Read down the 2027 board and note where each of the 19 commitments goes to high school. Five of them are in Ohio. Jamier Brown is at Wayne in Huber Heights, Kellen Wymer is at Liberty Center, Deontay Malone is at Massillon Washington, Mason Wilt is at St. Clairsville, and Davis Seaman is at Bishop Watterson in Columbus. Brown spent the spring semester at Big Walnut in Sunbury and returned to Wayne in August, which moves his address on this list without moving him out of the state.
The other thirteen are not. Four are in Florida. The rest are spread across Georgia, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
That is the whole in-state ledger for this class so far, and the raw ratio is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is which Ohio players Ohio State kept and which ones it did not, because the answer maps almost exactly onto the two holes that are still open in the class.
The top of the state stayed home
Two outlets have published a ranked list of Ohio’s 2027 prospects this year, and they disagree about the order. Rivals has Wymer first and Brown second. USA TODAY High School Sports has Brown first and Wymer fifth.
They agree on the part that counts. The two best football players in the state of Ohio are both committed to Ohio State.
Wymer, the interior offensive lineman from Liberty Center, is the No. 67 player in the country on the composite the board uses here, and Rivals director of scouting Charles Power told that outlet he “might be the most natural mover and explosive mover of all the offensive linemen nationally.” Brown, the receiver, is No. 24. They are the anchors of a class that Eleven Warriors has described as one of the best defensive line hauls the program has ever put together, and they are the reason the in-state number is not the story on its own. A class of five Ohio players that includes the state’s top two is a different class than a class of five that does not.
Three cornerbacks, three exits
Now look at who is ranked immediately behind them.
Rivals’ top 10 in Ohio contains exactly three cornerbacks. Ace Alston of Anderson in Cincinnati is No. 3. Kei’Shjuan Telfair of Euclid is No. 4. Monsanna Torbert Jr. of Cincinnati is No. 7.
Every one of them is going to play college football somewhere other than Columbus.
Alston committed to Notre Dame. 247Sports reported that the four-star, who is the No. 114 player in the country and the No. 2 prospect in Ohio on its composite, “gave the Irish his verbal nod over Oregon, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee, LSU, Penn State, USC and the in-state Buckeyes.” On3 reported that Ohio State had been in the top 10 he released in November. This was a recruitment Ohio State was in, and it lost.
Telfair committed to Penn State on April 19. He is a four-star, the No. 93 player in the country and, per the 247Sports Composite, the No. 4 prospect in Ohio. Onward State reported that he “chose Penn State over Miami, Clemson, and Arkansas.” Ohio State does not appear in that reporting, and so this piece will not tell you Ohio State lost a battle it was in. What is true is narrower and still worth writing down: the fourth best player in Ohio left the state, and he plays the position where this class is thinnest.
Torbert is the one Ohio State fans already know about, because it happened ten days ago and we covered it. The Cincinnati corner took an Ohio State official visit from June 12 to 14, went to Ann Arbor the following weekend, and committed to Michigan on July 1.
Set that next to what Eleven Warriors wrote in its defensive review of this class on July 7: Ohio State does not have a top-100 cornerback in the 2027 class, for the first time in five years. The two corners it does have, as of July 11, are Malone at No. 285 and Jaden Carey at No. 383, and Malone is one of the five Ohio players in the class.
So the shape of it is this. Ohio produced three cornerbacks good enough for its own top 10 in this cycle. Notre Dame has one, Penn State has one, Michigan has one, and the class that is short a top-100 corner is the one in Columbus.
The tight end the state had
The other hole is at tight end, where the class has no commitment at all and, as of today, no target either.
Ohio had a tight end. D’Angelo White, of Villa Angela-St. Joseph in Cleveland, is a four-star that Sports Illustrated’s Louisville site described as ranking as high as ESPN’s No. 3 tight end in the country. He committed to Louisville on January 10.
He was not a name Ohio State ignored. Two outlets independently report that Ohio State offered him. Sports Illustrated adds that he “had made multiple unofficial visits to OSU, UM and PSU,” which is to say he had been on campus in Columbus more than once. On3 reported that he picked Jeff Brohm’s program “over an offer list that included Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana, Penn State and Tennessee.”
Six months later, the only uncommitted tight end still holding an Ohio State offer, Colton Johnson, committed to Ole Miss on July 9. Ohio State was not among the finalists he named, which is the honest caveat there and it stays attached.
The tight end position in this class is therefore not empty because nobody was available. It is empty after the best one in the state signed elsewhere in January and the last one on the board signed elsewhere in July.
What the ledger actually says
It would be easy, and wrong, to turn five out of nineteen into a verdict about Ohio State abandoning Ohio. This piece is not going to do that, because the evidence in it does not reach that far. Judging whether the in-state share is unusually low would take a season-by-season number from an outlet, and no source cited here provides one.
What the evidence does support is more specific and more useful.
Ohio State went into its own state in this cycle and won at the top. It has the No. 1 and No. 2 players in Ohio, and it turned Liberty Center and Huber Heights into the two most important addresses in the class.
Below that line, in the band of the state’s rankings that produces starting cornerbacks and tight ends, it did not win. Three corners left for three rivals. A four-star tight end who had visited Columbus more than once left for Louisville. And those two positions, corner and tight end, are precisely the two the class is still trying to fix in July, with David Gabriel Georges and Karlos May deciding inside the next two weeks and neither of them playing either position.
The commits from Florida and Georgia and California are real, and several of them are outstanding. But a recruiting class is also a set of choices about where to spend the last few weeks before signing day, and the ledger above is the clearest statement available of what the earlier choices cost.
