The man at the top of this page won the Heisman Trophy twice. Nobody else has ever won it once and then won it again, and per Ohio State’s own accounting in 2020, forty-five years after the second one, Archie Griffin was still the only two-time winner in the history of the award. He is also still the leading rusher in Ohio State history, with 5,589 career yards, per 247Sports.
Ohio State has nineteen players committed in its 2027 class as of July 18. Not one of them is a running back.
The record book
Read the Buckeyes’ all-time rushing chart from the top and it is a recruiting pitch that writes itself. Griffin is first at 5,589 yards. J.K. Dobbins is second at 4,459, per 247Sports, which also notes he was the first player in Ohio State history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, finishing with 2,003 and 21 rushing scores. Ezekiel Elliott is third at 3,961 yards, and Dallas took him with the No. 4 overall pick of the 2016 draft. TreVeyon Henderson is fifth at 3,761 yards, per Ohio State’s athletic department, which also has him third all-time at the school with 48 touchdowns scored.
Four names, four different decades of Ohio State football, and every one of them either owns a school record or went in the first two rounds of an NFL draft.
What happened in April 2025
The most recent proof is the freshest. In the 2025 draft, per Ohio State, Quinshon Judkins went No. 36 overall to the Cleveland Browns and Henderson went No. 38 to the New England Patriots, two picks apart, out of the same running back room, off a national championship team. Judkins had led that title team in rushing with 1,060 yards and 14 rushing touchdowns.
Two things about that are genuinely rare, and they come from different outlets.
Per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope, it was the first time Ohio State had multiple running backs drafted in the same year since Jeff Cothran, Raymont Harris and Butler By’not’e all went in 1994. Hope also puts it in a national frame: Ohio State was the first school to have two running backs selected in the first two rounds of a draft since Georgia’s Sony Michel and Nick Chubb went in the first and second rounds in 2018.
That second fact is the one worth holding onto. Georgia spent the years around Michel and Chubb being called Running Back U by anyone with a microphone. Ohio State just did the same thing and the label did not move.
The honest part
A record book is a story about the past, and the recent past has two holes in it.
The first is a gap. Per Ohio State’s own release, Judkins was the first running back the program had drafted since Trey Sermon went in the third round in 2021. That is a four-year stretch with no Ohio State running back drafted at all, sitting directly between Dobbins going No. 55 in 2020 and the two second-round picks in April 2025. The chart at the top of this page is real. It is also not a straight line, and any pitch that presents it as one is selling.
The second one matters more, because it cuts at the word “pipeline.”
Ohio State did not recruit Quinshon Judkins. He signed with Ole Miss out of Pike Road, Alabama, where Rivals rated him the No. 18 prospect in his state and the No. 28 running back in the country, per Ohio State’s own roster bio. He spent two seasons in Oxford and was first-team All-SEC in both of them, and he was the SEC Freshman of the Year in 2022. Then, per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope, he announced his transfer from Ole Miss to the Buckeyes on January 8, 2024, moments after Michigan won the national championship. Ohio State’s roster bio calls him a “terrific addition to the team from the transfer portal.”
The numbers say the rest. Per that same bio, Judkins finished his three-year college career with 3,785 rushing yards. He gained 2,725 of them at Ole Miss and 1,060 at Ohio State. Roughly seven of every ten yards on his resume were run before he ever wore scarlet and gray.
So the fact in the dek of this article is true, and it is worth being precise about what it proves. Ohio State did have two running backs drafted in the same year for the first time since 1994. One of them, Henderson, the program recruited out of high school and developed for four seasons. The other arrived at twenty-one years old as the best running back in the transfer portal, already an All-SEC back twice over, and left fifteen months later as a second-round pick. That is a real accomplishment. It is a roster-building accomplishment, and only half of it is a recruiting one.
A seventeen-year-old choosing a college is buying the recruiting half.
What July 22 answered
Here is the state of the 2027 class as this site’s board has it verified. Nineteen commits as of July 18: six offensive linemen, four defensive linemen or ends, two linebackers, two cornerbacks, two safeties, two receivers, one quarterback. No tight end. No running back.
One running back was left on the board, and he was a five-star. On July 22, David Gabriel Georges announced for Tennessee, choosing the Vols over Ohio State and Ole Miss, per ESPN and CBS Sports.
This site does not predict recruiting decisions and did not predict that one. What can be said is what is now settled: the program with the two-time Heisman winner, the school rushing record, and two backs taken in the second round of the same draft closes the day with no running back in its 2027 class, and no back left on the board to take. The full accounting of that finish is in our story on the decision.
