The man at the top of this page went 11th overall to the Dallas Cowboys, and he is the best argument against the thing his jersey is usually used to prove.
Ohio State is DBU. That is not a fan’s claim, it is a counting exercise, and Eleven Warriors did the counting: entering the 2022 draft the Buckeyes had put 20 defensive backs in the first round, with Texas and Miami seven behind at 13 each. Matt Gutridge wrote it plainly that April: many fans call Ohio State DBU, the Buckeye secondary calls itself BIA, best in America, and NFL teams agree.
But a first-round defensive back is proof of two different things at once, and recruiting is only one of them. A program can recruit a player, or it can acquire one. Both put a man in the first round. Only one of them is a promise you can make to a seventeen-year-old on a visit.
Caleb Downs is not evidence of the pipeline
Downs went 11th overall to Dallas in the 2026 draft, and per On3’s Spencer Holbrook he reached Columbus by the other road entirely. The Mill Creek native, out of Hoschton, Georgia, was a five-star in the class of 2023, and he chose Alabama over Georgia and Ohio State. Ohio State recruited him and lost him. He played one season in Tuscaloosa, entered the portal when Nick Saban’s retirement broke, and Ohio State, in Holbrook’s words, won the re-recruiting war against Georgia for him.
So the freshest and shiniest brick in the DBU wall is a portal brick. That is not a knock on Downs or on the staff that landed him, it is a fact about which machine produced him, and it matters here because this is a recruiting site. Ohio State’s ability to win a 21-year-old All-American out of the portal tells a high school junior almost nothing about what happens to him.
The recruiting case for DBU is real. It is just older, and it is better.
Three in one round, three different ways
On one night in April 2017 Ohio State did something no program had done more of. Per 247Sports, Marshon Lattimore went 11th overall to New Orleans, Malik Hooker went four picks later to Indianapolis at 15, and Gareon Conley went 24th to Oakland: three defensive backs in a single first round, tying Miami’s 2002 mark for the most ever taken.
All three were high school recruits. And the interesting part is that no two of them arrived the same way.
Lattimore was the blue-chip you would expect. Eleven Warriors’ Tim Shoemaker described a two-way star at Glenville High School in Cleveland, an Army All-American, a nationally coveted prospect and a top-50 recruit with scholarship offers from nearly every powerhouse program in the country. He committed on January 4, 2014. Ohio State won a fight it was supposed to win, over an Ohio kid it could not afford to lose.
Conley was taken off Michigan. Per Eleven Warriors’ Vico, on March 10, 2012, Conley became the fifteenth member of Michigan’s recruiting class when he committed to the Wolverines. He did not stay. On December 7, 2012, Conley committed to Ohio State, and four and a half years later he was a first-round pick for a program he had once pledged to beat.
Hooker was a three-star. This is the one that should reorganize how you read a recruiting ranking. Shoemaker’s account: a high school basketball phenom out of New Castle, Pennsylvania, who opted to play football in college despite only playing it for a few years at the prep level, seen more as a developmental prospect than an instant-impact player. He picked the Buckeyes on July 29, 2013. Four years later he was the 15th pick in the NFL draft.
Win the elite in-state kid. Flip the rival’s commit. Develop the three-star nobody else saw. Three defensive backs, one first round, three separate mechanisms. That is what a pipeline actually looks like from the inside, and it is a far more useful thing to show a recruit than a portal win.
The 2027 class is running all three plays again
Ohio State has four defensive backs committed in its 2027 class, and our board has every one of them verified.
At safety, Eli Johnson is a four-star, No. 208 nationally as of July 16, out of Cibolo Steele in Cibolo, Texas, committed since November 15, 2025. Angelo Smith is a three-star, No. 882 nationally in the July 16 snapshot, out of Chaminade-Madonna in Hollywood, Florida, and he has been committed since September 21, 2025, which makes him the longest-standing defensive back in the class.
At corner, Jaden Carey is a four-star, No. 383 nationally as of July 16, out of St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, and he pledged on June 17, 2026. And Deontay Malone is a four-star, No. 285 nationally as of July 16, who committed on June 14, 2026, out of Massillon Washington.
Read that last school name again. Gareon Conley went to Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio. Ohio State’s 2027 corner comes from the same building.
That is a fact, not a forecast. Malone is not Conley and a high school does not confer anything. But this is precisely the shape of the older machine still running: an Ohio corner out of a program Ohio State has recruited before, landed in June, a year and a half before he signs.
The mechanisms are all visible in this class if you know to look for them. Angelo Smith is the three-star safety, which is the only detail Malik Hooker’s file and his have in common and is worth exactly that much, because Hooker’s ranking is history and Smith’s career has not happened yet. We are not predicting anything. We are pointing out that the last time Ohio State put three defensive backs in one first round, one of them was rated where Smith is rated now, and the program took him anyway.
What is still open
One corner is still live. Gabriel Osborne Jr., the No. 5 cornerback in the class, committed to Oklahoma in June, and per Eleven Warriors on July 1 Ohio State is still pursuing him. That would be the Conley play, run in the other direction: take a corner off a program that already has his pledge.
And one is gone in exactly the way that stings. Monsanna Torbert Jr., a four-star and No. 106 nationally, took an Ohio State official visit from June 12 to 14, visited Michigan the next weekend, and pledged to the Wolverines on July 1, per Eleven Warriors and Buckeyes Wire. Fourteen years after Conley left Michigan for Columbus, a Cincinnati corner left Columbus for Michigan. The flip runs both directions, and it always has.
Four defensive backs in, one corner still on the board, one lost across the rivalry. The wall says 20 first-rounders. Downs is the reminder that the wall has two builders. The 2027 secondary is the older one, still working.
