Ohio State Buckeyes football GM Mark Pantoni's official bio on the athletic department's official website for the program states that, in his role, he is responsible for "all administrative duties for personnel and recruiting, including NIL negotiations, high school and transfer portal film evaluations, on-campus official and unofficial visits, and roster construction and management."
Pantoni spoke with Cleveland.com and shared a very high-level overview of how he chooses recruits -- and how he sets a budget for each player based on how many snaps he's expected to see right away, if any.
“I always start with, one, take the current position room and what each player in the room is making,” Pantoni began. “I always want to be loyal to our current players. So it’s a challenging approach when you’re trying to put a value on a high school player, because you want to be fair to the current room and to the locker room in general. Every championship team, they have strong culture, strong leadership in that locker room. And so it’s delicate. It can break very easily if you’re not careful.
“As you’re trying to place values on guys based on those criteria, it only takes one school to create a market. And so, as much as we may feel like it’s a fair number, it could be considerably less than another school. It’s very challenging to come up with that initial number, but at the same time, hope they realize the why, give the ‘why’ behind how you came up with that, and just based on what current guys are making is how you initially start.”
Thus far, Pantoni has found a great mix during nearly every season of the 15 he's been around for. Obviously, his job is made easier by the product selling itself, but two-thirds of the program's all-time championships in the modern era (post-1992) were under Pantoni's watch. There's only ever been positive momentum in talent acquisition, even through Urban Meyer's coaching staff scandal. Whenever he's unearthed a star like Sonny Styles, he's also been able to recruit the successor, in this case, Payton Pierce in the middle.
Ohio State GM Mark Pantoni believes the Lane Kiffin-Deion Sanders method won't work
Something Pantoni stressed was that the high school method is still the preferred method of roster-building, saying, "You always want to live in the high school world, because if you start trying to live in the portal world, it’s not sustainable.”
It felt like Pantoni wasn't pointing fingers, but at least had a few head coaches in mind when he made that statement.
One is Lane Kiffin, the portal king. While he has the top or a near-the-top portal haul most years, Kiffin has never coached a team in the CFP, bailing on the only chance he had. He rode Ferris State Bulldogs quarterback transfer Trinidad Chambliss to a CFP appearance with the Ole Miss Rebels before taking the LSU Tigers job. Kiffin's 2026 LSU squad will be transfer-heavy, just like most of his teams in Oxford, Mississippi.
Another frequent portal user is Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders. Coach Prime has mass-imported and, thus, mass-exported transfers year after year. For 2026, 43 are incoming while 36 are outbound.
Pantoni trusts in his process of stacking high school classes. These aforementioned coaches' methods just aren't the Ohio State way.
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