Ross Bjork is the future of Ohio State football

Ohio State's pitiful game-day enhancements are secondary to the ultimate goal of bilking the program's pay pigs for every penny.

Ohio State University Athletic Director Ross Bjork and Ohio State University President Ted “Slapshot” Carter

A nice perk about living in Ohio is that you can expect the worst at all times, in everything, and more often than not, be right:

I’m not sure who “Don Bellows” is, but he sounds like somebody who could do some freelance work around this humble establishment.

Some fans didn’t like how he bashed Ted “Slapshot” Carter mere days into his presidency, but roughly a year and a half later, we’re starting to see how right he was.

Such is the iron price of prophecy.

Carter veered in hiring Ross Bjork, then of Texas A&M, as Ohio State’s newest athletic director. He could have gone with continuity and brought Gene Smith’s famed protégé, Pat Chun, then at Washington State, back to the Buckeye State.

But Slapshot understood he had leverage after Ohio State’s previous president went down in flames (largely thanks to Jeffrey Epstein’s No. 1 client, Les Wexner).

Slapshot wanted to put his stamp on the administration, and he did, with jubilation from A&M fans, who were incredulous that someone else would want to hire their doofus athletic director.

We got searing insight into Bjork’s vision in his first full offseason, which lucky for him, came after riding Ryan Day’s coattails to a national championship.

And it’s like the rest of the economy in that it relies more and more upon the ultrawealthy. According to The Wall Street Journal, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans comprise 50 percent of the country’s consumer spending.

That trend will only intensify after Donald Trump and his Congressional stooges blew a $4 trillion hole into the national deficit to transfer more wealth to that lucky 10 percent through the tax code, which was already written mainly with their class interests at heart.

So you get stuff like Ross building 400 “elevated, field-level suits” that they can sell to fans rich enough to want to brag to their friends about “being on the field” despite having a terrible viewpoint for any on-the-field action that doesn’t occur on the goalline a few yards in front of them.

You get stuff like the “1922 Club,” a self-described “elite, members-only” club inside the Shoe.

Why renovate or expand the bathrooms, something that would improve the game-day experience for 99 percent of the crowd, when you can build an exclusive pervert playground that doesn’t even have a view of the field?

It’s the perfect example of who the current administration is looking to serve. And if you’re reading The Rooster, the odds are that you’re not rich enough to be included in that crowd.

Ticket prices are never coming down. Concession prices are never coming down. Ohio State doesn’t even let a COTA bus run down Lane Avenue, because that would hurt its ability to extract every penny from parking revenue on game days.

When all that stuff is taken off the table, what’s left over for everyone else?

You get stuff like “THE Towel” and the ensuing university propaganda that this was something fans desperately wanted.

You get stuff like a band of Ohio University graduates having their song, which is so bad that you wonder if their record label paid Ohio State for the privilege of being played before games, dubbed by Ross as a “powerful visual tribute to the people and places that make this state home.”

I understand that not everyone listens to only 10-15 songs produced between 2005 and 2013, like I do, but what are we doing here? This little gremlin is singing about smoking cigarettes on his way to school, something that’s rendered even more unbelievable when you realize he’s from Upper Arlington.

And this is who we’re looking toward to set the tone on game days? Jesus.

And it makes sense in a way, because Ross isn’t from Ohio. He wouldn’t know “a powerful vision tribute to the people and places that make Ohio home” if they were outside his house, shitting on the hood of his F-250 truck.

That’s why we get stuff like the ringing of the Victory Bell before the local team has won the damn game. And instead of being done by students, as per tradition, it will be outsourced to whatever marginal celebrity is in town for the big game.

And honestly, the relentless march of corporate sterility is a poetic end to what once made college football a unique spectacle.

This could have been managed to some degree if university administrators, coaches, and, to a lesser extent, fans had accepted that players are employees like everyone else and not spent 50 years perpetuating the myth of the “student-athlete.”

Alas. We are here now, in the Wild Wild West, where it’s monetize and upmarket or get relegated to the dustbin of history. But like America, only a select few are beneficiaries of that boom.

If you are wealthy enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Ohio State tickets, you will be increasingly catered to. Everyone else? Well, Bjork and his university paymasters will offer you junk like towels and “digital Buckeye leaves” while everything else about the game day experience gets worse.

In which case, you can stay home and still pay the piper by watching all the beautiful commercials that FOX has stuffed into a four-hour broadcast for your viewing pleasure.