Ohio State is set to pay $125,000 to a search firm that assisted with the hiring of Ross Bjork as its next athletic director.

The school retained Collegiate Sports Associates to help find candidates to replace Gene Smith, who is retiring at the end of June after nearly two decades leading the Buckeyes’ athletic department.

According to a copy of an invoice obtained by The Dispatch through a public records request, CSA charged $62,500 for executive search services last October.

An additional professional fee payment of $62,500 from Ohio State is due later this year, a school spokesperson said. Bjork begins his tenure as athletic director on July 1 and will also be a senior advisor for the Buckeyes starting in March.

CSA is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was founded in 2010 by Todd Turner, a former athletic director at Connecticut, North Carolina State, Vanderbilt and Washington.

The firm has assisted with the placement of athletic directors at 43 Division I schools, including Georgia, Michigan State and Nebraska, among others, as listed on its website.

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It’s also been involved with searches for football coaches, men’s and women’s basketball coaches, other administrators and conference commissioners between the Big South Conference and Southern Conference.

The one-page invoice does not specify the services provided by CSA in Ohio State’s search for an athletic director in recent months, but firms typically aid schools by vetting a pool of candidates and contacting them.

Bjork, who has been the athletic director at Texas A&M since 2019, said last week that CSA reached out to him “right before” the Christmas and holiday season.

CSA worked with a search advisory committee of 14 people that OSU formed last fall in order to “help nominate candidates and provide input and feedback.”

Ted Carter received a list of finalists from the advisory committee when he began his tenure as the university’s president earlier this month, leading to final interviews.

Carter did not identify other finalists last week at a news conference introducing Bjork, though The Dispatch learned that Pat Chun, the Washington State athletic director who worked in Ohio State’s athletic department from 1997-2012, was among them.

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Since becoming an athletic director at Western Kentucky in 2010, Bjork has built a reputation as a strong fundraiser.

In the 51-year-old administrator’s most recent stop, he led one of the largest fundraising campaigns in the history of Texas A&M’s athletic department, a capital campaign that resulted in the construction of several facilities, including an indoor football complex.

Jeff Toole, the athletic department’s chief financial officer, told USA TODAY Sports last week that it has put $270 million in projects.

But Bjork also brings some baggage to Columbus, largely from his role in two high-profile coaching controversies.

He gave former Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher a mammoth contract extension in 2021 that resulted in a record $77 million buyout when he was fired two years later.

Previously as the athletic director at Mississippi, he defended former coach Hugh Freeze amid an NCAA investigation that included 21 rules violations. Freeze was later implicated in the infractions case and resigned after it was found he made a phone call to a number tied to an escort service.

And Mississippi settled a lawsuit with the coach who preceded Freeze, Houston Nutt, after Nutt claimed that school officials made false statements regarding him during the NCAA investigation into Freeze’s violations.

“Certain statements made by university employees in January 2016 appear to have contributed to misleading media reports about Coach Nutt,” the university conceded in a statement following the settlement. “To the extent any such statements harmed Coach Nutt’s reputation, the university apologizes, as this was not the intent.”

Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch and can be reached at jkaufman@dispatch.com.

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