The longer view on Ohio State's 2027 class: position groups, board math, and where the cycle goes from here.
20 STORIES / ON THIS BEAT
247Sports lists 29 enrollees in the 2026 class, and 11 of them played high school football in Ohio, six of those in Cleveland, Akron and their suburbs. The 2027 class has 19 pledges, five from Ohio and none from that corner of the state.
Ohio State's five-star receiver commit served the two games, returned September 4 against Lakewood St. Edward, and caught six passes for 157 yards and two scores while adding a 95-yard kickoff return. The Warriors lost 48-21 at home and open Greater Western Ohio Conference play at Springboro on Friday.
Land-Grant Holy Land reported on Monday that Ohio State's five-star edge rusher, a commit since December 29, plans three trips to games this season. His 247Sports page logs one visit. Ohio State has seven home dates, and the two rankings printed on that same 247Sports page have him first and third.
Resolved Ohio State's five-star receiver commit transferred back to Wayne in August, and the OHSAA opened its infractions report on Thursday. Per the Cincinnati Enquirer, Tim Stried says he drew one one-game suspension at each of the two schools. The Dayton Daily News prints the two football rules the report cites, and one of them is the NIL disclosure bylaw.
Three of those 11 were Buckeye targets, and the announcement landed six days before Ohio State lost its top 2027 target to a school with an Adidas bid. Three weeks later New Balance signed the Buckeyes' 2028 five-star receiver commit. The apparel money is on the board now.
Resolved The OHSAA says Ohio State's five-star receiver commit met a transfer exception. He is sitting two games for two unrelated infractions instead, missed Friday's loss at Fairfield, and is cleared to return in Week 3. Nobody will say what the infractions were until August 27.
Resolved Ohio State's five-star receiver commit spent one semester at Big Walnut, won three state track titles there, and is enrolled in Huber Heights again. His pledge to the Buckeyes is not in question. Whether he plays this fall is.
A position by position read of the class entering August puts it at 19 commits with two groups at zero. The likeliest running back is now a flip of an Alabama or a Florida State pledge. The tight end may not be a high school recruit at all.
Donte Wheat in 1981, Willie Salter in 2001, and then nothing until Nick Saban retired. Eleven Warriors counted the roster this week. ESPN, reporting on one recruit in 2024, had already recorded the mechanism.
Arvell Reese went fifth and Sonny Styles seventh in April, the first time in NFL draft history two linebackers from one school have gone inside the top 10. Six times this site has tested a Buckeye position claim and found somebody else's recruit at its heart. Not this time. And neither man arrived as a linebacker anybody wanted.
Ohio State became the first school this decade to put two tight ends in one NFL draft, and the first in its own history to do it in a single class. One came from Purdue. The other was a two-star whose only FBS scholarship offer was Ohio University. The 2027 class has no tight end and nobody left to sign.
Dwayne Haskins, Justin Fields and C.J. Stroud all went in the first round, and Eleven Warriors has Julian Sayin in line to make it four top-15 picks in nine years. Georgia recruited Fields. Alabama recruited Sayin. Kansas State recruited the quarterback who won the national title. The 2027 class has one quarterback, and he took a June visit to UCLA.
Ohio State put three defensive backs in one NFL first round in 2017, tying the record, and all three were high school recruits who arrived three different ways. The newest first-round Buckeye defensive back arrived from Alabama. The 2027 class has four defensive backs committed and one corner still on the board.
Archie Griffin still leads the Buckeyes' all-time rushing chart fifty years on, and Ohio State put two backs in the same NFL draft in 2025 for the first time since 1994. The 2027 class does not have a running back in it at all, and on July 22 the last five-star on the board, David Gabriel Georges, chose Tennessee.
Two first-round linemen in one 2025 draft, the first such pair in fifty years, is the pitch that landed the Buckeyes' deepest line haul since 2020. Here is the record the recruiting is selling.
The 2027 in-state ledger. Ohio State holds the two best players in the state and lost the three cornerbacks ranked behind them, to Notre Dame, Penn State and Michigan. The class still has no top-100 corner and no tight end, and the state produced both.
Nine of the 18 pledges as of July 6 play offense, and six of them are offensive linemen. There is no running back in the class, no tight end, and a quarterback who took an official visit to UCLA after he committed. On July 22 the five-star who could have filled the hole, David Gabriel Georges, chose Tennessee.
Two five-star ends, two top-25 tackles, and the highest-rated class in program history. Here is what the standard actually was, and how close the 2027 line has come to it.
Nine defenders are pledged. Eleven Warriors calls the defensive line haul the program's best since the 2021 class that produced JT Tuimoloau and Jack Sawyer. The secondary is short a top-100 corner for the first time in five years, and Karlos May's July 18 commitment closed the one hole left on the front.
Six offensive linemen, a historic defensive line haul, and a philosophy shift you can trace directly to ten sacks in two January losses.
← Search every beat on the wire
