Pantoni stocks OSU with top talent
Dedication, track record draw recruits’ attention
Jaxon Smith-njigba was sitting in a psychology class at Rockwall High School in a suburb of Dallas one morning three years ago when his phone rang.
It was a recruiter from Ohio State on the other end.
Mark Pantoni, the director of player personnel, had been impressed by his recent performances and wanted to invite him to visit the school for a game later that fall.
Once Smith-njigba agreed, the Buckeyes offered him a scholarship, and little time was wasted. He committed in November following a trip.
At the time, Smith-njigba was an undervalued wide receiver prospect, a year away from picking up a five-star rating. He had offers from a handful of Power Five Conference schools, but none of them were blue bloods or even the premier in-state schools like Texas or Texas A&M.
All of which made the early interest from Ohio State stand out.
“They didn’t care about all the other stuff,” Smith-njigba said. “They just cared about me, how good I was and my potential.”
From Smith-njigba, now in line to be the Buckeyes’ starting slot receiver, to dozens of other players, Pantoni found out about them early in their high school careers.
The shrewd 39-year-old recruiting chief and his staff pored over film from games, 7-on-7 passing tournaments and summer camps before turning them into priorities on the recruiting trail.
It’s an eye for talent that has shaped a decade’s worth of Ohio State football rosters, spanning two coaching tenures.
“He’s great, the best in the business,” said former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, who first brought Pantoni to Columbus.
“I just think you look at his hit rate,” said Ryan Day, who succeeded Meyer
in 2019.
That percentage might only be increasing. On Thursday, the Buckeyes open their season at Minnesota with a team stacked with blue-chip prospects at every position and bolstered by a freshman class that was the highestrated group to sign with the program in the modern era.
Holding these pieces, Ohio State remains at the forefront of the national title conversation and a threat to return to the College Football Playoff final.
Early riser
The days begin early. Pantoni rolls into his office at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center by 7 a.m., the reason that packs of Red Bull sit in a corner of the room.
His perch is like a lot of workplace setups. He sits behind a U-shaped desk that holds framed family photos as he peers into a desktop computer.
But the stakes are especially high. He’s there before sunrise most mornings during the fall to review film of recruiting targets.
Ohio State’s recruiting board for a class of high school juniors contains about 150 players. Then around 50 remain as seniors.
He sifts through every second of the past week’s film. Interns cut up the video, dividing a prospect’s plays between good plays and bad plays, before it reaches Pantoni’s screen. They call them focused tapes. It’s a continuous process. They want to see every touchdown or missed block. No corners cut.
“I try to grind through it,” Pantoni said.
He stays until 10 p.m. Then starts over again.
“You have a better percentage of making an accurate evaluation the more you know something about them,” he said. “But it definitely puts more on my plate for sure.”
Pantoni is a cerebral evaluator. He casts a stoic exterior, someone prone to more observations than outbursts after catching a spectacular highlight. With a high volume of plays to review, he must stay on top of things.
“He’s pretty even-keeled and kind of just locked in and focused on making sure he’s got the best evaluation,” said Weston Zernechel, an assistant director of player personnel.
When Pantoni followed Meyer to Ohio State in 2012, it would have been a stretch to say he oversaw a recruiting department. He worked alongside Greg Gillum, a director of high school relations. They were the only full-time recruiting staffers.
Pantoni now oversees four full-time employees within a player personnel department and expects the trend to continue.
That’s because of new rules adopted by the NCAA this spring that allow players to transfer once as an undergraduate without sitting out a season.
Known as the one-time transfer exception, it opens the door for more roster movement, something Pantoni likens to free agency. With a larger staff, Pantoni has more time to devote to watching film of college players in addition to his diet of high school tape. But he’s not alone there, either. Ohio State hired Ryan Cavanaugh, a former NFL scout with the Houston Texans, this summer as its first-ever college scouting coordinator. Cavanaugh primarily evaluates players on opposing teams. Some are in the NCAA transfer portal, an online database that notifies schools of their intent to transfer. Others are not, though it helps to be prepared just in case.
“If we need an offensive tackle,” Pantoni said, “and we’ve already got reports written on guys, when their name enters the portal, we’re already ready to attack.”
Since June, the Buckeyes picked up two transfers in USC linebacker Palaie Gaoteote and North Carolina kicker Noah Ruggles. In previous offseasons, they found critical additions like running back Trey Sermon and star quarterback Justin Fields.
Transfers still make up only a sliver of the roster, but the wider pool of available players each offseason is likely to demand more research in the coming years.
Pantoni sees a scenario in which the structure of Ohio State’s player personnel department evolves to a point in which more staffers are brought in to assist with college scouting.
Though perhaps more exhaustive, their search remains the same. They look for talent and identify the right fits, allowing the coaching staff to prioritize certain prospects. It’s especially critical since Day spends much of his time during the season in game-planning meetings as the offense’s primary play-caller.
‘A walking computer’
Madeline Pantoni knew she had a precocious son.
He wasn’t much older than 5 when he was scrutinizing baseball box scores in the Sarasota Herald-tribune.
If he didn’t think someone’s batting average was accurate, he pressed her to call the newspaper. He knew he was right.
“Even at that young age, he would remember all that data,” she said. “He was like a walking computer.”
Blessed with a sharp mind, Pantoni set his sights on attending medical school. As a pre-med student at Florida, he could retain medical jargon from anatomy and biology classes.
“Luckily the good Lord gave me a good strength of memorizing stuff and remembering things,” he said.
If he was going to work in sports, it was to be as an orthopedic surgeon. He spent a summer in 2004 interning with Dr. James Andrews, the renowned orthopedist, in Birmingham, Alabama, focusing on arm injuries in baseball.
But as the prospect of debt from medical school loomed, Pantoni held off on the idea and remained at Florida to attend a graduate school program in applied physiology and kinesiology.
Staying on campus, he took on an internship with the track and field program, then with Meyer’s recruiting staff in 2006.
He never played football growing up. He was best at baseball, a switch-hitting third baseman in high school. But he was a fervent fan of the Gators. He traveled to road games with his future wife, Kristin, attended open practices and followed recruiting news.
Pantoni did a lot of grunt work at first. He addressed envelopes to mail recruiting information to prospects. He logged film. When players visited, he picked them up at the airport and shuttled them around campus.
Recruiting also fascinated Pantoni, especially at a time when Florida was returning to national prominence under Meyer.
His eagerness won over Meyer, who would ultimately welcome him when he reviewed film of prospects.
“He would ask to sit in when I would watch evaluation footage and ask me almost to the point where he was a nuisance,” Meyer said. “He’s a young guy, but I saw right away incredible work ethic and a desire to learn.”
Not long after, he was formulating Meyer’s recruiting strategy, one of the first non-coaches to have such responsibility and stature within a college football program, earning him a reputation as a trailblazer for the personnel industry. Some call him a “godfather.”
Pantoni is quick to credit the guidance of Meyer and others on staff for helping him develop a sense of talent evaluation, but the brainpower that promised to propel him through medical school made him a quick study and allowed him to establish credibility among coaches.
Recruiting staffers who have worked with Pantoni point out how well he can sort through prospect information. There is no shortage of material between recruits’ heights and weights, testing times, statistics and other notes. Much of it remains at the tip of his tongue.
“I don’t think he left the medical field because he wasn’t smart enough,” said Adam Caltury, the director of recruiting at Pittsburgh who spent 2014 and 2015 as a recruiting assistant at Ohio State. “In terms of memory, critical thinking, he checks all the intelligence boxes. He has high-level intelligence.
“So just in terms of all the kids that we’re recruiting, he’s able to recall a lot of things about each and every single one of them. He may have watched a kid three weeks ago, but he’s able to remember what he saw, while he’s comparing them to a kid he’s watching that day. I think that’s part of his separating factor.”
The future
Pantoni has thought about other ways in which his career path might change course.
He could move into athletic administration, working toward becoming an athletic director, a role that involves hiring football coaches and scheduling bigtime games.
Or maybe he might turn to the NFL. He could aim for a job as a general manager. There would be obvious financial benefits, a pay scale that could more than double his $225,000 base salary for this season, according to a copy of his contract obtained through a public records request.
But Pantoni sees downsides to both tracks.
An athletic director’s responsibilities span far beyond football, overseeing dozens of other sports, and the NFL offers little stability for someone who has spent a decade and a half at only two schools.
“There are so many great things here,” he said, “so it’s like, why would I want to go do something that’s such a risk for money?”
If he were to bolt for the NFL, the opportunity might have been in January when Meyer unretired and returned to the sidelines with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But he said he never had serious talks about following Meyer for a second time and noted his former boss was sensitive to poaching anyone from the Buckeyes’ staff. Meyer often touts the infrastructure he left behind.
“He has such respect for this place,” Pantoni said.
By staying at Ohio State, Pantoni has seen his own job grow.
His administrative duties for recruiting, which have always involved organizing prospects’ official and unofficial visits, now involve overseeing a creative media department that is up to five fulltime employees.
As the Buckeyes maintain a talent edge over most of their peers, Pantoni thinks about an opportunity to win another national championship.
A framed photo of AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the Buckeyes won the inaugural College Football Playoff seven years ago hangs by the side of his desk.
When he first joined Meyer’s staff at Florida, the Gators won two titles in three years, giving him an early rush of success.
But they don’t always come so quickly.
“You realize it’s not normal,” he said. The pursuit continues. jkaufman@dispatch.com @joeyrkaufman