On the night of the 2026 NFL Draft’s first round, the New York Giants took Arvell Reese with the fifth pick. Two picks later, the Washington Commanders took Sonny Styles seventh. Per Eleven Warriors, that was the first time in NFL draft history that two linebackers from the same school have been drafted within the top 10 picks.
Not the first time this decade. Not the first time since some year with a story attached to it. The first time it has ever happened, to anybody.
This site has now run the same test on six Ohio State position claims: O-Line U, Running Back U, DBU, the defensive line, Quarterback U, Tight End U. Every single time, the same thing was sitting in the middle of the record. Somebody else’s recruit. Max Klare produced at Purdue first. Will Kacmarek’s only FBS scholarship offer out of high school came from Ohio, not Ohio State. Caleb Downs picked Alabama. Justin Fields was Georgia’s No. 1 signee. The claim kept being a development claim wearing a recruiting claim’s clothes.
Linebacker breaks the pattern. This one is Ohio State’s, all the way down.
Both of them are Ohio kids, and neither one took a detour
Arvell Reese committed in August 2022, out of Cleveland Glenville. Ohio State’s own roster lists him with a hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and under “Last School” it says Glenville. That is a high school. There is no college in front of Ohio State on his record, which is the whole thing this site keeps failing to find everywhere else. Eleven Warriors noted at the time that he was the seventh prospect from Ohio to commit to Ohio State in that cycle, and the first Glenville player to commit to the Buckeyes in more than five years.
Sonny Styles was, per Eleven Warriors, “the five-star in-state 2023 safety/linebacker commit,” out of Pickerington Central. He reclassified from the 2023 class into 2022 and signed his National Letter of Intent on Dec. 15, the first day of the early signing period. He is also the son of former Ohio State linebacker Lorenzo Styles Sr.
An in-state five-star whose father played linebacker in Columbus, and a Cleveland kid out of Glenville. Ohio State recruited both of them, out of Ohio high schools, and three and four years later they went fifth and seventh. Nothing about that needs a caveat.
The caveat is somewhere else entirely.
Neither one arrived as a linebacker anybody wanted
Reese was not a blue-chip linebacker. Sports Illustrated, on the day he committed, had him as the 20th-best linebacker and the No. 277 prospect overall in the class of 2023. Good. Not a coup. He picked Ohio State over Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan and USC, so the competition was real, but nobody signed him thinking they had just landed the fifth pick in a draft.
And then there is the detail that reframes the entire record. Per Eleven Warriors’ analysis of his commitment, “his junior year was his first time ever playing linebacker and he only played in five games in 2022.”
Five games. That was the complete linebacker résumé of a man who would go fifth overall.
Styles is the same story told from the opposite end. He was a five-star, but read his listing again: “safety/linebacker.” Ohio State did not play him at linebacker. It played him at safety, on purpose, for two years, and the defensive coordinator has said out loud that this was the plan. Jim Knowles, in May 2024:
When I first met him or when I first got here, I think everybody talked about “He’s gonna be a linebacker, he’s gonna be a linebacker.” But I really wanted to see him at safety first.
Styles started all but one game at either nickel safety or strong safety in 2023. He moved to linebacker during the 2024 championship season, and linebackers coach James Laurinaitis described what he inherited: “I think Sonny’s made a really smooth transition to linebacker. He’s so used to breaking and going from safety, you had to slow him down.”
So the record that has never been set by any school in the history of the NFL draft was set by a kid with five career games at the position and a kid his own coaches deliberately kept away from it.
The hole in this, and it is a real one
There is one thing in this story that does not belong to Ohio State’s recruiting department, and it would be dishonest to bury it.
What moved Sonny Styles to linebacker was Caleb Downs. Once Ohio State added the Alabama transfer safety, the secondary was full, and Styles went down a level. The transfer portal is in this record after all. It just did not arrive carrying a linebacker. It arrived carrying the safety who took Styles’ job, and that is what turned a safety into the seventh pick in the draft.
Which means the honest verdict is narrower than the headline, and more interesting. Ohio State did not sign the best linebackers in America and watch them become the best linebackers in America. It signed two Ohio kids who were not really linebackers yet, moved one of them down a level because a transfer took his job, and got the first top-10 linebacker pair in the sport’s history out of it.
That is not a recruiting pitch. It is a development pitch with a recruiting pitch’s record attached, which is exactly what Quarterback U turned out to be. The difference, the one that matters, and the reason this piece reads differently from the other six: this time Ohio State recruited the men themselves.
What the 2027 class is actually buying
Ohio State’s 2027 class has 19 commits, and two of them are linebackers: four-star Prince Goldsby and four-star Quinton Cypher.
Both are recruited as linebackers. Which is, on the evidence above, not the bet that produced Arvell Reese and Sonny Styles.
That is not a criticism, and it is not a prediction. Nobody here knows whether Goldsby and Cypher become what Reese and Styles became, and anybody telling you otherwise in July 2026 is guessing. But it is worth saying plainly what the last three years actually proved, because the pitch a recruit hears this summer will be the simple version, and the simple version is wrong.
The simple version is that Ohio State is Linebacker U now, so come be a linebacker here.
The record says something stranger and better. Ohio State found a top-10 linebacker in a kid who had played five games there, and another in a safety it refused to move until it was ready. Whatever that is, it is not a position. It is an eye.
