With a full section of his family sitting just to his right, Ross Bjork was introduced as Ohio State’s next athletic director, on Wednesday afternoon.
Still the athletic director at Texas A&M, Bjork won’t start in full capacity until July 1, when he officially replaces current AD Gene Smith. He will, though, begin his transition to Ohio State and officially be on the payroll beginning March 1 as the senior advisor to Smith until he retires.
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Both the transition and job are something Bjork, who has Ohio ties with his family being from the state, is excited about.
“My mom, Linda, if I would’ve told her six months from now that Ohio State called, I would’ve been disowned from the family,” he joked. “But why else, Ohio State? To compete at the highest level, be a leader in intercollegiate athletics and the future of all of this. It’s a broad spectrum of responsibilities, it’s not just athletics, you’re a leader in this community in a meaningful way.”
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Here are a few takeaways from Bjork’s news conference that covered topics regarding Jimbo Fisher, Ryan Day and more.
How much is Bjork being paid?
Bjork has two separate salaries this year.
Beginning on March 1 he will be paid $175,000 per month to be the senior advisor to Smith. In that role, he will be able to transition to the university and learn more about the day-to-day operations from Smith.
Once he takes over as the full-time athletic director on July 1, he will have a five-year contract with a base annual salary of $1.65 million. He will also receive a lump sum payment of $1.094 million to compensate Bjork for the $750,000 buyout he had to make to Texas A&M for leaving before his contract ended. He will receive $350,000 for “media, promotions and public obligations.”
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How did Bjork become the Ohio State AD?
The process for Ohio State’s search moved fairly quickly.
As the sitting athletic director at Texas A&M, Bjork got a call around the holidays from the Ohio State search committee to see if he was interested in the position. The first thing he thought about was his family.
Bjork has a wife, Sonya, and two sons, Paxton and Payton. Payton will play college football at Tarleton Texas next year and Paxton will begin high school. He wanted to make sure the move was OK with them.
“The first thing you think about is family,” he said.
There was silence from Ohio State through Texas A&M’s loss in the Texas Bowl, but conversations picked up once new president Ted Carter took office on January 1.
From there, Carter was involved in all of the interviews. Bjork said he and Carter had a conversation on Sunday, he began meeting with people at Ohio State, including football coach Ryan Day, on Monday, and then, the move was final.
Bjork still needs to be approved by the Board of Trustees, which will be done in February, Carter said, but the deal is largely done.
“If it looks like it’s a little bit rushed, it’s actually not,” Carter said. “I wanted to make sure that whoever we selected would have good overlap time with Gene Smith to be ready to come in here and go to work.”
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What will Gene Smith’s role in the department be?
Although Bjork has been named the next athletic director, Carter made it clear that Smith will make all of the major decisions until he retires.
Still, that time is crucial for Bjork, who will be around Smith daily.
The two have known each other for a long time, dating back to when Bjjork served as UCLA’s senior associate athletic director under then-AD Dan Guerrero, who is a close friend of Smith.
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Bjork said he wants to learn numerous ins and outs of the job from Smith over the next five months. He did specify he wanted to familiarize himself with all of the contracts like with Nike, Learfield and more.
Ultimately, he said his time over the next five months will be focused on interacting with people and building relationships with everybody in the department.
“I want to learn the people, get to know the people and luckily I don’t have to make the day to day decisions,” Bjork said. “There will be a lot of studying, but again it will be about interacting with people.”
How does Bjork approach coaching decisions?
It’s no secret that Bjork is walking into a department at a crucial time. There’s a good chance that he may have to make a decision about men’s basketball coach Chris Holtmann sooner rather than later if Smith decides to keep Holtmann through his tenure.
The men’s basketball team finished 16-19 last season and is currently 12-5 after a loss on Monday at Michigan.
He may also have to make a decision about Day’s future in the next year, especially if the Buckeyes lose to Michigan and underachieve again.
But Bjork doesn’t believe in the idea that an incoming athletic director fires a coach because they weren’t “the guy” or he didn’t hire them. He said the decision has to be in the best interest of the institution.
“The No. 1 thing I can do is understand the people because that teaches you about the culture,” he said. “Before you come in with a wild game plan or I have this, it doesn’t work that way. You have to get to know the people which teaches you the culture.”
Any decision he makes would be about more than just the wins and losses of that specific season.
“Are there barriers to success? What are the challenges? Is there momentum in the program? We’ll sit down and learn. I have a lot to learn about other sports that are here,” he said.
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Bjork went on to compliment Day multiple times on Wednesday. The two met on Monday and had about an hour-long meeting where both left impressed with the other person.
“This guy right here he’s going to get it done and it’s going to be a lot of fun when we win those championships,” Bjork said pointing to Day.
It’s no secret that their relationship is the most important one in the athletic department — one could argue it’s the biggest in the entire university. And Bjork, who played college football at Emporia State University, has a football mind but said he doesn’t want to overstep boundaries. Day is the coach and he’ll help him how he can.
“He’s a brilliant mind in the game of football,” Bjork said. “He knows what championship football looks like. The Game matters and we talked about that and the best thing I can do is lock arms with him, figure out are there any barriers and figure out key decisions. He’s the coach, he’s the strategist. He has to build the roster. It’s my job to say what are the infrastructure and culture pieces I can help with and then let you go to work.”
Time will tell how Bjork will handle coaching decisions at Ohio State but he comes with experience. For example, what has he learned from contract situations such as the one with Jimbo Fisher?
In the interview process, Carter mentioned one of the topics he pushed hard on was Bjork’s decision to give former Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher an extension in 2021 and then fire him two years later, leaving the university with a $75 million buyout, the largest in college sports history.
It was a decision that received backlash across the country, but one Carter said Bjork owned behind closed doors.
He did so, again, on Wednesday.
When asked about what went into that decision, Bjork didn’t go into extraneous detail but said the university wanted a long-term commitment knowing that the market was going change in the 2021 offseason.
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“It was my job to execute it and make the right recommendations and right structure. It was approved by university leadership,” Bjork said.
That wasn’t the only questionable decision Bjork made in his 30-year career in intercollegiate athletics. He also spent time at Ole Miss during the Hugh Freeze era. Freeze resigned in July 2017 due to a “pattern of personal misconduct.” Freeze’s resignation came after the attorney of former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt filed a lawsuit against the university requesting Freeze’s phone records, which prompted an Ole Miss investigation. USA Today reported the university-issued phone was used to make a call to a phone number connected to a female escort service on Jan. 19, 2016.
Bjork, who at the time said if Freeze didn’t resign the university would’ve terminated his contract, defended that decision and the way the university handled it all.
“You can say what you want on perception but the fact was that the compliance record was strong on day to day. There were a lot of outside forces that infiltrated, but as far as the head coach, we knew exactly what was happening from a compliance standpoint and then he had a personal failure and as soon as we found out about it we took action and said he can’t be the head coach anymore,” Bjork said. “It happened but how do you deal with it, to me, is more telling than the thing that happened behind that.”
(Top photo: Cameron Teague Robinson / The Athletic)