By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
A few weeks after deciding to cut scholarships for a handful of their 36 intercollegiate athletics programs, Ohio State president Ted Carter said on Friday that the school would not only retain all of those sports, but retain scholarships for all of them.
“When I hired (athletic director) Ross Bjork, he and I decided right away that we would retain all 36 Division I sports programs,” Carter said in an interview with Eleven Warriors. “It’s important. We have over 1,000 student athletes. It’s important for our Olympic sports that we do this. Not many other schools are going to be able to do this. And we will remain financially self-sufficient. That’s no small order, because we’re going to be sharing a fair bit of our revenue with our student-athletes. And finally, we’re going to retain scholarships for all 36 Division I sports.
“We will determine how best to do that. There’s a lot of big decisions to be made. But these decisions will help shape the conversation about how we can make sure that our student-athletes remain students first.”
About a month ago, local Columbus media reported that the men’s gymnastics program was told that they would no longer be able to offer athletic scholarships to student-athletes, with other sources telling SwimSwam that they were one of several sports to be told the same, including artistic (synchronized) swimming.
The context is comments in August by Ohio State’s new athletics director Ross Bjork that rosters would be cut and some sports would ‘act a little bit more like a club sport’ as part of a new tiered athletics department for the Buckeyes. Bjork said that the school would retain all 36 athletics programs at that time. Ohio State is one of the most robust athletics departments in the country in terms of the number of sports it offers.
The breadth of varsity athletics offerings is a big differentiator between the two superconferences emerging in the NCAA. The Big Ten offers 28 championships while the SEC only offers 22; and beyond that, most Big Ten schools offer far more varsity sports than most Big Ten schools.
18 Big Ten member schools sponsor 396 sports, averaging 22 sports per school. 16 SEC schools sponsor 268 sports, an average of 16.75 per school.
In the latest rankings from USA Today, Ohio State was the richest athletics department in the country, earning $251,615,345 in the 2023 fiscal year. They also spent a record amount of money: $225,733,418.
The Ohio State women’s swim team won four straight Big Ten titles before losing to Indiana last season. The Ohio State men also finished 2nd behind the Hoosiers.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Ohio State Reverses Course, Says They Won’t Cut Scholarships in Face of House Settlement