Ohio State's $20 million bargain

Everybody seems to think it's ridiculous that Ohio State spent $20 million on their roster. So do I. There's no way a team this good should cost that little.

Ohio State is talenting its way to a national championship. They thumped Tennessee in the first round of the playoffs. They took a 34-0 lead on undefeated #1 seed Oregon in the Rose Bowl. The Texas game was close, but they won the Cotton Bowl and are now headed to the national championship. They’re now 8-point favorites heading into the national championship game against Notre Dame. That’s about as big as a championship spread will ever be.

Simply put, the Buckeyes have got more dudes than anybody else. They have an NFL wide receiver corps and an NFL defensive line. Those are two areas that’ll make any guys going pro in something other than sports on the other side of the ball look particularly helpless.

In the offseason, they landed the top high school recruit and the top-ranked transfer available this off-season: Wide receiver Jeremiah Smith and safety Caleb Downs. Both were first-team All-Americans this season. Smith had 187 yards and two touchdowns in the Rose Bowl; Downs rocketed through Texas’ line to blow up a run play during OSU’s critical goal line stand, then made the game-ending interception.

The Buckeyes have had a top-5 recruiting class in every year featuring current college athletes. They landed three of the top 10 transfer prospects in the 2024 portal. Importantly, they haven’t experienced a mass exodus of outbound transfers like many other schools pulling top classes.

How’d they do it? Everybody knows the answer, at this point: Cash. In the offseason, Ohio State athletic director Ross Bjork bragged that the Buckeyes’ roster received “around $20 million” in NIL compensation for this season, a number described as “jaw-dropping” and shocking. Head coach Ryan Day has also been open about the money needed to keep his team together, saying in 2022 that OSU needed $13 million simply to retain the current players on his roster, an underdiscussed aspect of NIL. They’re probably the most expensive roster in the NIL era of the sport¹, although there’s no way to know for sure².

The Buckeyes are the best team money can buy, and money talk follows them everywhere. There have been multiple articles detailing how they built their $20 million team, and Kirk and Desmond are yelling about it on College GameDay. In a sport unused to open discussion of paying players, people seem to think it’s pretty ridiculous that Ohio State spent $20 million on this team.

I have to agree. Every time I hear people saying the Buckeyes spent $20 million on this roster, I find myself asking:

That’s it?!?!?!?!?!?!

$20 million seems like a lot of money when you compare it to the amount of money college football players have traditionally received, which is zero dollars. $20 million is roughly $20 million more than zero, an increase of infinity percent. When people talk about the Buckeyes’ big spending, it still sounds like an insult implying OSU is doing things the wrong way.

But, realistically: $20 million is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy below the actual value of having the most talented team in college football. This is a sport with billion-dollar TV deals and coaching contracts worth over $100 million. Ohio State built an entire roster of Sunday guys for the amount of money you’d spend on the third-best player on an NBA team. This is Malcolm Brogdon money! Kentavious Caldwell-Pope cash! You can buy the best team in one of the most popular sports in America for… half the price the Giants are paying Daniel Jones not to play for them! How??? (Also, which half of Daniel Jones are you taking for $20 million? I’ll go legs!) If Ohio State got this roster for $20 million, it’s an absolute steal, and everybody else in the sport should feel pretty stupid.

$20 million is not a lot in big-time college sports. Ohio State’s athletic department made $280 million in the 2023 fiscal year, much of it because of their football team. And that’s less than they’re going to make this year, with new TV deals for the Big Ten and the College Football Playoff. The payout the Big Ten will receive because Ohio State made the national championship game is… coincidentally, exactly $20 million³. If you were to put an actual dollar number on the value of having a team this good, it would be very, very, very high. A lot higher than $20 million.

In fairness, we’re dealing with some apples and oranges here. In the 2024-25 athletic year, college athletic programs are still restricted from spending the hundreds of millions they make in revenue on athlete salaries. The $20 million that went to Ohio State’s players did not come out of OSU’s athletic budget, but had to be raised from outside sources, like donors and corporations. Starting in a few months, schools will be allowed to give money to players, straight-up, out of one bank account and into the other. That will change pretty much everything, and lead to roster prices approaching their accurate value.

But while revenue sharing is new, the concept of “spending a lot of money to get the best college football team” is not. College football just went about it weirdly. Deep-pocketed schools have always spent big bucks on stuff intended to attract players—coaches, facilities, amenities, etc.—as a proxy for talent acquisition: A school would spend $10 million on a coach, and that coach would go out and get the players to win championships.

Now, we’re heading into The Paying Players Era. The need for workarounds is coming to a close. But nobody is connecting the dots. Schools are still spending huge amounts of money on all the other stuff out of habit. Wake up! You can just pay the players now. No need for Pimp My Ride-ass athletic facilities with a waterfall, two shark tanks, and Playstation 5s in every locker. You can just pay the players and they can buy their own Playstation 5s if they want them.

This offseason, Georgia signed head coach Kirby Smart to a 10-year, $130 million contract extension, the largest in the history of the sport, Alabama signed Kalen DeBoer to a contract worth $11 million per year, and Florida State agreed to pay Mike Norvell over $10 million per year through 2031. These schools did this within the last 12 months, knowing that players make decisions based on money, knowing that revenue sharing was likely coming.

This is an economy that’s totally out of whack. Georgia is paying Smart $13 million per season, about 65 percent of what Ohio State is allegedly paying their entire championship-level roster. If the best NFL coach had a contract that paid him 65 percent of the league’s salary cap, he would make $176 million per year. That is about $156 million too high.

Anyway, after handing out those huge coaching contracts: Georgia was left with a comically inept receiving corps that dropped huge passes all season long and just lost their star QB to a school paying more NIL money, Alabama lost two All-Americans and a 5-star QB prospect in the portal to Ohio State, and missed the Playoff entirely while their AD begs boosters to give more NIL money, and Florida State went 2-10⁴. This is what we call “misallocation of resources.” All these schools should slash their coaching salaries by like, 50 percent and spend the savings on players. Sounds crazy… but Florida State actually made Norvell give back $4.5 million to help with revenue sharing. They won’t be the last to retroactively realize the money they need to stop spending the old way.

I’m a Northwestern fan. We’re not a championship contender at all. But we are currently building a new $850 million football stadium, the most expensive college football stadium ever. It’s financed primarily by donations from billionaire booster Pat Ryan. I keep asking myself: Why couldn’t our billionaire benefactor give, like $50 million to our NIL collective to build a super-duper-team, followed by an $800 million stadium with some slight downgrades? Northwestern has argued that the stadium’s new luxury suites will increase revenues. Sure. But you know what else increases revenues? Being really good at football! And it would be a lot cheaper! CALL OFF THE CRANES!

This is no longer a discussion about the morality of paying players. (We did that. The haters lost. Throw a parade.) It’s also not a discussion about whether Mid State and Also Ran Tech will be able to keep up in the spending wars. (They won’t, but they never did in the past, and there’s a lot more to college sports besides championships.) I am just pointing out that schools are already spending much, much more than $20 million to win football games, in an era when $20 million apparently gets you Jeremiah Smith, Caleb Downs, and a -300 moneyline in the national title game.

The most valuable commodity in sports is on-field talent. This is not up for debate. In every major pro sports league on earth, teams spend significantly more money on player salaries than just anything else, without exception. There is no professional sport where coaches make more money than the best players. There is no professional sport where support staff expenditures are significantly higher than player salaries.

But this logic has not yet reached college football. Teams are still spending money on all the other stuff when they can just buy the thing they need. It’s like if Congress passed a law allowing political parties to pay voters $50 for their votes, and the Democrats still spent $2.3 billion on primetime TV ads instead of buying enough votes to guarantee a win in the election. (The Democrats would absolutely do this.)

We’re currently stuck between two eras of college football. This is a brief window when the new rules are in play, but everybody is still more or less operating under the old model. As a result, this is almost certainly the cheapest championships will ever come. If Ohio State wins the title with its $20 million roster, they got an absolute bargain.

1. NIL deals are all done in private. What we know is generally based on rumors and speculation, and the few figures that do get reported are almost always leaked by people with something to gain from it. However, nobody has refuted Bjork’s claim or tried to one-up the Buckeyes by saying “actually, we spent $23 million.” It seems fair to take him at his word, and likely they’re the biggest spenders right now.

2. Oh, and btw: Please, please, please, please stop using the On3 NIL valuation rankings when discussing how much players are actually making in NIL. Those rankings are estimates based on an algorithm, which may or may not be based on reality. If I see one more article or video using the On3 estimates as if they are actual, reported value of NIL deals, I will become The Joker.

3. The playoff performance payouts are split between schools from the conference whose team advances. So Notre Dame gets to keep its $20 million, while Ohio State has to split it with Purdue and Rutgers. But still: $20 million is the price.

4. Just wanted to be clear about some of the terminology here in case you’re not familiar. The football team which represents Florida State University won two games and lost ten games in the 2024 college season, resulting in a 2-10 record. That’s typically considered a sub-par record in most sports, including college football.