Ross Bjork opens up on if football should break away from other sports

With the amateurism model of college athletics unraveling before the courts, Congress and elsewhere, a main question facing leaders is whether to govern football separately from the other sports. New Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork was asked directly at his introductory press conference if he thinks this should happen.

Bjork was ultimately non-committal about breaking away governance of football to a separate entity from the NCAA, but seemed open to the idea. He also suggested that a lot of the problems facing college football can be fixed without a major change to the governing structure.

“There are things that we can do right now that doesn’t take a czar. We can clean the recruiting calendar up, we can clean the transfer windows up, we can get our coaches maybe off the road in December because they need to be worried about roster retention. There’re things that we can do right now within the structure, where you don’t have to break away football, that would be really, really easy. But we’ve gotta get it done. And that goes back to the whole governance model where things get stuck, because everybody gets in their silos. And we gotta take those down,” Bjork said.

Bjork highlighted two key aspects he’s considering in discussions of breaking away sports or changing governance structures: Maintaining ties to higher education and the overall scale of a respective schools entire athletic operation.

“So I think we have to look at it as: the highest-resourced institutions are different. And finally, the NCAA acknowledged that. We have a leader in Charlie Baker who has at least acknowledged that, as a starting point, all the programs over $100 million budgets were different. But if you just take football, what does that mean for every other sport? How do you schedule, how do you travel? What’s the regional aspect of it? I know one thing, that universities want education tethered to this. So if we say we’re separate in football, again, what does that mean? And so, to me, it’s the highest-resourced institutions can house a lot of these key elements: Financial, player relationships, player negotiation, that’s the model that we have to get to. What that looks like, how that works is going to be determined,” Bjork said.

And within potentially governing football separately or a portion of schools breaking into a new division, Bjork raised a number of questions still to be answered.

“I think the first question to that is, what does that mean? Does that mean playoff, does that mean money, does that mean TV rights, does that mean playing rules? What do we want out of that goal?” Bjork said.