Ohio State Drops Men’s Gymnastics Scholarships After ADs “More Like a Club Sport” Comments

The Ohio State University Athletics Department, a department that brought in over $251 million in revenue last year, more than any other in the country, has dropped scholarships from its men’s gymnastics team, according to a local NBC affiliate citing “multiple sources”.

Ohio State is one of only 15 men’s NCAA men’s gymnastics programs left, a decrease from almost 60 in the 1980s.

This is being treated within the gymnastics world, including Olympic pommel horse icon Stephen Nedoroscik, as the tip-of-the-spear for the new world of collegiate athletics,

The move echoes comments in August by Ohio State’s new athletics director Ross Bjork that rosters would be cut and some sports would ‘act a little bit more like a club sport’ as part of a new tiered athletics department for the Buckeyes. The move also, so far, holds true to Bjork’s comment that the school intends to maintain all 36 of its varsity athletics programs.

While there are untested long-term plans in place to stabilize college athletics in the new world of pay-to-play, including bringing in private equity and increasingly-louder rumblings of spinning off profit making football and basketball programs, there will be a lot of right-sizing of rosters and expenses in the next few seasons, if not total elimination of programs, on the road to solutions, and those budgets and roster spots are unlikely to be returned down the road.

Ohio State hosted the 2024 NCAA Championship in men’s gymnastics at the on-campus, 3,700 seat Covelli Center, where the Buckeyes finished 6th behind Stanford, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois. Ohio State has won three national titles, fifteen Big Ten titles, and five Nissen Award winners as the NCAA’s best male gymnast.

While interest in women’s college gymnastics has exploded across the country, with crowds of 10,000-plus becoming a regular occurrence across the country (and two programs averaging more than 10,000 fans per game last season), men’s NCAA gymnastics still averages just 673 spectators, with the best program pulling in about 1,200 fans per day according to The College Gymnastics Association.

NCAA men’s gymnastics programs are limited to a maximum of 6.3 scholarships, and like swimming those scholarships can be split among any number of athletes.

The U.S. men’s gymnastics team won a historic bronze medal at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in the team competition: their first medal since taking bronze in 2008. The men’s national gymnastics team members come from a number of different colleges, notably Stanford, Michigan, and Oklahoma, but noe attended or are scheduled to attend Ohio State.