On April 24, Ohio State’s own athletic department published a sentence no Ohio State team had ever been able to publish. Max Klare went 61st overall in the second round to the Rams. Will Kacmarek went 87th overall in the third round to the Dolphins. In the department’s words, the Buckeyes “became the first school this decade to have two tight ends selected in the same NFL Draft,” and the two of them “were also the first tight end duo in school history to be drafted in the same class.”
That is a record. It is three months old. It is the single loudest thing anyone could say to a high school tight end this summer.
Ohio State recruited neither of them.
Where the record actually came from
Max Klare arrived from Purdue. Eleven Warriors, grading the 2025 offense position by position in January, called him Ohio State’s top receiving option at the position and put his season at 43 receptions for 448 yards and two touchdowns, describing it as “a step back from what he produced at Purdue in 2024.” He was already that player before Columbus. Ohio State acquired him, and then he got drafted in the second round.
Will Kacmarek is the more instructive half, because his path does not merely bypass Ohio State’s recruiting. It indicts the whole idea that recruiting is where a tight end comes from.
Per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope, Kacmarek was “ranked as just a two-star recruit by 247Sports” out of Mary Institute & St. Louis Country Day in St. Louis, and “Ohio was the only FBS school to offer him a scholarship out of high school.” Not Ohio State. Ohio. One offer, from the MAC. He played three seasons in Athens, and when Ohio State signed him out of the transfer portal on the last day of 2023, Eleven Warriors noted he was unranked in the 247Sports transfer portal rankings.
Hope’s story carries the reaction from inside the building, from the position coach who made the call:
The initial knee-jerk (reaction) was “Hold on, you gotta go find the best tight end in the country…and you’re taking a kid from the MAC who doesn’t even start?”
Two years later that kid went in the third round.
The split, printed honestly
Here is the number that decides the argument, and Ohio State’s own release is the one that hands it over. The department’s career recap says Kacmarek “played in 55 career games, including 24 as a Buckeye,” and finished with “65 career catches for 761 yards and four touchdowns,” of which he “had 23 catches for 253 yards and two TDs as a Buckeye.”
Sixty-five career catches. Twenty-three of them at Ohio State. Forty-two somewhere else. Eleven Warriors, reporting his transfer in December 2023, independently counted 42 catches at Ohio University. Two sources, one number, no argument.
Credit where it is due: that release does the thing recruiting copy usually does not. It prints the career total and the Buckeye total side by side, so a reader can see for himself that most of the resume predates the uniform. This site has caught the opposite three times in two weeks, on the offensive line, at running back and at quarterback, where an official release named a career figure and left the reader to assume Columbus produced all of it. Here, nobody has to assume anything.
The control case
Ohio State does recruit tight ends sometimes, and there is a clean example of what that looks like.
Jeremy Ruckert’s official Ohio State roster bio lists his hometown as Lindenhurst, N.Y., and his last school as Lindenhurst. That is the whole provenance: a high school, then Ohio State. No portal, no waystation. He made the 2021 Mackey Award watch list as the nation’s top tight end while wearing the uniform he was recruited into.
Cade Stover, the tight end Houston took in the fourth round at No. 123 in 2024, is the case in between, and he is the reason the pattern is not a coincidence. Stover is from Mansfield, Ohio, and Ohio State absolutely recruited him. It just did not recruit him at this position. Per Eleven Warriors’ Andy Anders: “Coming to Columbus as an outside linebacker, Stover switched to the offensive side of the ball before his second season as a Buckeye in 2020.” He then caught 36 passes for 406 yards and five touchdowns in 2022 and 41 for 576 and five more in 2023, and left as a drafted tight end.
So line up the last three tight ends Ohio State sent to the NFL and ask a simple question of each: did Ohio State sign this man out of high school, to play tight end?
Stover: signed, but as a linebacker. Klare: no, Purdue had him first. Kacmarek: no, and the only FBS program that wanted him at eighteen was a MAC school.
The pipeline is real. The recruiting story under it is not the same story.
What this has to do with 2027
Our 2027 needs page computes every position group straight from the commit board, and tight end reads STILL OPEN: zero commits, zero targets. That is not a projection, it is a count of the class as the board has it, where six of the commitments are offensive linemen and not one is a tight end.
It is also, now, permanent for the summer. Colton Johnson picked Ole Miss on July 9 and he was the last uncommitted tight end holding an Ohio State offer. The position has no commit, no target, and nobody left on the board to become one.
The comfortable reading is that April proved this does not matter. Ohio State just set a school record at tight end without recruiting a single one of the men who set it, so why spend a scholarship there at all? Take the best one available in the portal in two years and go win a national championship, which is roughly what happened.
The uncomfortable reading is the same fact from the other side. A record built entirely out of other programs’ recruiting is not evidence that Ohio State develops tight ends. It is evidence that Ohio State buys them after somebody else develops them. Purdue found Klare. Ohio found Kacmarek when nobody else in the FBS would. Ohio State found them both when they were already good.
Which of those two readings is right is not something this page can settle, and it will not pretend to. What it can say is the part that is countable, and it is countable exactly: Ohio State has never had a better month at tight end than April 2026, and the number of men in that record who chose Ohio State out of high school to play tight end is zero.
The 2027 class currently has zero as well. Those are different zeroes, and it would be a mistake to read the first one as permission for the second.
