ATLANTA — “Think traditionally, but without traditional thinking.”
Those were the words of Ross Bjork, the still-new Ohio State athletic director during the Saturday morning media day ahead of Monday night’s College Football Playoff National Championship game. The question was about the balanced approach taken by his football program, and also by the opponent, Notre Dame. The Buckeyes and Fighting Irish inarguably rank among the most tradition-rich teams in the 155-year history of college football. Yet, here they are, after a combined 271 seasons, the second- and fourth-winningest programs of all time, having steered their way to the final game of this season by embracing modernized approaches to the sport while honoring the history that is as much a part of their DNA as helmets and shoulder pads.
Maintaining the shine on those silver and gold helmets by piling up silver and gold in the form of NIL money.
“We want to work at these places because of what they are and what they have been and the success they’ve enjoyed,” Bjork said. “But we have also been charged with ensuring that’s what they continue to be.”
Bjork said that just as the Buckeyes were ending their media day session and the players who earned a spot in the title game, the ones who cost $20 million to assemble, according to Bjork, filed in around him and headed for the team bus. His mantra about respecting the past while moving toward the future was uttered as 45-year-old head coach Ryan Day was holding court at a podium just over his boss’s shoulder. Day’s big-game failures lit the spark needed to raise those millions to sign those players who are now in Atlanta needing only one more win to earn Ohio State’s first national title in a decade.
When the Buckeyes exited the room, their seats were filled by their counterparts at Notre Dame, whose roster includes 10 additions via transfer, once a taboo subject in South Bend, Indiana. The players opted to play in northern Indiana partly due to the just-established coffers of name, image and likeness money. Those new arrivals included the quarterback from Duke who led the Irish downfield late against Penn State in the CFP semifinals, setting up the transfer kicker from South Carolina who kicked the game-winning field goal. Now, Notre Dame football is on the cusp of its first national title since 1988, when cell phones were still carried in shoulder bags. As the Irish players took their places, coach Marcus Freeman, the human energy shot, immediately and unknowingly parroted Bjork.
“Our everyday walk is spent with one foot firmly planted in our past, but that other foot is always stepping in our future.”
Is that easy, Coach?
“No. But it’s also not a burden. It’s a privilege. Once you understand that, it’s worth it. And what makes it worth it is … well …”
With a smile, the 39-year-old coach — a former All-Big Ten Ohio State defender — swept his hand broadly, toward Mercedes-Benz Stadium across the street, toward the gold-wearing Notre Dame faithful in the nearby Playoff Fan Central craning their necks to see their Irish, and toward the cylindrical gold CFP championship trophy, sitting atop a podium in Freeman’s sightline.
“You win football games by being smart and working hard, that’s no secret,” Freeman’s quarterback, Riley Leonard, said. “But you also have to evolve. I think that in college football now, as much as it keeps changing, programs and universities have to change with it. Your choice is to either do that or get left behind.”
But evolution is also a choice. The dinosaurs didn’t have to walk into the tar pits. And college football programs — even old-timers such as Ohio State and Notre Dame — don’t have to walk into the quicksand of mediocrity, led there by the blinders of obligation to keep on keeping on the same way that Knute Rockne and Woody Hayes did.
“The greatest challenge isn’t changing the minds of the people inside the football building. They are living it. They are going to do whatever it takes,” former Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn, now a college football analyst for Fox, said in December as his alma mater began its CFP run. “It’s making the people who support the program understand what needs to be done. Making them understand that the way it always worked, the way their favorite teams were built, is not how it works now. And then explaining that their support that might have always just been rooting for the team, even buying season tickets, that support needs to be backed monetarily. That makes some people uncomfortable, but it is also the reality. And it pays off. Literally.”
Freeman’s predecessor at Notre Dame, Brian Kelly, has come under fire from those who love the Irish, and some of that is warranted. But criticism that he didn’t understand the modern business model like Freeman does isn’t entirely accurate. That model has changed dramatically since Kelly’s sudden departure for LSU three years ago. Even while he still had the job, finishing his 12 seasons only 13 wins shy of Rockne’s record 105, Kelly openly described the daily tug-of-war between pulling Notre Dame into the current times while also wrestling with the longtime program backers who resisted change, aka “the Gold Seats.”