COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Former Ohio State University football coach and Youngstown University President Jim Tressel said he is still learning how to be Ohio’s lieutenant governor.

During a fireside chat with NBC4’s Colleen Marshall and sponsored by the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, Tressel said he is focused on education and workforce development because that’s what Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told him to do.

Tressel described his current job as like being an assistant coach again, following someone else’s game plan.

Tuesday’s event was Tressel’s second public appearance of the day, and he was on his way to a third, speaking to a banking group.

While Tressel downplays his experience at governing, he is clearly an important front man for the DeWine agenda. The governor tapped him to promote workforce development because of Tressel’s higher education experience. Tressel was also at the helm of one of Ohio’s state universities when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were still an important part of college life.

Regarding the mandated end to DEI, Tressel said it should be an everyday conversation in classrooms and dormitories.

“I always thought the word university meant unity in diversity,” he said. “You left your hometown, which you grew up in, whatever it was. Certain culture, certain beliefs, and you went to that place where people came in from lots of different places, and you learned about other cultures. You learned about people who didn’t look like you, who didn’t believe like you, who didn’t think like you, who didn’t prefer like you. And you created that unity and that diversity. And that’s how you grew up. That was always the way that I thought. And it wasn’t with a special department. It was in the classroom, in the dormitory, in the sports teams, in the marching band, in the plays, in the Baha engineering race team, in the Rocket team, in the concrete canoe team, and so the fact that we created so many departments — and I’m not picking on DEI — we’ve had lots of different departments have been created at universities, have led to our inefficiency. We’ve got to get more efficient.”

Tressel also spoke at length about efficiencies in government and said the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts came as a shock to many people, but it’s forcing a reexamination of how government operates.

That’s not all Tressel talked about; other topics include a potential run for Ohio’s governor, the state’s workforce development drive, and more. See what the lieutenant governor has to say about those topics in the video player above.