Pete Thamel: Ohio State an 'interesting escape hatch' for new AD Ross Bjork after 'tenuous' A&M tenure

Ohio State’s move to hire Ross Bjork from Texas A&M as the new athletic director came as a surprise to many. That was in no small part due to the handling of football coach Jimbo Fisher and his gaudy contract.

Bjork was at the helm at Texas A&M when Fisher was given a 10-year, $95 million contract extension in 2021 that he was bought out of two years later for around $75 million. This, among a number of other pitfalls from Bjork’s tenure, led to what ESPN’s Pete Thamel deemed a “tenuous” time that Bjork bailed on.

“It was certainly a surprising move, if only because the situation at Texas A&M was a little bit tenuous in the wake of his part in what’s going to be remembered as the worst contract extension in the history of college sports,” Thamel said on the “Paul Finebaum Show” on Thursday. “There was obviously the pursuit of Mark Stoops that was clumsily executed there. It was an interesting escape hatch for Bjork to end up in Columbus, Paul.”

The ultimate motivator for Ohio State to hire Bjork, Thamel surmised, was his willingness and ability to get Texas A&M out ahead in the fore front of the NIL era. He managed to marshal donor dollars and create an open environment for letting college athletes get paid better than most as NIL was adopted.

And that attitude is a departure from the way Ohio State might’ve approached things under outgoing athletic director Gene Smith. More simply put: Money was on the Buckeyes’ collective minds as they grabbed Bjork.

“I think from an Ohio State perspective, the way I viewed it was almost like a pure capitalist play,” Thamel said. “They wanted to go distinctly away from the Gene Smith tree and away from the things that had been done, and they wanted to be modernized and they wanted someone who would lead the charge in fundraising and collective raising. And certainly you could argue how A&M spent their collective money, but no one would argue that they spent it, and raised it and had it available and were at the forefront of that. I think that was institutionally the shift from Gene Smith, who is fairly conservative in that space — and a lot of that emerged during the late part of his tenure — to Ross Bjork who has been a ring leader in that space.”