How the Ohio State football team will handle a salary cap

The Ohio State football program now has to pay players. After a landmark NCAA settlement, programs will now be able to pay players directly instead of letting NIL collectives handling it all. Collectives will still be involved in programs, just not as much as they have been in the past couple of years.

Based on the terms of the settlement, programs won’t be able to go over a certain threshold to spend on their roster. That means that Ohio State will have to operate with  salary cap. How is that something that they will deal with early on?

The Ohio State football program will need to budget wisely.

The Buckeyes constantly get some of the best recruits in the country. Right now, they have the second-best recruiting class in the country. They have the most five-star recruits too. Once these rules start, those five-star recruits are going to be more expensive than they already are.

How Ryan Day figures this out will determine how well the Ohio State program does in the next era of college football. He’s going to need to make sure that his current GM, Mark Pantoni, knows exactly how things are going to work. College football programs are going to need to start hiring salary cap experts.

Ohio State is going to be one of the programs who can handle this the best. They still have all of the resources to at least get in the door for the top recruits. The salary cap negotiations to field a great team is going to be tricky though. Tough decisions will need to be made.

How those decisions pan out will be interesting to see. The Buckeyes will likely come out on top as they have in the past. If they don’t, there will be a new coaching staff in place.