Ohio State announces hiring of Texas A&M's Ross Bjork as next athletic director
Ohio State has announced the hiring of Ross Bjork as the successor to Gene Smith as the school’s athletic director.
A press conference to introduce Bjork will be at noon on Wednesday at the Covelli Center. The OSU board of trustees must approve the hire. Its next scheduled meeting is in February.
Bjork has been the athletic director at Texas A&M for the past five years. Before that, he served in that role at the University of Mississippi from 2012-19. His first job as an athletic director was at Western Kentucky from 2010-12.
Bjork, 51, is a native of Dodge City, Kansas, and graduated from Emporia State where he played fullback on the football team.
Bjork’s hire is the first major one in the tenure of new Ohio State president Walter “Ted” Carter Jr., who was hired in August and officially began this month.
In an interview Thursday with The Dispatch, Carter said the new AD would need to be a leader who would "know how to work across a very complex spectrum.
"We need to hire somebody that is not learning on the job," Carter said. "(They) have to come in with a whole lot of experience, understand the challenges that are out in front of us, be able to make certainly hard decisions — because there will be some hard decisions coming up."
Bjork will become the ninth athletic director in school history. Smith, a Cleveland native, has served since 2005 and is regarded as one of the most respected and influential athletic directors in the country. He announced his retirement last August.
Bjork has no ties to Ohio or the Big Ten. His tenures overseeing the Ole Miss and Texas A&M have included major controversies.
At Ole Miss, Bjork repeatedly defended then-football coach Hugh Freeze against 21 NCAA rules violation charges, including a failure-to-monitor charge against Freeze and a lack of institutional control. The NCAA infractions committee said Ole Miss had "an unconstrained culture of booster involvement in football recruiting."
The allegations included charges of a cash payment to a linebacker. Freeze was eventually fired after it came to light from a public records request filed by his predecessor, Houston Nutt, that Freeze had placed at least 12 phone calls to escort services.
At Texas A&M, Bjork fired football coach Jimbo Fisher in November. Fisher was lured to Texas A&M from Florida State in 2017 with a guaranteed, 10-year, $75 million contract. Bjork didn't become Texas A&M's AD until 2019, but he extended Fisher's contract in 2021 through 2031 and allowed it to remain fully guaranteed.
No offset or stipulation was included in the extension to reduce the amount A&M owes Fisher if he takes another job. As a result, the school owed Fisher $76 million.
"It was a mistake, as we look back on it," Bjork is quoted as saying in a report by Dallas television station WFAA following Fisher's firing. "There’s a lot of other buyouts where if coaches got let go today, would be more than what our buyout is. But those programs are winning. Ours didn’t work.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State announces Texas A&M's Ross Bjork as next athletic director
