Ohio State Football: Buckeye Collectives aren’t helping themselves

The Ohio State football team is having trouble when it comes to NIL. The Buckeye Collectives are not helping themselves.

The Ohio State football program might be at a crossroads with its collectives. Athletic Director Gene Smith came out and publicly supported three of them: Cohesion, The Foundation, and O Foundation. As of today, they are not getting the job done. The Buckeyes openly lost out on recruits in 2023 because the collectives couldn’t put together nice enough NIL packages for them.

But it’s what happened earlier this week that really is starting to rub people the wrong way.  Brian Schottenstein, the de-facto leader of The Foundation, took to Twitter to stir up some ” Big News” that many correlated between C.J. Stroud and his future. Many believed that “Big News” was Stroud returning for his senior season. It just turned out to be a very weird video of a gender reveal for his new daughter.

For these collectives to work they need to be able to rely not only on big donors but also the small ones. They are putting forth the effort for fans to sign up for recurring donations. Almost like a subscription service. Well, getting the entire fan base’s hopes up that Stroud was going to come back is not the way to do it.

Deceiving the fans while asking for their money is just plain stupid. If Schottenstein wants to be the leader of this thing then he needs to lead. Time for him to grow up and not use C.J. Stroud as a way to get people to his Twitter page just to watch a gender reveal video.

I frankly question if he should be to face of the Ohio State collectives. After all, his party is the one that got Urban Meyer in big trouble last year at his restaurant. It just seems like this guy, while a good booster for Ohio State, shouldn’t be affiliated in any other way with them.