Ohio State opens its season on Saturday, and the highest-rated player in its recruiting class intends to be in the building for three games before the year is out.
Land-Grant Holy Land’s Gene Ross reported on Monday, August 31 that DJ Jacobs “now plans to make three trips to games this season.” Jacobs is the edge rusher from Blessed Trinity Catholic in Roswell, Georgia who committed to Ohio State on December 29, 2025, and he is the top line of this board by any reading of it. Ross calls him “the crown jewel of a strong 2027 class” and writes that holding the commitment “will be one of the biggest storylines as we get closer and closer to National Signing Day.”
That is the whole of the report, and it is worth being precise about the size of it. Ross does not name the three games. Neither will this story.
Seven dates, and nobody has said which three
Ohio State’s own schedule page lists twelve games and seven of them are in Columbus:
- September 5, Ball State, 12:30, Big Ten Network
- September 19, Kent State, noon, FOX
- September 26, Illinois, time to be announced
- October 10, Maryland, time to be announced
- November 7, Oregon, time to be announced
- November 14, Northwestern, time to be announced
- November 28, Michigan, noon, FOX
Three of seven. A recruit choosing among those dates is choosing between a September tune-up and a November afternoon against Oregon or Michigan, which is a different kind of visit and a different kind of signal, and it is exactly the thing no outlet we could read has published yet.
The one game-day date in Ross’s story belongs to somebody else. He reports that 2028 defensive lineman Kellan Hall, whom he calls “the No. 1 DL and No. 2 overall player in the cycle per the 247Sports Composite,” is “scheduled to see the Buckeyes on Oct. 10, when Ohio State will play host to Maryland.” Ohio State’s schedule page agrees on the date and the opponent. Hall has not committed anywhere and so has no row on the 2028 board, which carries pledges only.
What the counters on his own page say
247Sports keeps a page for Jacobs, and the numbers printed on it are the useful frame for a story about visits. Read on Monday, September 1, it counts 38 offers, one visit and zero coach visits, and its team list dates that single logged visit to June 12 and marks Ohio State as the school that recruited him, through Larry Johnson.
Two cautions on that, because a counter is not a biography. It is 247Sports’ own log of the visits 247Sports recorded, not a claim about how many times this player has been to Columbus in his life. And a June visit for a player who committed the previous December is not the same event as a recruiting trip: he was already pledged. What the counter does establish is the ordinary scale of the thing. One logged visit in the record, and a plan for three in a single autumn.
The page also says, under Crystal Ball, “No Crystal Ball predictions at this time.” Nobody at 247Sports is currently predicting he goes anywhere else.
No. 1 and No. 3, on one page, and the difference is the scale
Ross writes that Jacobs is “the No. 1 EDGE and No. 1 overall player in the 2027 class per 247Sports.” That is true, and it is true of one of the two rankings 247Sports prints side by side on his page:
| Ranking | Rating | National | Edge | Georgia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 247Sports | 98 | No. 1 | No. 1 | No. 1 |
| 247Sports Composite | 0.9984 | No. 3 | No. 1 | No. 2 |
The first is the outlet’s own board. The second is its composite, which folds in the other services. And On3’s Industry table, which is where this board takes its rank and star figures for every commit, also has him third nationally as of its August 16 reading.
So the two consensus rankings agree with each other and the single-outlet board is the one carrying him at No. 1. All three call him the best edge rusher in America. This is the same problem this site has already written about at the class level, where Ohio State’s 2027 haul is 5th, 7th or 11th depending on which table you open, and the fix is the same one: name the table, every time. “Per 247Sports” and “per the 247Sports Composite” are two different sentences about the same player on the same screen.
What Ohio State is protecting
The evaluation on that page is signed and dated. 247Sports director of scouting Andrew Ivins evaluated him on December 27, 2025, two days before the commitment, and files him under “reminds us of” Travon Walker of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Ivins calls him a “cast-iron edge defender with the size, speed and strength to wreak havoc on Saturdays and then Sundays,” notes that he “constantly destroys blocks with violent hands and a powerful lower half,” and lists as the one thing left to do that he “needs to keep tinkering with pass-rush technique.” Two earlier evaluations by the same scout, from April 2025 and August 2024, sit under it.
The stats table on the same page covers three varsity seasons:
| Season | Tackles | TFL | Sacks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 81 | 14 | 6 |
| 2024 | 112 | 35 | 12 |
| 2025 | 102 | 24 | 16 |
| Total | 295 | 73 | 34 |
The page’s written background adds the honours attached to those years: MaxPreps freshman, sophomore and junior All-American in 2023, 2024 and 2025, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Class AAAA defensive player of the year as a sophomore, and appearances in both the Under Armour All-America Game and the Polynesian Bowl in 2026 as an underclassman. Sacks are the line to watch: 6, then 12, then 16, rising in each of the three seasons while the tackle count did not.
One number on that page is not printed here. The written background credits him with three forced fumbles in 2023 and the stats table on the same page says one. Tackles, tackles for loss and sacks agree in both places for all three years, so those are the three columns above, and the forced fumbles are left out rather than picking a side in an outlet’s argument with itself.
Ninth of nineteen, and the part of this that is a calendar
Sorting this board by the day each player said yes, Jacobs is the ninth of the nineteen to pledge. Eight were already on it when he committed in December, including fellow five-star Jamier Brown, and the other five-star, Marcus Fakatou, did not join until the end of June. He has now been committed for eight months, which is most of a recruiting cycle. In the last week of August, 247Sports put him on its preseason All-America team and made him one of four finalists for national player of the year.
Ross frames the visits as a retention question, in an era where, as he puts it, “NIL and outside factors” play “a heavy hand in recruitments.” That framing is his. What is checkable is the shape of the fall: seven home dates, three of them spoken for, a signing period in December, and a player whose page currently shows nobody predicting anything other than what he already said.
What we could not read
The reporting behind this appears to be a 247Sports story published the same day, Benjamin Wolk’s “Peach State Pipeline: DJ Jacobs visits set, two sets of twins with different visit plans, 2029 lookahead,” dated August 31, 2026 and listed on Jacobs’ own player page. It is marked VIP and sits behind 247’s paywall, so this site has not read it. Land-Grant Holy Land’s paragraph also embeds a post by Mick Walker of Lettermen Row, which was not opened and is not cited here.
That is why the sentence above says three games and not which three. Somebody has almost certainly published the answer. It is not on a page we can open, and a guess in this space would be indexed as a fact by Thursday.
This board will carry whichever games he actually attends, on the days he attends them.
