Ohio State has been incredibly successful in the transfer portal this offseason, and that has made a lot of people very uncomfortable.
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OHIO STATE IS FACING SOME CRITICISM FOR DOING TOO WELL IN THE OFFSEASON. SHOULD IT?
People have a poor perspective on what, exactly, constitutes "a lot of money."
What I mean by this is that for most of us, after a certain dollar amount money becomes essentially fictional. In my brain there is no functional difference between a few million dollars and five hundred billion dollars, because I'm never going to have either amount and wouldn't know what to do with it even if I had it (with that said, if anyone out there would like to give me five hundred billion dollars, I would love to try and figure this thing out).
One cool example that illustrates the concept is this site from 2021, showing visually the difference between median household income, a million dollars, a billion dollars, and the ultra-wealthy. If you're an average person looking at this chart, anything above a million bucks might seem wildly inappropriate.
But what if you're a state university with a gigantic donor base? What if you're a state university with a gigantic donor base who's athletic department just brought in $280 million dollars in revenue in the last fiscal year? What if you're in charge of maintaining the relevancy of a particular sport, which supports the viability of dozens of others (because damn, men's basketball ain't pulling their weight these days)? What if you just like winning football games while operating within the current set of rules?
I'll tell you what you do: you find the freaking cash to bring in the players to win the games to maintain the viability of one of the largest athletic departments in the United States.
Reactions to Ohio State's transfer portal haul are funny to me, in large part because I think it reveals a lot about the culture of college football and how fans of it think. There's a decent amount cognitive dissonance required to retroactively cheer cheatin'-ass programs like the Miami Hurricanes of the 1980's or the Nebraska Cornhuskers of the 1990's while simultaneously bemoaning players getting paid above board in 2024.
But that's college football! It's not about what you do, but how cool you look doing it. Paying players via a complicated Ponzi scheme involving speedboats and Hummel figurines is cooler than a kid signing a contract with an NIL collective after a lawyer looks it over for an hour.
Anyway, the takes reacting to the Buckeyes using a lot of NIL money to retain most of their current roster and bring in several of the best players in the transfer portal have settled somewhere between "this is the worst thing to ever happen to college football" and "well, they'd better win a national championship."
Let's address the latter first. Here's a quote from the shambling husk of Deadspin:
Ah, a Marvel movie reference. That's almost as bad as naming your long-running rival hate column after a single joke from a sitcom that went off the air over a decade ago.
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Everyone is trying to claw their way to the mountaintop. There's no cute, bespoke way to do it in a sports entertainment industry worth tens of billions of dollars. Ohio State and its supporters have the money they need to try and accomplish their goals, so they're going to spend it. It's as simple as that.
Major college athletics is and always has been a cutthroat business. If getting other programs getting angry at Ohio State for finally giving up the kayfabe that surrounds the culture of college football is the true cost of the roster the Buckeyes have assembled for 2024, then I'm fairly certain they're willing to pay it.
