Former Texas A&M AD Ross Bjork is now the AD at Ohio State.
Before Bjork left A&M, he seemed close to hiring Mark Stoops as the school’s new football coach. At some point late in the night, that potential deal went south and Stoops ended up staying at Kentucky.
Bjork was asked in a recent interview what happened during the ordeal with Stoops.
Here is an excerpt of his comments about the situation:
“Here’s what people, they don’t really realize about the process” he said. “The athletic director and the team — whatever that may look like — we run a search process. We make recommendations to the President. ‘I would like to hire this person,’ or, ‘I think this is the No. 1 candidate.’ That’s how it works on every institution. No athletic director has the full autonomy to say, ‘I’m absolutely going to hire this person and no one else is involved.’ That’s where it goes back to alignment, that’s where it goes back to process and communication.”
“So how that name (Stoops) got out there — of course, he was a candidate. But we didn’t hire him. We hired Mike Elko, and Mike Elko is a great coach, and we’re gonna meet them in the playoffs because he’s going to build it. So at the end of the day, who did you hire and how did you get there? That’s what matters the most. So searches in today’s world are really, really probably unrealistic in terms of because of social media, because of plane tracking, because of whatever. And so that’s what you have to do is just go through a process and pick the right person, and that’s what we did.”
