Mark Pantoni joined the Buckeyes alongside Urban Meyer in 2012. Back then, recruiting revolved around relationships, home visits, and evaluating talent. Fast forward more than a decade, and Ohio State now has separate departments dedicated to scouting, transfer portal evaluations, and roster management, with Pantoni overseeing the entire operation.

Unlike those Michigan-crushing Urban Meyer days, recruiting now doesn’t just require building relationships, conducting in-home visits, and laying out roster plans. Instead, everything comes down to those dollar bills, forcing Pantoni to change his approach.

“Everything has changed, other than the evaluation part,” Pantoni told Cleveland.com during a sit-down interview. “Coming here, it was really just me and one other person, Greg Gillum, recruiting. And fast forward now, and it’s a whole huge department in many roles. You have the transfer portal, you have NIL. So I’ve shifted my focus.”

The rise of NIL, the transfer portal, and player agents has completely changed the recruiting process. The Buckeyes have had to adapt, and no one has seen that transformation more closely than Ohio State general manager Mark Pantoni. He now plays a crucial role in helping coach Ryan Day balance recruiting, transfer portal additions, and roster budgets.

“We named Mark Pantoni the general manager this year for that very reason to try to start to go down that road,” Day said in an interview with On3. “Because we do see it very much like that…”

Day, his coordinators, and position coaches now handle most of the personal relationships with players and their families. Whereas Pantoni’s role has moved toward roster management, financial planning, and negotiations with agents. Because now, high school prospects have representatives involved in their recruitment. That means schools are no longer only asking, “How good is this player?” They are also asking, “How does this player fit our budget?”

“I can’t be emotional in my decision-making when it comes to the financial part,” Pantoni continued. “In that aspect, things have changed to where I’m still evaluating a ton of film, which does help me. And using the coaches’ evaluations, putting everything together, what’s a fair valuation on each player?”

That thinking is becoming common across college football. Programs like Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Oregon are no longer simply collecting the highest-ranked high school players they can find. They have to balance NIL money between recruits, transfer players, and veterans already on the roster, because the House vs. the NCAA settlement put a cap of $20.5 million on revenue-sharing money. Plus, the new NIL deals now have to be approved by the College Sports Commission’s regulatory arm, NIL Go.

To make sure things happen smoothly in the ever-changing college football landscape, the Buckeyes have made separate offices designated for different aspects of recruiting. The two offices are located within the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. On the right side of the Center, staffers have a room to analyze film of recruits from all over the country. The other belongs to Pantoni. There, he now functions as the boss of the entire operation, talking to agents and formulating a sustainable roster budget to compete every year.

But putting a squad together involves several stages of preparation and an intensive process, involving several members of the OSU staff.

First, every recruit identified through recruiting trips, relationships with high school coaches, and recruiting camps is evaluated by at least “four to five” people of the Buckeyes staff. The next step is for the position coaches, who solely look into those prospects and give grades to different recruits, and set priorities. Once all of that is done, the whole staff, including Day, has a joint conversation about the best approach to recruit any prospect.

Mark Pantoni opens up about his strategy of handling NIL deals for newer recruits

Ryan Day clearly divides responsibilities when recruiting different groups of players, whether from the transfer portal or high school ranks. For starters, OSU’s executive director of player personnel looks after the high school recruiting. Whereas, the program’s scouting coordinator, Billy Homer, oversees the recruits that the Buckeyes identify to target from the transfer portal. And the two staffers work in tandem with Pantoni to put in a dominant recruiting class. However, that’s not where the work ends, since the toughest part is handing competitive NIL contracts.

“I always start with one, take the current position room and what each player in the room is making,” Pantoni said. “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. It’s very challenging to come up with that initial number, but at the same time, hope they realize the why…”

As per reports, OSU’s last year’s roster cost went north of $35 milion, and it was $20 million in 2024 when the team won the national title. This year, Pantoni has assembled an impressive 3rd-ranked recruiting class, while also bringing 18 players from the transfer portal. Going by the year-by-year pattern, OSU’s 2026 roster should be valued more than its 2025 one. But that’s exactly what the OSU GM wants to avoid.

“This is probably the most NFL-esque it has (been), and ever will be,” Pantoni said about managing finances like managing roster cap in the NFL. “So it is a little fascinating to work with this, and it makes the strategy and problem-solving a lot more delicate and deliberate.”

The whole strategy Pantoni is following is adapting to the changing landscape of college football, being competitive in the NIL game, but also not losing sight of those relationships that were always important. Despite the OSU GM not handling the relationship side of recruiting, he still misses that aspect. However, he understands what it takes to consistently build top-five recruiting classes year after year, and he is doing just that.