Luke Sohyda is a Buckeye. The tight end from Canon-McMillan High School in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania announced his commitment to Ohio State on Tuesday, September 8, and Dan Hope opened Eleven Warriors’ report on it with the sentence this site has been writing around since July.
“Ohio State doesn’t yet have a tight end in the 2027 recruiting class,” Hope wrote, “but it now has one for 2028.”
That is the news and it is also the joke the calendar is telling. The 2027 class has no tight end and it is a year from signing. The class that does have one is the class of high school juniors.
What happened, and when
Brandon Huffman filed Rivals’ version twenty minutes later and both outlets put the pledge on the same day, which is the standard this site holds a date to. 247Sports’ team board stamps his row Commit 9/8/2026. ESPN’s 2028 class page says committed 09/08/2026. Four stamps, one Tuesday.
Both outlets also place him in the same seat three days earlier. Sohyda was in Ohio Stadium on Saturday for the Buckeyes’ opener against Ball State, and Huffman quotes what he told Rivals’ Steve Wiltfong about it.
“It was amazing to be back. The atmosphere is like no other. You hear how crazy the experience is and then you go and it even exceeds that expectation.”
The offer is older than the visit. Hope reports that Ohio State tight ends coach Keenan Bailey offered him in June, after Sohyda came to one of the Buckeyes’ 7-on-7 tournaments with his Canon-McMillan teammates. Huffman’s version of the same summer is shorter: “Offered by the Buckeyes in the summer, Sohyda impressed the Buckeye coaches at the team 7v7 camp in June.”
What Sohyda told Wiltfong after the opener was the part that reads like a decision already made.
“The opportunity to play for the Buckeyes is huge for me. I text Coach Kee almost daily. Definitely seems like a place I can see myself ending up.”
He picked Ohio State, per Hope, over a dozen other offers including Maryland, N.C. State, Pittsburgh and West Virginia.
The first man on this board nobody has ranked
Every previous commit in Ohio State’s 2028 class arrived with four services’ numbers attached, and the 2028 board prints all four side by side because no two of them agree. Sohyda arrives with something this board has not carried before, which is a hole where the number goes.
247Sports gives him a score of 87 and, in the national column of its own commits page, the letters NA. He has a rating on that board and no position on it. Rivals prints no number of its own on him at all. ESPN lists him on its class page at 6-4 and 250 with no star count and no grade beside his name.
The only national figures anybody published are composites, and the two of them do not match. Hope’s story says he is “ranked as the No. 521 overall prospect in the 2028 class” and names no service for it. On3’s ratings card, read the same day, puts the Rivals Industry composite at 84.67 and No. 546. Huffman’s own article, filed off the same company’s data, says Rivals has him “the No. 24 tight end in the class and the No. 16 recruit in Pennsylvania”; the card beside his byline says No. 28 and No. 17. Nothing on either page explains the gap and this site is not going to invent one.
So his row on our board carries two outlets instead of four, and it carries no rank. That is the honest shape of a three-star junior in September 2026, and it is the reason this board stores every service’s reading separately rather than averaging them into a number that nobody printed.
What he is supposed to be
Hope’s scouting sentence is the most useful thing published about him this week. At 6-4 and 250, Sohyda plays tight end and defensive end for Canon-McMillan, and Ohio State is taking the offensive half: a “blocking-first tight end who can also be a big target over the middle of the field in the passing game.”
That is a specific job, and it is one the program has been publicly short of for two cycles. Ohio State put two tight ends in the 2026 NFL draft and recruited neither of them out of high school as a prize. The room it is building now starts with a junior who was unranked in September.
Where this leaves both classes
The 2028 class is five men: Sohyda, five-star receiver Jett Harrison, five-star quarterback Christopher Vargas, five-star defensive lineman Jameer Whyce and four-star running back Elijah Newman-Hall. Four of those five are top-100 players on somebody’s board. The fifth is a tight end, and he is the only one of them at his position.
The 2027 class is nineteen men and still has two rooms at zero. One of them is tight end. Nothing that happened Tuesday changed that, and the men left who could are a shorter list every week.
The full 2028 class, every outlet’s own reading of it, is on the 2028 board. What the 2027 class still needs is on the needs page.
