The most important thing Brady Edmunds has said about his recruitment is that it was over before we knew it was over.
Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope published a sit-down with Ohio State’s 2027 quarterback on Sunday, July 26, three days after Edmunds shut down his recruitment. In it Edmunds walks through the summer he spent deciding, and the timeline he gives is not the timeline the public had.
He left Westwood thinking he was gone
Hope’s first line is the one that reframes everything: “Edmunds left his official visit to UCLA last month thinking he was going to be a Bruin.”
That visit was June 5, per Eleven Warriors’ Chase Brown, whose June reporting had Edmunds calling the trip one that “went really, really well” and saying UCLA “definitely won them over” about his family. What Edmunds adds now is what happened when he got home to Huntington Beach.
“I mean, I walk into my bedroom when I get home from the OV, and I have an Ohio State flag hanging on the wall. I got an Ohio State teddy bear, and my whole wardrobe is Ohio State. It was hard for me to separate from that fact that this was my goal, this was what I wanted to do, even without football.”
The text from the lounge
Edmunds took his Ohio State official visit two weeks after the UCLA trip, which puts it on June 19, the date A to Z Sports reported at the time. Hope writes that he went into it still unsure. He did not stay unsure for long.
“During my Ohio State OV, I think I got back to the hotel one night, my dad was in the lounge area he just got back to or whatever, and I think we talked for a second, and then I went upstairs, and he texted me and said, ‘You’re gonna be a Buckeye, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah,’ because the love that I got on that OV, and just how I felt throughout the whole thing, like, I didn’t think I could walk away from that.”
Hope’s next sentence is the part that matters for anyone who followed this in July: “Edmunds waited another month before officially shutting down his recruitment on Thursday, wanting to be sure he was making the right decision.”
So the question the class could least afford to lose was answered in a hotel in Columbus in the third week of June, and the answer stayed private until July 23.
What that month contained
It is worth saying plainly what Ohio State’s 2027 class did while its quarterback was quietly settled, because none of it was quiet. This site flagged Edmunds on July 5 as the least settled piece of the class, and on the reporting available that day, he was. Then, per our board, five-star receiver Monshun Sales chose Indiana on July 17 and five-star running back David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22. Edmunds’ announcement landed the next day.
Read in order, July looked like a class losing two of the best skill players in America and then getting a save. Read with Hope’s timeline, the save had already happened. The two misses are still misses. The quarterback was never the thing that was in the balance in July, whatever it looked like from outside, and that is a correction we are glad to print about our own watch.
The reason the watch existed at all has not changed. There was no replacement. Ohio State took a run this spring at five-star Nebraska pledge Trae Taylor, who reaffirmed with the Huskers and sits on our board as a miss, and Hope reported on July 23 that every top-100 quarterback in the composite for this cycle is already committed somewhere. That is the argument this site made in Quarterback U: carrying exactly one quarterback per class works right up until the one leaves.
The room he is walking into
Hope reports Edmunds is now expected to be the only quarterback in Ohio State’s 2027 class. He also lays out the depth chart honestly, and it is not a soft landing. Even if Julian Sayin leaves for the NFL after this season, Edmunds will likely wait behind sophomore Tavien St. Clair, the five-star Hope calls Sayin’s expected successor. By the time Edmunds’ first real shot arrives, he may be competing with Christopher Vargas, the No. 1-ranked quarterback in the 2028 class, where Hope writes Ohio State is an early frontrunner.
Edmunds says he has heard the version of this where UCLA was the better football decision.
“Whatever headlines or whatever gets drawn up online, I think I had a really, really good chance of playing there. I trusted my capabilities, and I trusted the way I work and everything like that, but I thought I was the best fit for that program. My confidence doesn’t come from what people tell me or narratives drawn up or anything like that; mine comes from how hard I work.”
The line he keeps returning to came from a coach who was not even recruiting him. “It was an Eastern Washington coach my freshman year,” Edmunds told Eleven Warriors. “He just told me, like, ‘When you’re making your decision, take away football and can you see yourself there?’” UCLA is 45 minutes from his house. He says Columbus still won that question.
Sixteen pounds, and a number that moved
The one hard physical fact in the interview is a body change. Edmunds is 6-foot-5. Hope reports he bulked to 242 pounds and fought an injury last season, then slimmed to 226 this offseason to get his mobility back, with the goal of being a bigger threat running the ball. Edmunds points at his sophomore film as the standard, noting he ran for 157 yards and two touchdowns in the first game of 2024.
Note the discrepancy rather than smoothing it: Eleven Warriors’ own file card on July 23 listed him at 220 pounds, and Land-Grant Holy Land’s July 24 write-up used 220 as well. The 226 figure is newer and comes from Edmunds himself, so that is what we are carrying, with both numbers on the record.
His ranking moved too, slightly. Our board carried No. 243 nationally from Eleven Warriors’ July 23 story. Hope’s July 26 piece has him at No. 242 overall and No. 20 at the position, and Land-Grant Holy Land’s Caleb Houser independently gives the same two numbers off the 247Sports composite. The board now reads 242, dated, the same way Karlos May’s number is dated.
He is not done being a high schooler
Edmunds told Eleven Warriors he does not want to rush the four and a half months he has left before he enrolls at Ohio State, and that his priority through the whole recruitment was his senior season at Huntington Beach, where he wants a deep playoff run and the Orange County career passing yards record. He plans to be back in Columbus for at least one game this fall, which Hope notes is workable because Huntington Beach plays five of its 10 regular-season games on Thursdays.
The closing quote is the one Eleven Warriors put in the headline, and it is the whole decision in two clauses:
“I think my dad used the phrase, but I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to look at myself in the mirror as a man and be like, OK, I had this opportunity, and I didn’t follow through with it when I wanted it all my life. Ultimately, I just thought I could get it done there, and I thought I’d just be the happiest there.”
