COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State plans to spend around $125 million on upgrades to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, athletic director Ross Bjork said Thursday.The renovation to the training facility, which is home to the football program, will be the first since $21.5 million upgrades in 2005-07. Bjork said Ohio State has raised enough money or has offers in front of donors to meet a significant portion of that amount. Bjork said Ohio State plans to break ground on its renovations in about 18 months.Ohio State has been discussing potential changes to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center for years, dating back to former athletic director Gene Smith. The project has been delayed for a variety of reasons, including the constant changes in college sports. The upgrades are still pending final design work, bids and approvals.“We just have to go, it’s time to go,” Bjork said. “We’ve talked about it, but again we’ve been in this triage mode of adapting to NIL, adapting budgets, we’ve added scholarships to keep 36 sports, we just need to go.”Ohio State's brutal scheduleBruce Feldman and Ralph D. RussoOhio State is expanding the locker room and training room and building a new weight room, all inside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, which will stay at its current location at 535 Irving Schottenstein Dr. It will not impact the practice fields in the back or the indoor facility, Bjork said.The changes will also include upgrades to coach offices and position rooms, as well as a team meeting room that can’t hold the entire team for a meeting right now.“The individual position rooms are in the same place as the coaches’ offices, so if (offensive line coach) Tyler Bowen needs to have a private meeting and somebody wants to watch film, somebody has to leave,” Bjork said.The football team will be forced to vacate the facility for over a year while construction is going on, displacing it for a season. The tentative plan is to move the football team into temporary spaces, as well as utilizing the Fawcett Center, which is home to the athletic administration offices.Bjork said Ohio State will be thoughtful about where it moves the football team because it doesn’t want to just put the team in another building or situation that doesn’t fit.“We have people in closets now,” Bjork said with a laugh. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”A $500 million budget?Ohio State has one of the largest athletic departments in the country, sponsoring 36 varsity sports teams. The school has been adamant that it won’t cut any, which in turn leads to having one of the largest operating budgets in the country.The Buckeyes set a school record with $336 million in revenue from the fiscal year 2025, after the football team won the national championship. In the same fiscal year, the athletic department had $320,394,965 in operating expenses.Bjork said he expects Ohio State, which has remained self-sufficient, will be the first school to have a $500 million annual operating budget for its athletic department.“It’s going to happen,” Bjork said. “It could happen three years from now, two years from now, five years from now, but we will have a $500 million athletic budget at some point in time very soon. We have that capability.”When Bjork took over as athletic director in 2024, he came with a strong background in fundraising from his time at Texas A&M and Ole Miss. His focus is on maximizing Ohio State’s brand, he said.“There’s a lot of data that shows we have 12 million fans,” Bjork said. “If 1 percent of those people would join Buckeye Club, that’s 120,000. Right now we have about 25,000 donors and that’s a great number, but if you think about how we take the size and scale of Ohio State and maximize it, there really is no ceiling for our program from an engagement enterprise, value, revenue and all of those things. That’s what we’re going to focus on is taking vision and turning it into action.“We have to make sure we’re nationally competitive and make sure we have a financial and sustainable model.”