Hey, hey, where you been? But God talk is about to begin. Hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome back to another emergency podcast. Ohio State Athletic Director, Gene Smith, we were scheduled to get him this morning at 930 and coming off of all of the, you know, expansion conversations, the fact that the 12 team playoff is showing up in a year and everything else that's just changing cause football, we're all thinking, oh, he's just here to, you know, answer some questions about how the big tent is changing once again and, you know, scheduling all that stuff. And then he drops

the palm on us. He is riding off to the sunset. He announced that as of June 30th, 2024, he will be stepping down as Ohio State's athletic director as he is going to retire. And he had, you know, so most of the conversation went towards that and looking back on some of the stuff that he, you know, was part of both at Ohio State, but other stops along his ways got 38 years worth of experience being an athletic director, became Ohio State's athletic director in 2005.

And over the next year, Ohio State, now, now, actually, over the next couple of weeks here, we now have added Ohio State's football team needs to find a new quarterback, which is already a big thing and it's all right. But then you add on top of that, Ohio State's going to find a president and now Nathan, they've got to find a new athletic director. What is going on?

Yeah, just sort of the natural order of things just happens to be colliding here a little bit and I brought up the presidential absence last week as it related to this decision to bring Oregon and Washington on. I was kind of a stickler for that for some of these small details as I can be sometimes just because I thought it was interesting to find out who is in a room for Ohio State.

And so, yeah, now we have to wait and see how this unfolds because it's two massive decisions that Ohio State has to make. I mean, these are, I would actually argue that the football coach for sure is probably still the more visible person on the front porch of the university than the AD is, but the AD is probably right after that.

The president probably being at the top and you're talking about, or arguably, I guess, even with the football coach, maybe the football coach is still at the top of that.

But that's like the triumphant. They've got a football coach right now and they've got to hire those two other positions and it's beyond that.

You're talking about, again, someone who's become kind of an institution here. I mean, it's been 19 years. This is his 19th year will be his final year.

And someone who has tremendous influence, not just within the big 10, but really across college sports. I mean, whenever there's a major topic in college sports, national reporters are calling Jean Smith to find out what he thinks.

And it's partially because of who he is and the steam they have for him, the respect they have for him, but also the position he holds when you're the athletic director of Ohio State.

Your opinion matters more than if you're the athletic director at where he was before, frankly, you know, the Eastern Michigan's in the Arizona States and the other places as he made his own climb up the ranks.

So it's a major day and they did keep it quiet. This was not something that we heard a lot of rumblings about the last times I had ever talked to Jean about this thing.

He didn't sound like retirement was necessarily imminent, but it didn't come as a shock when you're 67 and you've been doing this for 19 years and everyone kind of assumed this is maybe your last job in the industry.

Then and obviously his name had been always floated out there whenever even bigger jobs came open big 10 commissioner in CAA stuff.

And he never really seemed that intrigued by those things and he talked today about how he was ready to step away a few years ago and stayed on because he thought Ohio State needed that leadership through what was going to be some trying times in the sport and within college sports in general.

The issues had been going on and now just felt like it was the right time to step away and in some ways it's maybe even a cleaner thing here now and the new president gets to be hired.

And then that person in conjunction with the other leadership at Ohio State can then hire the athletic director and now you get to people who are coming in on the same page starting their tenure together.

So Andrew Jean Smith Nathan just mentioned the other stops he was actually athletic director for the first time in 1986 at Eastern Michigan University and then when 1993 he became the second black man to ever be a power five athletic director winning with the Iowa State.

And then 2000 he goes there is on a state and then in 2005 he shows up at Ohio State and he's been here for the longest so many of his stops for 19 years and they had to mention.

There's a lot of moving pieces here but for our listeners the most important part is the football aspect of this and Jean Smith's voice has been extremely powerful within the count the football conversations whether it's playoff whether it's expansion whatever you want to name here.

He has been during his time he's he's hired two head coaches he hired Urban Meyer in 2012 who went on the winner national champion has been 2014 he was here for seven years and then he hired his successor Ryan Day and he also put Luke Pickle in charge of that 2011 season which as he classified it as hell that you're going through all those things.

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