Funding Ohio State sports isn’t cheap nowadays. Meeting with reporters at the Jack Nicklaus Museum on Thursday, Athletic Director Ross Bjork said the Buckeyes plan to be the first athletic department to have an operating budget of more than $500 million.
Bjork said much of the first two years of his tenure as Ohio State’s Athletic Director have been spent adapting to the changes of college sports, but now he aims to take Ohio State’s brand to the next level.
“There’s a lot of data that shows that we have 12 million fans. If 1% of those people would join the Buckeye Club (there would be 120,000 members),” Bjork said. “Right now we have about 25,000 donors, and that’s a great number, but if you think about how we take the size and scale of Ohio State and maximize it, there really is no ceiling for our program from an engagement, enterprise, value and revenue (standpoint).
“That’s what we’re really going to focus on, is to take vision and turn it into action, and really focus on what we have to do to make sure we’re nationally competitive. We have to make sure there’s a financially sustainable model. We will be the first program that has a $500 million annual operating budget. It’s going to happen. It could happen three years from now, it could happen two years from now, five years from now, but we will have a $500 million athletic budget at some point in time very soon.”
One specific area Bjork wants to improve upon is the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. Bjork said Ohio State plans to expand the indoor training facility used by the football team along with several others. He added that the project will cost around $125 million and that the location will remain the same.
“What we want to do is to expand the locker room, expand the training room, and develop a bigger team meeting room at some place within that structure,” Bjork said. “Right now, not everyone can fit in the team meeting room when we have a team meeting. Individual position rooms are in the same place as the coach’s office. So, if (offensive line coach) Tyler Bowen needs to have a private meeting and somebody wants an offensive lineman to watch film, somebody has to leave.
“A new office complex, a new weight room would be part of the new construction. The rest would be really a total renovation. The location is great, and we don’t want to lose that opportunity of that location, but new construction will be part of it. But then a total renovation timeline – we’ve raised some money on it, but that’s why we need some public visibility, we need to get it out in the public, we need to let people know, and then once we have that, we can really map out a time.”
With universities being allowed to share revenue directly with student athletes since the House vs. NCAA settlement was passed last summer, every dollar counts. However, Bjork said there’s more clarity about the NIL system than in years past, which has paved the way for more traditional fundraising opportunities for donors.
“Ever since I’ve been here at Ohio State, two-plus years, we are on our third iteration of the NIL,” Bjork said. “The first year I was here, and this was happening before I got here, it was donor-based. Then in my first full year that I was here, it was sort of a hybrid. We had some sponsorship activation, we had money going through collectives that we helped raise. It was sort of a hybrid, and then this year it’s been revenue share and third-party NIL agreements, and collectives, not as much, donors giving not as much. (Third-party NIL deals) have to be a valid business.
“I really believe that now we have a clear message to our donors to say this is what NIL is, and now we get back to sort of traditional fundraising, and then we have to expand that donor base. We really do, and our team has a really good plan, a really good roadmap to launch a lot of things separate from our campaign.”
