COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Two pictures hang above Mark Pantoni's desk: The greatest recruiting photograph ever taken, and a shot of AT&T Stadium the night Ohio State won the 2014 national championship.

One photo turned into the other.

If there were a nameplate on Pantoni's desk, it would read "Ohio State Football General Manager." He's the general manager who made those two photos above his desk possible; the general manager who signed the best recruiting class in team history in 2017; and the general manager who is responsible for the 2018 recruiting class that currently ranks No. 1 in the country.

OSU coach Urban Meyer has said recruiting is the "lifeblood of this program" a million times. He'll say it again the next time there's a microphone in his face. But now Ohio State is putting money where Meyer's mouth is by investing what will be millions of dollars the next few years.

The greatest recruiting photo ever taken, from left to right: Mark Pantoni, Darron Lee, Joey Bosa, Ezekiel Elliott and Eli Apple. All four of those players were selected in the first round of the 2016 NFL Draft.

The recruiting photo above Pantoni's desk is of him standing with Ezekiel Elliott, Joey Bosa, Eli Apple and Darron Lee during a recruiting visit. They all went on to be first-round NFL Draft picks after being integral parts of the title run, the other picture.

Pantoni sits under those two framed photos every day but rarely feels nostalgic. It's nice they're there -- "testimony," he says -- but he never forgets that those pictures need to be created again with new faces. This program needs to get to the point where those pictures become routine, not framed.

Otherwise, Pantoni is not doing his job.

"That's the standard now," he said. "Be the best. Nothing else."

Meyer has the reputation as one of most demanding coaches in college football, but even Meyer understands there are limits to what one person can do. So Ohio State invested in its recruiting department.

What was once a two-man recruiting staff of Pantoni and Greg Gillum in 2012 is now a 10-person staff. This has turned into an NFL-like operation.

Great recruiting leads to winning -- this, somehow, used to be a debate -- and Pantoni is pulling the strings. This GM can't draft players or sign free agents, but Pantoni can recruit. Now he has help.

The most recent addition came Sunday when Andre Robinson was hired as an assistant director of new and creative media.

The nine others, including Pantoni, earn salaries that add up to a combined $617,213.98, according to employment information obtained by cleveland.com.

That number doesn't include Robinson's salary because he was just hired, but Ohio State has made a tremendous investment in recruiting support staff. That number also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on recruiting travel, whether it's on coaches' trips or official visits made by prospects.

"We're having tremendous recruiting success," Meyer said, "but we aren't doing it without that staff."

Seven years ago when Jim Tressel was the coach and Meyer was at Florida, the recruiting coordinator position was just assigned to one of the nine assistants. For Tressel, it used to be tight ends coach John Peterson.

Now you have GM Pantoni -- who has his fingers in everything from prospect communication to coaches' travel to visit itineraries to film breakdown -- and an entire team dedicated to film breakdown, videos, graphics, marketing and social media.

Ohio State never had a meeting to discuss this expansion, but Meyer basically reassigned every available staff position he could to recruiting, and redefined staff roles. The recruiting department quadrupled in people and payouts.

Athletic director Gene Smith didn't even hesitate to pay up.

"You can have the greatest head coach and the greatest coordinator, but you know the old saying: 'Great players make great coaches,'" Smith said. "Understanding what was happening nationally, understanding just the way it's changing and the way young people pay attention, it was critical for us to have those people. ... I think it's important for us to look at where we are, see the future and put in place the infrastructure to support it."

Though Pantoni will tell you his day-to-day life hasn't changed -- the guy still stares at his cell phone all day -- he's been given the freedom to delegate, you know, like a GM.

Two other programs have officially started referring to their recruiting coordinators as GMs -- LSU and Arizona. Pantoni has more than doubled his salary the last few years to an annual income of $175,000, plus a bonus of 25.5 percent of his base salary if the team reaches the national title game. If anyone deserves to be called a GM, it's Pantoni.

Yes, Clemson has a top-notch creative team (from which Ohio State has learned); Michigan's Jim Harbaugh is pushing the limits with satellite camps, sleepovers and trips to Rome; and Alabama has more analysts than NASA. But this financial investment isn't the norm. Ohio State is pushing limits.

With its new staff, Ohio State's recruiting department has four points of emphasis. You can jump to later sections of the story by clicking the links below or you can just scroll through.

1. The staff breaks down film of every play of a prospect's career

When Pantoni was a graduate student/recruiting intern at Florida in 2006 who wrote 300 letters per day, he also evaluated high school tape and helped separate which players the Gators' coaching staff should be pursuing the hardest.

Meyer saw something in Pantoni from the start. So he tested him.

"At Florida he would get into pretty testy arguments with our group of assistant coaches and I would often encourage that and stage it," Meyer said. "I would say, 'Mark, what do you think?' I wanted to see him stand up for himself. If you have no confidence and don't know what you're doing, it's not going to be good for you. ... He wasn't very good at it at first, but I could tell he was a grinder."

Urban Meyer, left, and Mark Pantoni, right, at the beginning of their professional relationship at Florida.

That was how Meyer learned to trust Pantoni's film evaluation skills, despite Pantoni spending all four undergraduate years pursuing a career in sports medicine.

Considering film evaluation's importance in recruiting, it took a lot from Pantoni to go from argumentative kid to the most crucial eye in Ohio State's talent evaluation.

"I've locked myself in a room and watched film over and over again for almost a decade now," he said. "Obviously sitting with Florida and now here where guys who have gone on to have great careers, the Charlie Strongs and the Steve Addazios, and ... asking what they look for and picking their brains, not just with film but in philosophy and what to look for at different positions, you learn a lot."

Ohio State's film department is the closest thing to the NFL because Pantoni and his staff do something he estimates 90 percent of other colleges don't: Break down every single play from every game of a prospect's career.

Highlight films on YouTube and Hudl are fun to watch, but Pantoni is just as fascinated by the weaknesses as he is the TD punt return or a pick-six. He wants to see it all.

During the season, Pantoni and the staff -- which includes Tim Hinton, Eron Hodges and others -- break down every single play from every game on Friday nights. They analyze everything: The good. The bad. The ugly.

"That's the NFL model," Pantoni said. "You don't know how much time and resources go into that. You want to see if they take plays off. You want to see their weaknesses. You don't just want to see the highlight tape."

When told that Meyer referred to him as the most important person in the program, Pantoni quickly interrupted and said, "No, that's (strength and conditioning coordinator) Mickey Marotti."

But that he's even in that sentence is crucial to understanding how critical this branch actually is.

Meyer found something special in Pantoni, the most special thing being that he loves recruiting. He doesn't aspire to be a coach or the GM of the New England Patriots.

"A lot of times people in those positions want to become a coach, so instead of watching recruiting film or checking out the dot coms and camp film, he's in there watching quarterback film with the quarterback coach," Meyer said. "I've made that mistake in past because I hired a guy because he's a coach, but coaches want to do what? Coach. They don't want to sit for six hours a day and watch Rivals camp film."

2. The staff puts out more than 500 graphics and videos per week on social media, which advances strategic marketing

If Pantoni wanted a recruiting graphic three years ago, he would have had to send an email to one of the three sports designers employed by the university. Their offices were not in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, but on the other side of Olentangy River Road in the Fawcett Center. He'd get them whenever they had time. There were only three designers for all 36 sports.

Three years ago, there was no official Ohio State Football Twitter account. There were no videos. There were no graphics tailored to specific recruits. There was no marketing.

This is the area that's undergone the most change.

Now Ohio State football has an entire squad of smart, creative, ambitious and talented videographers and designers. The three names you have to know are Zach Swartz, Sammy Silverman and Kenton Stufflebeam.

"The area that's just changed so much is the creativity beast," Meyer said. "I would be disappointed if we aren't the best in the country now. We definitely weren't a couple years ago."

Ohio State has a marketing plan for everything. Take Friday's career fair in Ohio Stadium for example: Swartz was walking around with a video camera recording players talking to employers and interviewing people to discuss how helpful the program is for life after football.

What do you think that turned into? A SnapChat story and a marketing video posted on Twitter.

Another year, another job fair lets our players network with 100+ professionals from across the country to prepare for life after football. pic.twitter.com/92KSD8L00U — Ohio State Football (@OhioStateFB) June 17, 2017

Everything this graphics team does has a plan -- a constant, relentless and thorough sales pitch for Ohio State. All of it is digested by prospects.

Silverman and Stufflebeam have had an endless supply of mind-bending concepts that nobody on Ohio State's staff -- not even Meyer or Pantoni -- could draft. Swartz, Stufflebeam and Silverman also interact with the coaching staff to get a better idea of how to personalize graphics for players.

There's an entire database dedicated to organizing information ranging from what career a player wants, to his favorite music or color. No detail gets left behind.

"When it comes to our personalized graphics, we don't always just want to send a kid a picture of him wearing an Ohio State jersey and holding a Heisman," Swartz said. "We want to really individualize these graphics and cater to exactly what they like. It's personal. We want to get to know them. If a kid wants to be a cop one day, we want to know that and build a graphic around it."

For example, taking the album cover from the latest hip-hop album and turning it into a recruiting graphic. You may not get it, but prospects do.

Or how about selling Ohio State's NFL Draft success? Check out what they made for cornerback commit Sevyn Banks:

That's just one of the thousands of graphics these guys are releasing every month.

"It's invaluable," Pantoni said. "Kids are visual. ... The video, the graphics is what really gets their attention.

"What do they do all day? The same thing we do: Stare at their phones and social media. A lot of this stuff is really powerful. Some of those videos capture what words can't, what we can't describe."

3. The staff still emphasizes traditional on-campus visits and the personal touch

One of the first times Pantoni toured with a prospect was in 2006 when Cleveland Browns cornerback Joe Haden took a visit to Florida. He ultimately signed.

Pantoni has been doing this a long time.

Any time there's a prospect on campus or it's a big recruiting weekend, you'll see Pantoni wandering around with his cellphone in his right hand and a prospect at his side. This is an integral part of his job and something he still loves.

Jerome Baker, left, took a visit to Ohio State as a Florida commitment, and this is a picture of Gene Smith and Mark Pantoni selling the flip. Now he's one of the Buckeyes' best defenders.

But as part of this expansion came the hire of Tori Magers, who has the official title of on-campus recruiting coordinator. Ohio State could have as many as 20 prospects on campus at any given time, and it's her job to coordinate everything from which coaches are available to where recruits are taken.

"She now does that instead of me taking a kid around and my phone going off every three seconds," Pantoni said.

He also felt it was important to add a woman in the recruiting department, which takes on particular importance when it comes to connections built with prospects' mothers. Everything is calculated.

It's easy to get lost in the world of everything Ohio State has to sell -- Ohio Stadium, the NFL, academics, facilities, national titles, Urban Meyer and whatever else -- but the importance of a valuable campus visit has not and will never diminish.

Tori Magers, left, hosting four-star wide receiver Trey Knox of Murfreesboro (Tenn.) Blackman.

4. The staff drives home that OSU's program is about life after football

Of all the things Ohio State is doing, Meyer, Pantoni and Smith agree that Real Life Wednesdays is changing the game.

Meyer invites high-profile personalities from the business world to come meet with the team every week with the hope that his players will learn valuable lessons and, in turn, become marketable for life after football.

Some of the names that have spoken to the team include JPMorgan Chase & Company chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon; Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert; Harley Davidson CEO Keith Wandell; Panera Bread CEO/owner Sam Covelli; and many more.

We just did a deep look into Real Life Wednesday, how they come together and the recruiting impact it's having last week, which you can read below:

* The impact 'Real Life Wednesday' has on Ohio State football recruiting

"The Real Life Wednesday program, guys going out and getting legitimate internships, so it's not just talk," Pantoni said. "There is testimony of, 'Hey, we're going to have your son do an internship at Goldman Sachs or Nike' or wherever. There's real testimony there. It's important to parents to see that we are giving their kids options to be successful off the field, too."

Ohio State fans cling to every top-five list and recruiting update and flip and Pantoni's patented "BOOM!" tweets every time the Buckeyes pick up a new verbal commitment. Recruiting is fun because this is how national titles are won.

Just don't forget the money that goes into this.

"This is Ohio State," Meyer said. "We'd better be the best."