Ross Bjork reflects on the changes throughout college athletics

Ohio State AD Ross Bjork has been in college athletics administration for nearly 30 years, starting his career at Western Kentucky as an assistant development coordinator in 1996.

To say college althetics have changed during that time period is an understatement.

Not only has the transfer portal and NIL changed the industry on the surface in the last five years alone, but as an athletic director, Bjork and the rest of the ADs across the country were navigating uncharted waters during that initial process.

Today, the job is nothing like he imagined it would be when he was hired at WKU all those years ago.

“When I was in college, I was Player of the Week at Emporia State,” Bjork said. “We were at this quarterback meeting, and they asked all of us, ‘Hey, what do you want to do when you grow up?’ And the athletic director at the time was sitting in the room, and I said, ‘I want his job. I want to be an AD someday.’ I was 20 years old, and I thought it was about dealing with coaches, hiring the right people, balancing the budget, being visible in the community and building buildings.

“And then, when I got to Missouri – that was sort of my first big-time job in a big place – those were the fundamentals. Now, we have to do that because those are the fundamentals, and we have to do all the new stuff. Legislative, Congressional activity. We’re essentially lobbyists now for federal legislation, for state legislation. Now, we’re going to be dealing with salary caps that we’ve never had to deal with. We’re gonna be dealing with evaluation, if you will, on roster positions. Then, we have the NIL bucket.”

In that sense, Bjork said it’s almost as if programs need two athletic directors. One to deal with the basics and one to deal with legislative duties. The basics would handle the renovations of buildings, hiring coaches — all of those things Bjork knew the job would entail ever before becoming an AD.

“There’s a lot to it. We’re not just traditional athletic administrators anymore. We have to be all things,” Bjork continued. “We have to be a generalist in every area while also understanding enough about the specialty of it to be really good. So there’s a lot to it. You have to have great people, you have to hire the right coaches and you have to have coaches that think like a CEO.

“We have that in Coach [Ryan] Day, we have that in [men’s and women’s basketball coaches] Jake Diebler, Kevin McGuff. I can go down the list – [men’s tennis coach] Ty Tucker. You have to have coaches that are willing to adapt to make sure that they can execute all this stuff because I can’t do it alone, for sure.”

Bjork said it was fascinating how different college athletics were five years alone, then compared it to what it looked like 10 years and even 30 years ago.

At the end of the day, Bjork says he has seen it all happen in front of his eyes and knows that being at Ohio State — the Buckeyes have the resources at their disposal to be at the forefront of it all.