When a high school offensive lineman visits Ohio State, the sales pitch is not a slogan. It is a draft record, and lately the record has been doing the talking.
Six offensive linemen have committed to the Buckeyes’ 2027 class: Caden Moss, Kellen Wymer, Brody McNeel, Jimmy Kalis, Mason Wilt, and Davis Seaman. Per Eleven Warriors’ June 2026 accounting, that is the first six-lineman class the program has signed since 2020, and only four schools in the entire 2027 cycle hold even two top-100 offensive line commits: Ohio State, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, and Florida. A class does not stack up like that by accident. It stacks up because of what happened to the last group of linemen who came through.
The record the pitch is selling
Start with the most recent draft. In April 2025, per Eleven Warriors, Ohio State put two offensive linemen in the first round of the same NFL draft for the first time in fifty years: guard Donovan Jackson went No. 24 overall to the Minnesota Vikings and tackle Josh Simmons went No. 32 to the Kansas City Chiefs. The last time the Buckeyes managed that was 1975, when Kurt Schumacher went No. 12 to the Saints and Doug France No. 20 to the Rams.
That was the exclamation point on a longer run. On3’s Spencer Holbrook, ranking the best Ohio State linemen of the Ryan Day era, leads with Paris Johnson Jr., the No. 6 overall pick of the 2023 draft and a consensus All-American in 2022. Behind him sit Wyatt Davis, a unanimous All-American and Big Ten Offensive Lineman of the Year before he became a third-round pick, and Thayer Munford, a first-team All-American who became a starting tackle for the Las Vegas Raiders.
The player at the top of this page belongs on that list too. Josh Myers started 21 of his final 22 games at center for Ohio State, and per Packers.com, Green Bay took him No. 62 overall in 2021 and handed him the starting center job as a rookie, replacing the departed All-Pro Corey Linsley.
Why it matters for 2027
The through-line is Donovan Jackson. He was a top-100 offensive line recruit in Ohio State’s 2021 class, the last out-of-state top-100 lineman the program had landed until Moss committed this cycle. Four years later he was a first-round pick. That is the arc every one of these six 2027 commits is being shown: come to Columbus, and the coaching and the exposure turn a highly rated recruit into a Sunday starter.
The honest caveat is the same one that applies to any recruit. None of these six has played a college snap, and a development pipeline is a promise, not a guarantee. What Ohio State can prove is the record behind the promise, and right now that record is as strong as it has been in a generation.
There is a second caveat, and it belongs in the same breath as the first-round pair at the top of this article. Jackson and Simmons did not arrive the same way. As Eleven Warriors puts it in the same report that establishes the fifty-year record, their “paths to the draft’s first round were distinct”: Simmons transferred in from San Diego State to fill a need at left tackle, and he had been in the program a season and a half when Kansas City took him. Jackson is the one who ran the whole route, from a top-100 high school recruit in the 2021 class to the No. 24 pick four years later.
That distinction is the difference between two claims that sound identical. Ohio State can prove it puts offensive linemen in the first round. The claim being sold to a high school lineman on a visit is narrower and harder: that the program can take him, specifically, and do to him what it did to Donovan Jackson. The 1975 record is evidence for the first claim. Only Jackson is evidence for the second, and one man is a smaller sample than a fifty-year record implies.
