The entrance of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center on Irving Schottenstein Drive. Credit: Cassandra D’Angelo | Sports Photo Editor
Future Buckeyes may walk into a much different Woody Hayes Athletic Center than the one today’s student-athletes use.?
Ohio State plans to invest $125 million into renovating the football facility, with work expected to begin in about 18 months, athletic director Ross Bjork announced Thursday. Bjork also shared where Ohio State intends to allocate its revenue sharing funds.?
Bjork said the renovation project would target the north side of the facility, revamping the coaches’ offices, team meeting rooms, locker and training rooms.??
“What we want to do is expand the locker room, expand the training room, develop a bigger team meeting room at some place within that structure, right now not everyone can fit in the team meeting room when we have a team meeting,” Bjork said.?
Bjork described how finite space in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center has created limitations.
“The individual position rooms are in the same place as a coaches office, so if [offensive line coach] Tyler Bowen needs to have a private meeting and an offensive lineman wants to watch film, somebody has to leave,” he said.?
In order for the project to launch in the expected timeline, Bjork listed the steps that would need to be completed.?
“It’s not a short turnaround time, you have to design it, you have to go out to bid, you’ve got [to get] all the approvals,” he said. “We’re probably still 18 months or so from breaking ground, but we’ve got to get the process activated to get the approval started so then we can really put the design in place to have the right building.”
While the location of the renovated Woody Hayes Athletic Center would remain, Bjork said the project would include expansion, with a new office complex and weight room.?
Bjork said that while practice fields would not be impacted by the renovations, challenges such as using temporary locker rooms, including using space at the Fawcett Center, would come into effect.?
“We will have to vacate that building if we want to build it in the most efficient, fastest way possible,” Bjork said. “So we’ll have a good plan around that and that’s built into the cost, all of that’s built into that $125 million cost.”
Despite the obstacles that the renovation may present, Bjork believes the facility is due for change.
“There’ll be some short-term sort of pain along the way in logistics, but frankly for me, it’s just time to go,” Bjork said. “We’ve got to get this thing off the ground, we’ve been talking about it long enough and now’s the time.”
Bjork also discussed Ohio State’s revenue sharing plan for the 2026-27 year.?
The NCAA revenue sharing came into effect last year, allowing schools to directly pay student-athletes. In 2025-26, Ohio State distributed its $20.5 million allocation among four sports: football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and women’s volleyball.
Bjork said the same four sports would be allocated the funds for the upcoming year, however, Ohio State will now have an increased amount of $21.3 million to distribute.
“The first year of the settlement terms any new scholarships that we added had to count against the cap, $2.5 million had to count against the $20.5 [million],” Bjork said. “So we really only had $18 million of cash last year to distribute. This year we’ll have the full $21.3 million.”
Without discussing how the money will be divided, Bjork said that the football team would receive a large sum of the allocation.?
“Obviously football’s getting the lion share of that and then men’s and women’s basketball and [women’s] volleyball are getting their share,” Bjork said.
