict the environment around the benefits, it leads to people, are they doing the right thing? And people criticize, hey, what rules? There are rules published. There are rules codified both by the House case settlements. You have a federal lawsuit. You have rules that have then been codified by the NCAA, which then has College Sports Commission oversight.
And you can debate oversight and all these kind of things. But there are rules published.
What is the current spending cap for college football programs?
They are. They're on the books. And the question is, will they be enforced? What is that look in period going to be?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–2:32
2
How has college football revenue sharing changed recently?
2:32–4:29
3
What is the current spending cap for college football programs?
4:29–17:22
4
How does Ohio State plan to maximize its NIL opportunities?
17:22–22:36
5
What role do mega donors play in college football funding?
22:36–32:58
6
Do college football programs need in-house contract experts?
32:58–38:52
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Bill and Doug Show: Ohio State Football Talk
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