Buckeye Recruits: Full Text

Jamier Brown is eligible at Wayne, and the two games he is missing are not about the transfer

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State receiver Brandon Inniss before a 2024 game. Photo: Ruralexpat, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jamier Brown is eligible to play his senior season at Wayne. The Ohio High School Athletic Association said so through its director of communications, Tim Stried, and the Dayton Daily News published it on Wednesday, August 19.

He is still going to miss two games, and the reason is not the one this site and everyone else spent August waiting on.

“The student-athlete who transferred back to Wayne did meet a transfer exception, but due to two unrelated infractions, he will miss the first two games of the regular season,” Stried told the Dayton Daily News. “He will be eligible to participate in Week 3.”

The five game clock is dead, and it was always about a school he left

On August 7 this site wrote that nobody had said what happens after that, and the sentence was accurate on the day. The thing everyone was holding was a July 21 Columbus Dispatch quote from the same Stried: Brown “is eligible for the first five games of the season, and in early October the OHSAA will conduct a review of his status.”

That review was about Big Walnut. It was the association’s read on a boy who had transferred to Sunbury in January and would have needed a fresh football exception there. He does not go to Big Walnut anymore. He re enrolled at Wayne in the first week of August, and per the Dayton Daily News his transfer back cleared an exception on its own.

So there is no October hearing left to wait for, no Week 6 cliff, and no five game number that means anything. The clock that has been quoted in every story about him since late July has stopped, and it stopped because it was measuring the wrong school.

Two infractions, and nobody will describe them

Here is what is actually unresolved, and it is smaller and stranger than the thing it replaced.

The Dayton Daily News reports the penalty as two separate and unrelated incidents that each carried a one game suspension. It states plainly that the suspension is not related to his NIL lawsuit and not related to his transfer back to Wayne. WHIO-TV, reporting the same night, adds the part the paper does not: the OHSAA did not provide the reason.

Stried told the Dayton Daily News the violations will be made public at the OHSAA Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, August 27.

That is the entire public record. Two infractions exist, they are unrelated to each other, they are unrelated to everything that has made this recruitment a news story for ten months, and their nature becomes public five days from now. This site is not going to guess at them in the meantime, and a reader who finds a description of them somewhere before Thursday should ask that outlet which document it read.

He missed a loss

Brown sat out Friday night at Fairfield. Wayne lost 35 to 25 and is 0-1, per both High School On SI and Joe Eitel’s Ohio high school football database, which is a scoreline worth reading two places before printing it.

The second game he misses is Cincinnati St. Xavier, at home at Heidkamp Stadium on August 28. Then he is back, and Wayne’s Week 3 opponent is Lakewood St. Edward, the northeast Ohio program the Dayton Daily News calls a powerhouse without needing to argue the point. The paper dates that game September 5; the two schedule tables read for the Fairfield result both put it on September 4 in Huber Heights. We are printing both rather than picking, because a newsroom and a schedule table disagreeing by one day is not something a recruiting site should quietly resolve.

The shape of it is that a receiver who has been the best player on his field since he was a sophomore returns for the hardest game on the schedule, having played none of the two before it.

The lawsuit is the reason his name carries, and it is not this

It has to be said clearly because the two stories are going to be printed next to each other for the rest of the fall.

Brown was at the front of a lawsuit against the OHSAA during his junior year at Wayne, and per the Dayton Daily News that suit led to the approval of a name, image and likeness policy in Ohio. WHIO puts the outcome on the record: the OHSAA permanently approved NIL compensation for high school athletes in November 2025.

He beat this association once. He is now serving a suspension it issued. Those facts sit one paragraph apart and the Dayton Daily News, which broke both, says explicitly that the second is not about the first. That is the reporting, and absent something at Thursday’s board meeting that changes it, it is what this site carries.

For Ohio State, still nothing

The recruiting stakes remain what they were on August 7, which is close to zero.

Brown committed on November 23, 2024 and is the earliest pledge on the 2027 board. Nothing in this week’s reporting touches that, and no outlet has suggested it does. The Dayton Daily News notes he has previously indicated he plans to graduate early and enroll at Ohio State next spring, which means the senior season everyone has been litigating is a ten game window that ends in December either way.

What the two games cost is high school football, not Columbus. Last fall he caught 73 passes for 1,009 receiving yards, second in the Greater Western Ohio Conference, with 10 receiving touchdowns and, per the paper, multiple kick and punt return scores. Wayne will play St. Xavier without that.

What we changed on the board, and what we did not

Nothing, and that is deliberate.

The board holds pledges, positions, ratings and schools. It does not hold eligibility, and it should not: eligibility is a fact about one high school season, and a recruiting board that stored it would be storing a thing that changes on a Thursday afternoon in a room in Columbus. Brown’s row already reads Wayne, Huber Heights, which is where the August transfer put it. His stars, his rank, his listed size and his commitment date are untouched, because this week moved none of them.

One number needs its usual footnote. The Dayton Daily News lists Brown as the No. 1 recruit in Ohio and 25th nationally in the 2027 class, reading 247Sports. Our board carries On3’s Industry number, a different table kept by a different service, and it files him higher. Both are printed correctly by the people printing them, which is the whole argument of the rankings paradox: when two sites disagree about a recruit, they are usually agreeing with different tables.

He is one of five Ohio high schoolers in this class, and where each of them goes to school is laid out in the in state pipeline.

What would actually settle this

Thursday, August 27. The OHSAA Board of Directors meets, the violations become public, and either they are the ordinary two lines of a high school discipline report or they are not. Until then the honest version is the one at the top: he is eligible, he is suspended for two games, the two facts are unrelated, and the association that knows why is not saying yet.

Ohio State offered a running back on Monday, and he is in the 2028 class, not the one with none

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Quinshon Judkins gives an on-field interview after Ohio State won the national championship, January 2025. He arrived from Ole Miss through the transfer portal. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ohio State offered Zion Coger on Monday, August 17. He is a running back at Jasper High School in Jasper, Alabama, and he is in the class of 2028.

Land-Grant Holy Land’s Dan Hessler reported the offer on Tuesday morning. The date is not left on one outlet’s word: 247Sports’ own player page carries the event on its timeline, filed as “Ohio State Buckeyes offer Zion Coger” and dated August 17, 2026.

That is the whole of what happened. It is also, as far as we can find, the only Ohio State recruiting event of the week, and the class it lands in is not the one with the hole.

The two Zion Cogers on one page

Hessler calls him a four-star and puts him at No. 9 among running backs in the 247Sports Composite, No. 131 nationally and No. 8 in the state of Alabama. Every one of those numbers is on his 247Sports page, in the Composite block, exactly as printed.

The block beside it does not agree. 247Sports’ own board, the one its analysts keep rather than the industry average, rates him 90 and files him No. 180 nationally and No. 12 among running backs. The two readings sit an inch apart on the same page and describe a player forty-nine national places apart.

Neither one is wrong. They are different instruments, and this is what a 2028 evaluation looks like two and a half years out. This site printed the same split in the other direction when Christopher Vargas committed and no two services listed the same quarterback. The number we would use in prose is whichever one an outlet used, credited to that outlet, which is why both are above.

The page lists him at 6-0 and 190 pounds. It also lists 11 offers, zero visits and zero coach visits, and it says there are no Crystal Ball predictions on him at this time. Nobody has publicly forecast where he goes.

Ohio State is the newest name on a list that Alabama has been on since June

Ten of those offers carry dates on his 247Sports timeline. Read newest first, they are Ohio State on August 17, Indiana and Minnesota on June 22, Missouri on June 19, Alabama on June 8, Memphis and UAB on May 11, South Carolina on May 7, Oregon on April 29 and LSU on February 16.

So Ohio State is the last program in, by nearly two months, on a back the SEC found in the winter. Hessler frames the field as nearly a dozen offers including Alabama, Indiana, LSU, Missouri, Oregon and South Carolina, and expects Ohio State to try to get him to Columbus for a game day.

That part cannot happen yet, and the reason is a document this site publishes.

An offer is the only thing August allows

The NCAA’s fall 2026-27 Division I calendar makes August 1 through August 31 a dead period. No in-person recruiting contact or evaluation, on or off campus, and no prospect may take an official or unofficial visit at all. We read that document by eye and it is on the recruiting calendar page in full.

An offer is a phone call and a graphic. It is the one recruiting event a staff can produce this month, and it is what Ohio State produced on Monday. The zero next to visits on Coger’s page is not a signal about his interest. It is the calendar.

The first day anything else is possible is September 1, when the fall evaluation period opens and coaches can go and watch him play on a Friday night. A game day visit to Ohio Stadium sits behind that date, not this one.

The room he would join already has a back. The room that needs one is a class older

Ohio State’s 2028 class is not short at running back. Elijah Newman-Hall, a four-star, has been committed since June 2025, and Hessler’s read is that the staff wants more than one back in the cycle. The rest of that class is on the 2028 board, where every service’s reading of every commit is printed side by side rather than reconciled into one.

The 2027 class is the one with the problem, and it is a year closer to signing. It has nineteen commitments and no running back. David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22 and took the last uncommitted back off the board with him. Jayden Miles had already gone to Florida State, one day after his Ohio State official visit.

What is left at the position in 2027 is one name and it belongs to somebody else: Nigel Newkirk, committed to Alabama since June 1, carried on our board as a flip target and No. 226 in the Composite as of August 16. That is the entire 2027 running back board. The two rooms this class has never filled are laid out in no running back, no tight end, and what the class still needs is on the needs page.

A staff that misses at a position and then offers two classes deep at the same position is not a mystery. It is the ordinary answer. It is worth saying plainly that the ordinary answer arrives a year too late for the class that needs it.

Alabama, again

Coger is the No. 8 prospect in his state on both of 247Sports’ scales, and Ohio State now has an offer out to him while Alabama has had one since June 8.

That sentence would have been strange three years ago. Ohio State had two players from the state of Alabama in its entire history, Donte Wheat in 1981 and Willie Salter in 2001, until Nick Saban retired. Eleven Warriors counted seven in three years when Karlos May committed out of Birmingham in July, and the whole count is on this site with the mechanism ESPN documented on a single recruit in 2024.

Coger is not part of that count and may never be. He has no commitment, no visit and no public prediction. What he is, today, is one more Alabama address in an Ohio State offer list that did not used to have any.

What would tell us this is real

Three things, in order. A visit date, which cannot exist before September 1. A second Ohio State touch after the evaluation period opens, which is when a staff shows whether an August graphic was a courtesy or a plan. And a Crystal Ball entry or a public lean, which on this page is currently empty.

Until one of those lands, the honest version is the one at the top: Ohio State offered a running back on Monday, in a class that already has one, while the class that has none has a single flip target and, per the NCAA, no published signing date yet to work against.

The full 2027 class, every rank sourced to the outlet that reported it, is on the 2027 commit board.

Ohio State's 2027 board is three men who already said yes to somebody else

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ohio State fan known as Big Nut before the national championship game in Atlanta, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Brayton Feister picked Oregon on Friday, and the thing he took with him was not a linebacker. It was the last name Ohio State could add to its 2027 class without asking a seventeen year old to break his word to another school.

We wrote that on the day. This is the other half of it: who the three remaining names actually are, when they said yes to somebody else, and what any Ohio State flip would be arguing against. All three were read again on their own 247Sports pages on Saturday, because a target’s number is worth exactly as much as the day it was taken.

The three, as their own pages read this weekend

Benny Easter Jr., a wide receiver from Summer Creek in Humble, Texas, listed at 6-0 and 200 pounds. His 247Sports page carries a Composite rating of .9713, which puts him No. 72 nationally, No. 11 among receivers and No. 9 in Texas. It records a hard commitment to Texas Tech on November 20, 2025, and 14 offers, Ohio State among them.

Nigel Newkirk, a running back from Gainesville, Georgia, 5-11 and 200. His Composite rating of .9180 has him No. 226 nationally and No. 16 at the position. His page dates his Alabama pledge to May 31, 2026, one day before the date Sports Illustrated reported it, which is the ordinary shape of a Sunday night decision written up on Monday. We are not going to pick between the two.

Gabriel Osborne Jr., a cornerback from Mustang, Oklahoma, 6-2 and 180. A Composite rating of .9843 makes him No. 36 nationally, No. 4 among cornerbacks and the No. 1 player in his state. 247Sports’ own panel, which is a different table from the Composite, grades him a 98 and ranks him No. 15 in the country. His page dates his Oklahoma commitment to June 1, 2026.

So the board’s remaining ceiling is one top 40 player, one top 100 player and one back outside the top 200, and none of the three is free.

Easter is the long one, and Ohio State was already deep in it

Easter has been committed to Texas Tech for close to nine months, which is longer than any other name in this story and longer than most of Ohio State’s own class. Length is not the same as certainty. On3 and Rivals’ Hunter Shelton reported on April 7 that Easter spent that day on campus at Texas, that Ohio State had hosted him the weekend before, and that an Ohio State official visit was already on the calendar for May 29. LSU had him booked for April 17, Ole Miss for an official visit on June 5, Alabama for one on June 19. His 247Sports page says he took five official visits in all.

Easter’s own words to Shelton that day were not the words of a man looking to leave. “Everything is going well with Tech and with what they’re building,” he said. “They made it to the Playoff this year and came up short.”

One number in that April story deserves care, because it is the kind of thing that gets repeated wrong. Shelton put Easter at No. 47 overall and No. 9 among receivers as of April 7, on the Rivals Industry ranking. That is a different table from the 247Sports Composite, and comparing the two produces a fall that never happened. Read against itself, the Composite is the only honest comparison, and the Composite is what our commit board stores.

Which brings up a correction we owe you. This site published Easter at No. 64 in the Composite three times in July, on an Eleven Warriors reading, and that is what he was as of July 7. His own player page read No. 72 on Saturday. The board now says 72 with Saturday’s date on it, and the three July stories now carry that July 7 date in the sentence, because they were right on the day and we are not going to quietly rewrite them.

Newkirk committed before Ohio State ever got him on campus

Newkirk is the only running back Ohio State is chasing in a class that has no running back and no tight end. 247Sports’ Brett Greenberg reported that he picked Alabama over LSU, Ohio State and Michigan on a Sunday, earlier than the July 1 date he had set, right after an official visit to Tuscaloosa that weekend. Running backs coach Robert Gillespie had led the recruitment for more than a year. Two of Newkirk’s former Gainesville teammates were already in Alabama’s 2026 class.

The part that matters for Columbus is the calendar. Ohio State had an official visit on the books for June 12 that Newkirk committed before taking, as Cleveland.com’s Andrew Gillis noted when he named him a flip target on August 3. Whatever case the staff had planned to make in person, it never got made.

His junior tape is not the problem. His page lists 184 carries for 1,496 yards and 19 touchdowns in 2025, at 8.1 yards a carry, with 12 catches for 128 more.

The running back room in this class has been empty since David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22. Newkirk is the entire plan B, and plan B has been pledged to Alabama since the end of May.

Osborne is the biggest name, and he is the hardest ask

Osborne is the highest rated player Ohio State is still pursuing in this cycle, and the reason is exactly why he will be difficult. 247Sports’ Collin Kennedy reported that Osborne picked Oklahoma over Alabama and Ohio State as the Sooners’ 23rd commitment of the 2027 cycle, and that the pledge moved Oklahoma to No. 1 in 247Sports’ team rankings that day. He is an in state prospect at a program building the class of its life. Nine days after he committed, News On 6 reported that 247Sports had moved him to five stars in its June 10 rankings update.

Ohio State’s need at the position is real and has been documented here since visit season: this class has two cornerbacks and lost the state’s best, and Osborne would immediately be the best defensive back in it.

What this actually means for the class

Nothing about Ohio State’s 19 commitments is in question here. The class is still No. 5 on On3’s Industry table, still built in the trenches with six offensive linemen, still holding three five-stars, and its two linebackers, Prince Goldsby and Quinton Cypher, are the same two who were there on Thursday.

What changed on Friday is the shape of every remaining move. Before Feister announced, Ohio State could grow this class by winning an argument with a recruit. Now it can only grow this class by winning an argument with a recruit and a coaching staff at once, at three schools that have no reason to help. And at tight end there is no argument to have at all: the class has no tight end committed and no tight end target on the board, a hole that opened when Colton Johnson picked Ole Miss on July 9.

Fall visits are the next real information, and the first home game is the first chance to generate any. Until then, the honest version of this board is three names, three other logos, and every rank on it stamped with the day somebody looked.

The full class, every rank credited to the outlet that published it, is on the 2027 commit board. What this class still needs is on the needs page.

Brayton Feister picks Oregon, and Ohio State's 2027 board has nobody left on it

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A storm front over Ohio Stadium during Ohio State's game against Tulsa on September 10, 2016. It forced an hour-long delay. Photo: Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Brayton Feister committed to Oregon on August 14, 2026. He did it on the Pat McAfee Show, exactly as 247Sports’ Jackson Moore reported on August 10 that he would, from Massillon Washington with four hats laid out in front of him. cleveland.com’s Matt Goul, who watched the segment, wrote that Feister surveyed the four and nearly picked up the Ohio State hat before stopping, then reached for an orange shoe box instead and pulled out a pair of green Oregon cleats. “Ultimately, I chose the Ducks because from Day 1 there’s been nothing but consistency,” he told McAfee. “From the minute I stepped on campus, it’s felt like home. Everybody showed with a passion that I’m their guy.”

He was the top ranked uncommitted player in the 2027 class by Sports Illustrated’s reading on August 11, a consensus four-star, No. 133 nationally and No. 7 in Ohio on the 247Sports composite at 6-2 and 238 pounds. He was also the last uncommitted name on Ohio State’s board.

The forecast said this, and this site said so first

Twenty four hours before he announced, we published every public number on this recruitment, and none of it favored Ohio State.

Rivals’ team prediction put Oregon at 94.1 percent, reported by Yahoo Sports’ Dylan Feltovich on August 11, who also wrote that Rivals analysts Steve Wiltfong and Greg Smith both predicted the Ducks. The 247Sports Crystal Ball on his player page read Oregon at 100 percent off one prediction, with no lead experts attached and a medium confidence label. We would not call one prediction a consensus then and we will not now. They were right: Oregon won, Wiltfong and Smith both called it, and the caution above was always about how thin the public sample was, never about which way it pointed.

The visit log explains more than the percentages do. His 247Sports page names June official visits to Cal on the fifth, Georgia on the twelfth and Oregon on the nineteenth, and no trip to Columbus. SI’s James Parks reported the same absence of an Ohio State official visit on August 11, alongside Feister calling the Buckeyes a dream school. Ohio State made the final four without ever hosting him officially, and today that is where it finished.

Feltovich reported on August 11 that Feister would be Oregon’s 25th commitment in the 2027 class and its third linebacker, alongside four-stars Toa Satele and Brandon Lockley, in a group ranked No. 4 nationally. The Canton Repository’s Brad Bournival reported on the day that Dan Lanning is already sharing schemes with him and plans to play him at linebacker immediately, with packages on offense built to let him carry the ball. Feister told Bournival he plans to graduate from Massillon early and be on campus in January.

The class does not change, and that is the problem

Ohio State’s 2027 group stays at 19 commits and two linebackers: Prince Goldsby, the No. 101 player in the composite, out of Blue Springs South in Missouri, and Quinton Cypher, No. 213, out of Millbrook in Raleigh. Both are four-stars and neither is in question. The class is still No. 5 on On3’s industry table and still built in the trenches, with six offensive linemen and three five-stars.

What today removed was not a player. It was the last name Ohio State could add without taking one from somebody else. The three targets left on the commit board are Benny Easter Jr. at receiver, Nigel Newkirk at running back and Gabriel Osborne Jr. at cornerback, and they are committed to Texas Tech, Alabama and Oklahoma. Every remaining path in this cycle is a flip attempt.

That is worst at the two positions with nobody in them. The class has no running back and no tight end, it has no tight end target at all, and the only running back it is chasing has been pledged to Alabama since June 1.

What Massillon keeps

Feister transferred into Massillon Washington from Archbishop Hoban in May, reported by On3’s Andy Villamarzo on May 4. Ohio State still has a player from that school in this class: Deontay Malone, the No. 279 cornerback in the composite, committed on June 14.

One more date belongs in the record. Feister was originally set to announce on July 11, and 247Sports’ Jackson Moore reported on August 10 that the event was postponed after what Feister called an unfortunate event away from football, before he set the new date.

The full class, every rank sourced to the outlet that reported it, is on the 2027 commit board. What the class still needs is on the needs page. The men who chose elsewhere are on the same board, with the reporting that says where they went.

Brayton Feister announces Friday on the Pat McAfee Show, and the entire public forecast is three predictions deep

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Resolved. This story was filed before the decision. The outcome, reported AUGUST 14, 2026: Brayton Feister picks Oregon, and Ohio State's 2027 board has nobody left on it

Mercedes-Benz Stadium from the Ohio State sideline, hours before the national championship game against Notre Dame, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The recruiting industry has published its forecast on Brayton Feister and it is unanimous. It is also, when you count it instead of feeling it, three predictions.

Feister, the Massillon Washington athlete who is the last name on this site’s watch list with a date attached, announces on Friday, August 14. Ohio State is one of four schools still in it, and the honest report a day out is not a lean. It is an inventory: here is every forecast anybody has published, here is who published it, and here is how large the sample actually is.

The date moved once already, and the reason is not football

This is the part that had not been reported when this site wrote about his commitment date on Monday. Jackson Moore of 247Sports’ DuckTerritory reported on August 10 that Feister “was originally scheduled to decide on July 11,” and that “his event was postponed due to an ‘unfortunate event’ away from football, he said.”

Moore reports the new date is locked, and adds the venue: “Feister has now locked in a rescheduled date, set for Friday, Aug. 14. He will reportedly announce his decision live on the Pat McAfee Show on ESPN.” Anthony Moeglin, writing for Roundtable on Yahoo Sports on August 11, reports the McAfee Show announcement as well. Moore’s word is “reportedly” and this site is going to keep it, because a television booking is the kind of detail that changes quietly.

One more line from Moore, which is the clearest statement of the stakes anyone has published: “The Oregon Ducks hosted a long list of more than 30 recruits for official visits this summer, but Feister is the only one who is yet to announce a commitment decision.”

The whole forecast, counted

There are two public prediction modules that cover a recruit like this, and here is exactly what each one printed when it was read.

247Sports’ Crystal Ball, on Feister’s own player page, read August 13. The module says Oregon, 100 percent. It also says, in the same box, NO LEAD EXPERTS, a confidence label of MED, and a sample: 1 Predictions. One hundred percent of one prediction is not a consensus, and a recruiting site that prints the percentage without the denominator is selling the number rather than reporting it. Moore, writing about the same module, is careful the same way: he calls it “an early crystal ball pick from 247Sports.”

Rivals’ team prediction, which lives on On3’s Feister page. This site could not read that page directly. On3’s player pages sit behind a security layer that answered every attempt with a 403, so the number below is second hand and named as such: Dylan Feltovich, writing for Roundtable on Yahoo Sports on August 11, reports Oregon “holds 94.1% prediction likelihood per Rivals Team Predictions,” and that “both Rivals analysts Steve Wiltfong and Greg Smith predict Feister commits to Oregon.”

That is the record. One anonymous Crystal Ball entry at medium confidence, one machine-generated team percentage, and two named analysts, all pointing the same direction, none of them pointing at Columbus.

Wiltfong himself published a piece on August 10 under a headline saying one school “continues to trend.” He did not name the school in the part of the story this site could read, so this site is not going to name it for him.

A number worth correcting, and it is not anyone’s fault

Moeglin’s Roundtable piece reports that Feister has “a 94 percent chance of landing in Oregon” according to 247Sports, and that all the 247Sports and On3 experts have him to the Ducks. The 94.1 figure is Rivals’, not 247Sports’, per Feltovich at the same outlet a day later. And 247Sports’ own module, read here, shows one prediction and no lead experts at all.

This matters for exactly one reason. Two forecasts that agree are evidence. One forecast quoted twice under two different logos is the same forecast, and a reader deciding how much to trust Friday’s odds deserves to know which of those two things they are looking at.

The quote everybody is running is nearly a year old

Moore’s story carries the most quoted sentence in this recruitment: “Oregon definitely, by a landslide, shows the most love. It’s been non-stop love coming in from the Ducks, man. I really appreciate everything they’ve been showing me and it’s an incredible relationship we’ve built with them.”

Read the attribution around it. Moore writes that Feister told DuckTerritory.com that “nearly a year ago.” Everything on this recruitment’s calendar happened after it: three official visits in June, a July 11 decision that got postponed, and what Moore describes as a late push by Georgia and by Cal in June. The quote is real and Feister said it. It is also a year of recruiting old, and it is being passed around this week as though he said it this week.

The one column where Ohio State is alone

Feister’s 247Sports page carries a college list with five schools on it, and four columns beside each: the program’s interest, who is recruiting him, the roster outlook, and his visit date. Read August 13, it says this.

Georgia and Oregon are labeled “Warmer” and each has a June visit date, June 12 and June 19. California is “Cool” with a June 5 date. Arizona State is “Cool” with no date. Ohio State is “Warm,” with no date in the visit column.

Those labels are 247Sports’ own editorial temperature. They are not probabilities and they are not Feister talking, and a reader should treat them as one outlet’s read rather than a signal.

The fourth column is the interesting one. Under “Recruited By,” four of the five rows are empty. Ohio State’s row names two coaches: linebackers coach James Laurinaitis and safeties coach Keenan Bailey. That is a fact about what 247Sports has filled in on a page, not evidence about a decision, and it would be dishonest to dress it up as more. It is also the only cell on that page where Ohio State is the only school with anything in it.

On the visit column, the same caution this site published on Monday still applies. The page counts four visits and dates three of them, so the table alone cannot prove a negative. The reporting that Feister never took an official visit to Columbus comes from Sports Illustrated’s James Parks, and that reporting, not this table, is where the claim belongs.

What either answer would actually change

If he picks Oregon, Feltovich reports he would be the Ducks’ 25th commitment in a 2027 class ranked No. 4 nationally, and their third linebacker alongside four-stars Toa Satele and Brandon Lockley.

If he picks Ohio State, he walks into a class this site’s 2027 board counts at 19 commitments with two linebackers in it: Prince Goldsby, who committed on May 25, and Quinton Cypher, committed since December. Feister would be the third, and the first in-state linebacker of the class. He would also join Deontay Malone as the second Massillon Washington player in it, a coincidence of geography this site has already declined to read as a lean. What the class still needs at linebacker does not count him, and will not until an announcement exists to count.

What this site is not going to tell you

Which one he picks. Every number above belongs to somebody else, all of them point away from Ohio State, and a recruiting site that buries the only forecasts it found because it does not care for the direction they point is not worth reading.

What this site will do is come back on Friday and record what actually happened, in the board’s move log, with the outlet that reported it named beside it. That is the only entry that ever gets to be a fact.

Brayton Feister sets a commitment date, and Ohio State made his last four without an official visit

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Resolved. This story was filed before the decision. The outcome, reported AUGUST 14, 2026: Brayton Feister picks Oregon, and Ohio State's 2027 board has nobody left on it

Ohio State linebacker Cody Simon at College Football Playoff media day, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The best uncommitted player in the 2027 class plays his high school football in Ohio, calls Ohio State a dream school, and has never taken an official visit there. All three of those are somebody else’s reporting, and together they are the shape of the week.

Brayton Feister, the linebacker at Massillon Washington, has set his announcement for Friday, August 14. Sports Illustrated’s James Parks writes in his CFB HQ file that “the top ranked uncommitted player in the country will join the ranks of the committed on Friday, August 14,” and names four schools still in it: Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia and California.

Who he is, according to whom

Feister is the rare recruit whose own page argues with the stories about him, so here is every reading this site could source, with the name of whoever published it.

Sports Illustrated / CFB HQ calls him “the consensus four-star prospect and No. 10 ranked linebacker coming out of high school,” and the top ranked uncommitted player in the country.
247Sports’ own board, read August 11, does not list him as a linebacker at all. He is an ATH there: a 91 rating, No. 154 nationally, No. 10 at the position, No. 10 in Ohio, listed 6-2 and 238 pounds.
The 247Sports composite, on the same page: 0.9426, No. 133 nationally, No. 9 ATH, No. 7 in Ohio.
Rivals, as reported by On3’s Andy Villamarzo on May 4, had him in the Rivals300 and No. 6 in Ohio, at 6-2 and 235 pounds.

Nothing there is anyone’s error. A No. 10 linebacker and a No. 10 athlete are two different lists, three pounds in three months is a teenager, and Ohio’s board gets re-sorted every time somebody updates it. What the spread does show is that the services cannot agree on the most basic question about him, which is what he plays.

The high school tape is less ambiguous. Villamarzo’s story reports that in twelve games last season Feister had 133 total tackles, 39 of them for loss, 13 sacks and 4 forced fumbles, and that on the other side of the ball he ran for nearly 1,100 yards and 17 touchdowns. That is the stat line of a player nobody can find a position for because he keeps playing all of them.

He is at Massillon by way of a move. Villamarzo reported on May 4 that Feister and his younger brother Brydon, a 2028 linebacker and a two-time Ohio high school wrestling state champion, transferred from Archbishop Hoban in Akron to Massillon Washington.

The Massillon note the board already carries

Ohio State has a commit at that school. Deontay Malone, the four-star cornerback who pledged on June 14, is listed on the 2027 board at Massillon Washington. That is this site’s own verified row rather than anything the reporting above says, and it is worth saying plainly what it is and is not: a teammate is a fact, not a lean. Nobody quoted in any of the four stories cited here has connected the two recruitments.

The hole in the middle of it

Here is the part that will decide how Friday reads. Parks writes that “Ohio State offered the in-state linebacker, with position coach James Laurinaitis making the pitch personally, and the program has expectedly maintained consistent contact in the months since then.” Then comes the sentence that costs Ohio State:

“Feister called Ohio State a dream school and grew up a Buckeyes fan, also praising Laurinaitis’ own developmental success, citing players like Arvell Reese and Sonny Styles and the school’s historic output at the linebacker position, but the prospect has not logged an official visit to Columbus during his process.”

The 247Sports page points the same way without going quite as far. Its visit log names three trips, all in June: California on the 5th, Georgia on the 12th, Oregon on the 19th. The page counts a fourth visit it does not name, so this site is not going to tell you Columbus is absent from a list it cannot fully read. What it can tell you is that Columbus is not among the three the page does name, and that Parks, who could read the whole thing, says the official visit never happened.

Parks reports Oregon got him in person more than once and officially in mid-June, and that Georgia hosted him in Athens during June’s evaluation period. The 247Sports Crystal Ball, read the same day, shows Oregon at 100 percent.

What a yes would actually change

Ohio State’s 2027 class sits at 19 commits, 15 of them blue chips, ranked No. 5 nationally in the On3 rankings, per Andrew Gillis of Cleveland.com writing on August 3. Two of those 19 are linebackers: Prince Goldsby out of Blue Springs South in Missouri, who committed May 25, and Quinton Cypher out of Millbrook in Raleigh, who has been committed since December. Gillis’ read on the room is that “James Laurinaitis has proved himself to be one of the best recruiters in the nation in his short time as linebackers coach, and there could always be room to add a third to that crop.”

Feister would be that third, and he would be the first in-state linebacker in the class. What the class still needs has not counted on him, because until this week there was no dated decision to count.

What this site is not going to tell you

It is not going to tell you what he picks. The only prediction data we read is the Crystal Ball number above, it points away from Ohio State, and a recruiting site that quietly ignores the one forecast it found because it likes the other outcome is not worth reading. Friday will settle it. Until then the honest version is the one at the top: four schools, one of them a dream school he never officially visited, and a Massillon linebacker who has been three different players depending on which service you ask.

Christopher Vargas commits to Ohio State, and no two services list the same quarterback

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State quarterback Will Howard throwing before a 2024 game. Photo: Ruralexpat, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Christopher Vargas is a Buckeye. The quarterback from St. John’s Prep announced his commitment to Ohio State on Saturday afternoon, August 8, and both Eleven Warriors and Rivals put the same headline on it: he is the No. 1 quarterback in the 2028 class.

Then the two of them, plus 247Sports’ own team board, proceed to describe four slightly different players. That is not a knock on any of them. It is what a recruiting class looks like sixteen months before signing day, which is the figure Dan Hope of Eleven Warriors attached to the news, and it is the reason the 2028 board on this site prints every service’s reading side by side instead of picking one.

What actually happened

Vargas chose Ohio State over what Steve Wiltfong of Rivals describes as an offer list including Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Oregon and Stanford. Eleven Warriors lists the suitors as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Oregon, Penn State and Texas A&M, among others.

The relationship is old for a player this young. Eleven Warriors reports Ohio State offered Vargas in November 2024, when he was a high school freshman, and Vargas told the site in June that the recruitment had been running “for probably two years or three years now.” He gave Rivals the version he wanted on the record Saturday.

“Just the coaching staff and the place they’re at, the culture, they have everything that is great for me and the right fit for me,” Vargas told Rivals. “I think Ohio State is the place that can develop me the best.”

On Ryan Day specifically, per Rivals: “It’s not just throw you in there you have to go play under fire. He develops you into that best person and best player you want to be.”

The four readings

Here is every number this site could source today, with the name of whoever published it attached.

247Sports, on its own Ohio State team board (read August 9): a 96 rating, No. 4 nationally, No. 2 quarterback, No. 1 in Massachusetts. Listed at 6-4.5 and 195 pounds.
The 247Sports composite, as printed in Eleven Warriors’ file on the commitment: five stars, No. 6 overall, No. 1 quarterback. Listed at 6-5 and 205 pounds.
Rivals, in Wiltfong’s story: the No. 1 quarterback in the Rivals300, five stars, 6-foot-4 and 180 pounds.
Rivals’ scouting note, from director of scouting Charles Power, which dates itself: “measured in at around 6-foot-4, 175 pounds with 9.5-inch hands prior to his sophomore season.”

So he is the best quarterback in the class on two of those scales and the second best on the third, all of them current. And the spread on his listed size runs from 6-4 to 6-5 and from 175 pounds to 205. Nothing there is a mistake by anybody. Services measure at different camps on different days, and a sixteen year old quarterback in August is a moving target in the most literal sense.

Two of the four scales are on his profile page with the outlet’s name on each of them. Rivals is not on that board yet, because this site only carries a service on the 2028 board once it has read that service’s own page for every man in the class, and Rivals’ Ohio State commit list would not load today.

The stat lines diverge the same way, and this is the one place worth being careful. Eleven Warriors reports Vargas completed 117 of 156 passes for 1,857 yards and 24 touchdowns against two interceptions in nine games last season, helping St. John’s Prep reach the Division I Super Bowl. Power, at Rivals, writes that as a sophomore he completed 138 of 207 for 2,038 yards and 24 touchdowns against three interceptions and helped his team to a state title appearance. Both are published. This site cannot tell you which games each one counted, so it is not going to average them into a third number that nobody reported.

The one thing every reading agrees on is where he plays: St. John’s Prep. Even there, 247Sports and Eleven Warriors put the school in Danvers, Massachusetts, and Rivals writes it as Lawrence.

What he walks into

Eleven Warriors makes the claim that puts the class in scale: Vargas is the third five-star in Ohio State’s 2028 class, joining receiver Jett Harrison and defensive lineman Jameer Whyce, which gives the Buckeyes more five-star commitments in the cycle than every other school combined, three against two.

He is also the fourth commitment overall, alongside four-star running back Elijah Newman-Hall. 247Sports had the class No. 2 nationally when this site read the team board on Saturday. Rivals says No. 1. Both were true of their own rankings on the same day, which is roughly the point of this whole article.

The quarterback room he is joining is the part of this that has been visible for a while. Hope’s reporting on the depth chart is that Julian Sayin is the current starter and Tavien St. Clair, a five-star himself, is the expected successor. Eleven Warriors counts Vargas as the sixth composite five-star quarterback to play for Ryan Day at Ohio State, after Sayin, St. Clair, Quinn Ewers, Kyle McCord and Justin Fields.

Which brings it back to a story this site published on July 25, when Brady Edmunds shut down his recruitment and stayed in the 2027 class. The last line of that piece noted, on Hope’s reporting, that Ohio State’s quarterback recruiting had already turned to 2028 and that the Buckeyes were an early frontrunner for Vargas. Two weeks later they got him. Edmunds remains the 2027 class’s only quarterback, and the run of quarterbacks Ohio State has stacked at the position is the subject of Quarterback U.

What nobody knows yet

Signing day for this class is in December 2027. Vargas has two high school seasons in front of him, a Massachusetts state tournament to play in this fall, and a set of ratings that four different services will keep moving in four different directions the whole time. Power’s note already flags the honest caveat about the profile, that Vargas is “a bit older for the cycle” and will turn 18 in April before his senior season.

Nothing about a commitment in August 2026 is a signature. What it is, on the record, is the No. 1 quarterback in the class saying the words out loud, and a 2028 board that now has four names on it.

Jamier Brown is back at Wayne, and the OHSAA decides his senior season

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Resolved. This story was filed before the decision. The outcome, reported AUGUST 22, 2026: Jamier Brown is eligible at Wayne, and the two games he is missing are not about the transfer

Ohio State receiver Carnell Tate during a game in 2024. Photo: Ruralexpat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jamier Brown is enrolled at Wayne High School again. Wayne athletic director John Augustine confirmed it on Wednesday, August 5, in an update the Dayton Daily News put on its story about Brown practicing with the team, and the Columbus Dispatch confirmed the same day with Big Walnut officials that he had left. The five-star receiver, the earliest pledge on Ohio State’s 2027 board, had been a Big Walnut student for exactly one semester.

What nobody can tell you yet is whether he gets to play a senior season. The Dayton Daily News put it as plainly as it can be put: his eligibility status for 2026 is still to be determined. Wayne’s administration, per WDTN’s Kayler Smith, is working out the details.

The move that lasted a semester

Brown transferred from Wayne, in Huber Heights, to Big Walnut, in Sunbury, in January. He told Delaware Source at the time that he moved to be closer to the Ohio State campus, per Richland Source. Sunbury sits north of Columbus and Huber Heights sits outside Dayton, so the move was toward the school he had already committed to, a year before he was due to enroll there.

The semester was not quiet. Brown received an exception from the Ohio High School Athletic Association to compete for Big Walnut in the spring, and then, per Richland Source, won three individual state championships: the 100-meter dash in 10.42 seconds, the 200 in 20.91, which was the fastest time in the state this year, and the anchor leg of a 4x100 relay that went 41.53. Eleven Warriors notes the Division II title in the 100. Richland Source adds the part that will follow Big Walnut around for a while: those three crowns carried the Golden Eagles to a share of the Division II state team title, alongside New Philadelphia.

Then, in the first week of August, he went home. Eleven Warriors reported the return “according to multiple reports” on August 5. Big Walnut, per the Dispatch’s reporting, confirmed he was no longer in school there and declined further comment.

The five-game clock, and why it has to be reset

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about because the number in it has been repeated without its condition.

On July 21, the Columbus Dispatch reported the OHSAA’s position on Brown’s football eligibility, and Tim Stried of the association gave it in a sentence: Brown “is eligible for the first five games of the season, and in early October the OHSAA will conduct a review of his status in conjunction with Big Walnut and the family to determine his eligibility for Week 6 and beyond.”

Read the names in that quote. The five games, the October review, the exception he would have to reapply for: all of it was about Big Walnut, the school he transferred to in January and does not attend anymore. The exception the OHSAA had already granted him covered track and field, not football. Eleven Warriors, reporting the return, says the consequence directly: Brown will have to go through the eligibility process again after transferring back to Wayne.

So the honest summary of the fall is three sentences long. He is enrolled at Wayne. He is practicing at Wayne. Nobody who has spoken on the record, at the OHSAA or at either school, has said what happens after that.

He beat this association in court ten months ago

The reason this story is more than a paperwork item is that Brown and the OHSAA have met before, and Brown won.

On October 15, 2025, a lawsuit was filed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas naming Brown’s mother, Jasmine, as plaintiff and the OHSAA as defendant, seeking to let Brown profit from his name, image and likeness while at Wayne. Eleven Warriors reported it from the complaint, which was obtained by ESPN’s Pete Thamel, and which put Brown’s earning power above $100,000 a year. Days later a Franklin County judge, Jaiza Page, issued a temporary restraining order that nullified the OHSAA’s prohibition for the duration.

The association did not wait for the case. It called an emergency referendum, and its member schools voted. Per the Statehouse News Bureau, 447 schools voted in favor and 121 against, with 247 abstaining, so nearly 79 percent of the 568 schools that voted approved, and Ohio became the 45th state to allow high school NIL. Stried told the bureau the OHSAA pushed for a yes “because we felt this would be a lot better structure for NIL than no guardrails.” In 2022, the same membership had voted the idea down by 67 percent. Brown’s attorney, Luke Fedlam, said the family had gotten what it wanted, a permanent bylaw change for every athlete in the state, and would begin the process of dismissing the suit.

One detail from that reporting reads differently in August than it did in November. Stried, describing what the new bylaw was built to prevent, said it “ensures there’s no transfer portal like at the college level.” The transfer rules that produce Brown’s current problem are the other half of that same sentence: Ohio decided its high school athletes could be paid, and decided at the same time that they could not move freely to be paid. Brown is now standing in the space between those two decisions, and he put himself there by moving toward Columbus and then back.

He also said something in October that has aged into the frame for this week. “Being able to compete where you’re from matters,” Brown told ESPN. “Ohio is home, and I take pride in that, so my focus is staying here and doing my part to help make things better.”

For Ohio State, this changes nothing

The recruiting stakes here are close to zero, and it is worth saying so before anyone builds a flip narrative out of a high school hallway.

Brown committed to Ohio State on November 23, 2024. He is the earliest commitment in the class, ahead of quarterback Brady Edmunds by nine days, and he shut his recruitment down in May. Richland Source calls him a steadfast commitment ever since he pledged. Nothing in this week’s reporting touches that, and no outlet has suggested otherwise.

What it changes is a season of high school football, and then not even a full one. Eleven Warriors reports that Brown plans to enroll at Ohio State in January as a midyear enrollee, which makes the return to Wayne a five month stay by design. The worst case the OHSAA can hand him is that a review in early October ends his high school career three or four games short. He would still walk into Columbus in January as the highest-rated receiver Ohio State has in this class either way.

Wayne, for its part, gets back one of the best players in the country if he is cleared. Across his first three seasons there, per Eleven Warriors, Brown caught 167 passes for 2,556 yards and 27 touchdowns, and he was the Greater Western Ohio Conference’s Offensive Player of the Year in 2025. Richland Source counts 3,875 all-purpose yards and 36 total touchdowns in a Wayne uniform, because he returned kicks and punts too. Last fall alone he went for 1,009 receiving yards on 73 catches, second in his conference.

What we changed on the board, and what we did not

His profile and his row on the board now read Wayne, Huber Heights, rather than Big Walnut, Sunbury. That is the whole edit. His stars, his rating, his listed size and his November 2024 commitment date are untouched, because nothing this week moved any of them.

We have also left his eligibility alone in both directions. Every outlet that has reported this says the same thing, which is that it is undetermined, and a recruiting site guessing at an OHSAA ruling is how a guess becomes a fact three links later.

One number is worth a footnote for readers comparing us to other sites. Eleven Warriors and Richland Source both place Brown at No. 25 overall nationally, reading the 247Sports composite. Our board carries On3’s Industry number, which is a different table by a different service, read directly on August 6. That is the same split we wrote about in the rankings paradox: when two sites disagree about a recruit, they are usually agreeing with different tables.

No running back, no tight end: the two empty rooms in Ohio State's 2027 class

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State (in scarlet) lines up against Colorado at Ohio Stadium. Photo: David E. Lucas, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / DPLAnull

Read the board by position and the 2027 class sorts into eight groups. Six offensive linemen. Four defensive linemen. Four defensive backs. Two receivers, two linebackers, one quarterback. That is nineteen names and eight rooms, and two of those rooms are empty.

Ohio State has no running back committed in the class of 2027 and no tight end committed in the class of 2027. Cleveland.com’s Andrew Gillis walked the class position by position on August 3, and the interesting part is not that the two holes exist. Everybody who follows this class knows they exist. The interesting part is that the reported plan at both spots is a player who is not currently a 2027 recruit of Ohio State’s, and at one of them the plan may not be a high school recruit at all.

The running back is somebody else’s commit

The running back class was supposed to be settled on July 22. It was, in the wrong direction. Five-star David Gabriel Georges, the No. 10 overall prospect, picked Tennessee over Ohio State and Ole Miss, and ESPN’s headline said the quiet part out loud: Tennessee beat out Ohio State for him.

Gillis writes that after the Georges miss the Buckeyes “will have to look elsewhere for a running back in the class,” and names the two likeliest routes. Both of them belong to other programs. Alabama commit Nigel Newkirk and Florida State commit Jayden Miles “seem to be the likeliest two options, if Ohio State were to try and flip someone it has already offered.” If either one happens, per that report, the Buckeyes add another four-star back, and they are expected to take only one in the cycle.

Look at how each of those two got where he is, because it explains the size of the ask.

Newkirk is a Gainesville, Georgia back listed at 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds, and Rivals analysts rank him the No. 6 running back in the country. He committed to Alabama on June 1 and shut his recruitment down, becoming the seventh pledge in the Tide’s 2027 class. Sports Illustrated’s CFB HQ reported that Ohio State had hosted him for the spring game in April and had a June 12 visit on the calendar, and that he committed to Alabama before that visit ever happened. The reason SI gives is relationships: Newkirk had built an unusually close bond with Alabama running backs coach Robert Gillespie, he had visited Tuscaloosa more than anywhere else, and he already had two high school teammates on campus. LSU was a finalist and did not separate itself. Michigan, with a veteran running backs coach in Tony Alford, was a finalist and could not match the visits.

Miles is the other name, and his story is the one already on this board. He took an Ohio State official visit in June and committed to Florida State the day after it, per Eleven Warriors. He is carried as a miss here for that reason.

So the honest shape of the running back plan is this. Both candidates saw Ohio State up close this spring or summer, and both then chose somewhere else. A flip is not a fresh recruitment. It is asking a player to reverse a decision he made with the Ohio State information already in hand.

There is a longer horizon, and it is real. Gillis notes that Elijah Newman-Hall is waiting in the wings in the 2028 cycle, and Newman-Hall is already committed to Ohio State. That helps the 2028 room. It does nothing for a 2027 class that would sign with no back in it.

The tight end may not be a recruit

The tight end room is emptier than the running back room, in a specific way: there is nobody left to recruit.

Gillis puts it plainly. Ohio State “doesn’t have a tight end committed, and all of the players it has offered in the class are committed to another program.” That matches what this board already carried. Colton Johnson picked Ole Miss on July 9, and he was the last uncommitted tight end holding an Ohio State offer. Before that, Eleven Warriors reported the Buckeyes did not host a single official visitor at the position all summer.

Where the August read adds something new is what comes next. One option Gillis raises is the late add: Ohio State took Nick Lautar late in the process for the 2026 class and “could easily do the same in this upcoming cycle.” The other option is that there is no 2027 tight end at all. Given the development curve at the position, per that report, Ohio State has made a point of finding additions in the transfer portal, and if Mason Williams turns out well and Nate Roberts looks the part, the Buckeyes could play the portal game again rather than sign a high school tight end in this class.

That is a strategy, not an accident, and it is worth separating from the running back hole. One room is short a player Ohio State wanted and lost. The other room may be empty on purpose.

It is also the room this program just set a record in. Ohio State became the first school this decade to have two tight ends drafted in the same year, in April, four months ago. One of those two arrived from the transfer portal out of Ohio University. The portal answer is not hypothetical here. It is the recent history.

Two zeroes in a smaller class

The rest of the class is in good shape and the same report says so. The offensive line is six deep and effectively set. The defensive line is a four-man group with two five-stars in it. The linebackers have room for a third, the secondary is expected to add depth, and the quarterback question was closed when Brady Edmunds shut his recruitment down.

The thing that makes two zeroes matter more this year is the size of the class they sit in. Ohio State signed 28 players a year ago. This class is expected to be smaller. Two empty position groups inside a smaller class is a larger share of the class than the same two holes would have been last cycle, and both of the positions involved are ones you cannot easily backfill with a lineman.

One number we would not change until somebody read the table

There is a figure in that August 3 report that did not match what this site published, and rather than quietly move it, here is the discrepancy.

Gillis writes the class is ranked No. 5 overall per On3. Our board had said No. 7 by On3 since a July 7 reading, and when this piece first ran the LED band on the front page still said 07.

We left it at 7 that day, for a reason. On July 6, SI’s CFB HQ described Ohio State dropping from No. 5 to No. 7 in the Rivals Industry team rankings, and On3 publishes more than one 2027 team table. So “No. 5 per On3” in August and “No. 7 per On3” in July might be two different tables rather than a class that moved. On3 blocks automated reads from us, so we could not open the table and settle it in the same breath as writing this. Changing the number on the strength of a secondhand attribution would have been guessing with a citation stapled to it.

Updated August 6, 2026. Both tables have now been read directly, and it was two tables, not a move.

On3’s Industry team rankings have Ohio State fifth, on a class score of 92.186, with a star split of three fives, twelve fours and four threes. On3’s Rivals-only team table, stamped with the same update time on the same day, has the Buckeyes seventh, on 91.588. Neither figure is new and neither report was wrong. Ours was under-specified: an LED reading 07 over the word “National” cannot tell a reader which of two tables it came from.

The board now publishes the Industry figure, because that is the table On3’s own Ohio State commit page reports and it is the like for like successor to the composite this board has always been kept in. The whole rank column was re-read from it the same day. Every one of the 19 commits moved at least one place, and two moved off the blue chip line: Brody McNeel and Jaden Carey are three stars in the Industry read, which puts the class at 15 blue chips of 19. That is the same 15 of 19 Gillis printed on August 3, arrived at from the other end.

The front page LED now reads 05, and the small print under it names the table.

The two zeroes, meanwhile, are not in dispute by anyone. Count the board yourself.

Ohio State has had one player from Mississippi in its history, and Caden Moss went to high school in the same city

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State lines up against Michigan State at Ohio Stadium in 1979. Photo: David E. Lucas, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / DPLAnull

Caden Moss committed to Ohio State on Friday, June 26, 2026, on Instagram Live, after reaching the decision earlier that week. He picked the Buckeyes over Ole Miss, Kentucky, LSU, Oregon and Tennessee. He is a 6-foot-5, 320-pound offensive tackle from Jackson Academy in Jackson, Mississippi, he was the sixteenth commitment in this class and the sixth and last offensive lineman in it, and every outlet that covered the pledge led with the same idea: Ohio State had finally won one in the trenches away from home.

One line at the bottom of Eleven Warriors’ story is the more remarkable fact, and it does not appear in any of the other commitment stories collected at the foot of this page.

“He will be just the second player ever from the state of Mississippi to play for Ohio State,” Dan Hope wrote, “joining former Buckeye tight end Craig Robinson, who played just one season for Ohio State in 1990.”

The first one

Craig Robinson is not a mystery. His entry survives in the 1990 Ohio State media guide, reproduced by the roster archive BuckeyeRosters: tight end, 6-foot-3, 234 pounds, one roster year, and a hometown line that reads Jackson, Mississippi, Lanier High School.

The guide describes a high school career that sounds like a small town’s whole team. Robinson played defensive end, tight end, defensive tackle, linebacker, offensive guard, offensive tackle, running back and tailback. He caught 15 passes for 225 yards and four touchdowns and carried 15 times for 108 more. He was an all-state pick and a USA Today and Blue Chip All-American. He was a cousin of Danny Manning, and he came to Columbus intending to study computer science.

Then one season, and the roster moves on without him.

That is the entire history of Ohio State football in the state of Mississippi. One man, one year, thirty-six seasons ago, from Jackson. Moss went to high school in the same city, at a different school on the other side of it, and if he signs in December and plays he becomes the second name on that list.

Ohio State has not recruited offensive linemen like this in years, and three outlets measured it three different ways

The drought Moss ended is real, but the three outlets who reported it were not describing the same drought, and the differences matter more than the headline number.

Eleven Warriors measured commitments: for the first time since Donovan Jackson in the 2021 class, a top-100 overall offensive lineman who is not from Ohio committed to the Buckeyes.

The Columbus Dispatch measured signatures, which is a harder test. Joey Kaufman wrote that Ohio State has not signed a top-100 offensive lineman from outside Ohio since Jackson, who grew up in a suburb of Houston before enrolling in 2021.

Bucknuts measured blue chips at the position, and Garrick Hodge laid out the ladder in full: the last blue-chip out-of-state tackle Ohio State landed before Jimmy Kalis this spring was Ian Moore in the 2024 class, the last top-70 out-of-state tackle was Jackson in 2021, and Moss and Kalis together are the first pair of blue-chip out-of-state tackles in one Ohio State class since Jackson and Zen Michalski five years ago.

For Tyler Bowen, two years into the job, Eleven Warriors called Moss the biggest recruiting win of his tenure and the first out-of-state lineman he has landed at Ohio State ranked inside the top 300 of his class.

Nobody agrees on what he is

The services that rank Moss do not agree about his position, his ceiling, or how many stars belong beside his name.

His 247Sports player page, read on August 3, 2026, carries a 94 rating on 247’s own board: No. 69 nationally, No. 8 among offensive tackles, No. 2 in Mississippi. Those are the exact two numbers Bucknuts printed the night he committed, which means 247’s own evaluators have not moved him a single place in the five weeks since. The composite on the same page reads 0.9700, No. 75 nationally, No. 7 at the position. On the day he committed, Eleven Warriors and the Dispatch both had that composite at No. 72. The board on this site says No. 74, which is the July 7 figure. Three readings of one statistic, three weeks apart, drifting by three spots.

ESPN is not in that conversation at all. Eli Lederman’s story calls Moss a five-star, No. 15 in the SC Next 300 and the No. 4 offensive tackle in the 2027 cycle. One service’s seventh-best tackle is another’s fourth, and one of them gives him a fifth star.

Then there is the question of where he actually plays. Eleven Warriors reported that Moss is expected to play tackle for the Buckeyes but could also play guard. The scouting report on his 247Sports page, written by director of scouting Andrew Ivins and stamped Evaluated 01/03/2026, is blunter: “Certainly worth a look at the corner, but future might ultimately be on the interior where he can lean into defenders and clear space with his power.” Ivins notes that Moss added almost 80 pounds between his freshman and junior seasons and comps him to Micah Morris.

There is a tidy irony in that, and Bucknuts pointed at it without quite saying so. Donovan Jackson, the last out-of-state tackle of this caliber Ohio State signed, was listed as a tackle on his own recruiting profile, spent most of his career at guard, and moved out to tackle halfway through the 2024 national title season. The position on the profile has never been the point.

What Moss has actually done

He was the starting left tackle for a Jackson Academy team that went 11-1 in 2025 and won its first state title since 2011, and MaxPreps made him a Junior All-American for it. He played in both the Under Armour All-America Game and the Polynesian Bowl in 2026 as an underclassman. He averaged 5.6 points and 5.1 rebounds across 24 basketball games as a junior, and he threw the shot put 44 feet 1.25 inches as a tenth grader.

He told ESPN why he chose Columbus over five programs that were closer to home. “You’re going to be around very talented players at Ohio State, players that are going to bring out the best in you,” he said. “That’s a program where you’re going to have first-round draft picks every year. The development end is there for sure.”

Nothing is signed

Kaufman put the caveat in his own story, and it is the right note to end on. Keeping Moss in this class through December, when the early signing period opens, would itself be the notable feat. That is what the Dispatch’s yardstick is for: a commitment is a sentence a teenager says in June, and the reason the gap since Jackson is measured in signatures rather than pledges is that the two are not the same number.

Until then he is a verbal, No. 74 on this board, and the second name on a list of two.

Angelo Smith has fallen 688 spots since he committed to Ohio State, and nobody has re-watched him

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State against Colorado at Ohio Stadium on September 20, 1986. Ohio State won 13-10. Photo: David E. Lucas, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / DPLAnull

Angelo Smith committed to Ohio State on Sunday, September 21, 2025. He was the third pledge in the 2027 class, behind only Jamier Brown and Brady Edmunds, and he is still the third longest standing name on this board. Sixteen of the nineteen commits in the class arrived after he did.

On the day he committed, four outlets published the same number. The 247Sports composite had him at No. 400 nationally and No. 38 among safeties. Eleven Warriors printed it in a file box, Buckeye Sports Bulletin added that he was No. 46 in Florida, and Buckeye Huddle named the source out loud: “the 247Sports Composite.”

His 247Sports player page, read on July 30, 2026, says No. 1088.

The fall is 688 places, and both boards agree on the direction

There are two numbers on a 247Sports page and they are not the same thing. One is 247’s own board, set by 247’s own evaluators. The other is the composite, which blends the services. Reading only one of them is how a recruit ends up with two reputations.

Both moved the same way here.

On 247’s own board, Smith was the No. 32 safety in the class and the No. 35 prospect in Florida the week he committed, per 247Sports, Land-Grant Holy Land and Sports Illustrated. The same page today lists him at No. 45 among safeties and No. 51 in Florida.

On the composite, he was No. 400 on September 21, 2025. The figure this board carries, No. 882, is Eleven Warriors’ reading of the composite on July 7, 2026. The page itself said No. 1088 on the morning this story was written, with a composite score of 0.8678, No. 110 at the position and No. 111 in his state.

So the slide is 688 places on the composite in ten months, and it has not stopped.

The reason is printed on the same page as the number

Directly under Smith’s rankings, 247Sports publishes its scouting report and stamps it with a date. His reads “Evaluated 08/23/2025.”

That is a month before he committed. There is no newer one.

His 247 rating is still 88. His composite score is still 0.8678. Nobody has written down a lower opinion of Angelo Smith. What has happened instead is that the 2027 class kept getting rated around him, and a rank is a seat in a room that keeps adding chairs. The score is the evaluation. The number is the seating chart.

That distinction is worth insisting on, because “fell 688 spots” reads like a scout watched him again and came away unimpressed, and on the published record no scout has watched him again at all.

It is also not the whole answer. This site has sourced commit day composite figures for exactly four members of this class, and they did not all drift the same way. Per Eleven Warriors in November 2025, measured against the July 7, 2026 composite, Kellen Wymer went from No. 210 to No. 67 and Mason Wilt went from No. 518 to No. 365. Both climbed while the same room was filling. Brody McNeel, the hardest man in this class to rank, went from No. 234 to No. 310. Those three baselines are two months later than Smith’s, which is not nothing in a cycle this early, and four players is not a sample. What can be said is that the pool growing is a real mechanism and not a complete excuse, and that the only person who could settle it is an evaluator who has not filed since August.

Somebody put the forecast in writing

The day after he committed, Land-Grant Holy Land’s Gene Ross wrote the sentence most people were thinking.

“Smith’s ranking doesn’t jump off the page, currently ranked as a three-star prospect and listed as the No. 32 safety and No. 35 player in Florida per 247Sports,” Ross wrote, “but Ohio State is already well versed in the family’s athletic pedigree, and it would not be at all surprising to see those numbers increase drastically by the time his class’ signing day comes around.”

Ten months later the numbers have gone the other way on both boards. This is not a scoreboard on a writer. Signing day for the 2027 class has not arrived, the forecast has not come due, and Ross was explicit that he was predicting rather than reporting. It is here because it is the only published expectation anyone attached to Smith’s ranking, and the honest thing to do with a dated prediction is to check it.

What the last evaluation actually said

Andrew Ivins, 247Sports’ director of scouting, filed six bullets on Smith in August 2025. They are not dismissive.

A deep safety who “lacks size, but makes up for it with his football IQ and a 91 speed score.” Surprisingly physical for his frame, able to “wrangle larger ball carriers to the ground.” He spent most of his sophomore year in a single high look for Florida’s 1A champions and “flashed impressive range.” He is young for the grade and “could undergo a major physical transformation in the coming years, much like his older brother.” He needs to get better in man coverage. The projection: “a potential multi-year contributor at the Power Four level that can play assignment football and pitch in on special teams units.”

Sports Illustrated’s scouting section on Smith tracks those bullets point for point, down to the single high usage and the man coverage note, so it is best read as the same evaluation rather than a second one.

The production behind it, per Land-Grant Holy Land and Sports Illustrated and credited by 247 to MaxPreps: 40 tackles, 11 pass breakups and three interceptions as a sophomore, for a Chaminade-Madonna team that won the Sunshine State 1A title. Eleven Warriors had him at 18 tackles, an interception, two pass deflections and half a sack through three games of his junior year. He is a hurdler too, a regional qualifier in the 110 and the 400 as a tenth grader, with a best of 16.01 and 59.94.

He is 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds. Every outlet that measured him says so.

He had to camp twice to get the offer

Smith is the younger brother of Jeremiah Smith, and the first thing to say about that is that it did not shorten the line.

Per Eleven Warriors, he camped at Ohio State as a wide receiver in 2024 and did not get an offer. He came back in 2025 and camped as a defensive back, and Ohio State offered on June 17, per Buckeye Sports Bulletin, after a one day camp in Columbus. He noticed which one it was.

“Getting an offer like that, it felt wonderful. I don’t even know how to explain it, but I feel like I really put a lot of work into it and it wasn’t just given to me,” Smith told Eleven Warriors. “Knowing I’m his brother and stuff, people just think stuff’s supposed to be given to me. So knowing that I had to work for it to get it, it was a good feeling at the end of the day.”

Asked what makes him different from his brother, he went at the thing the evaluations keep circling.

“I’m not the biggest person in the world. It might be other guys that’s bigger than me,” he said. “So I feel like I just work at 10 times harder for everything, and that’s really what pushes me to be different.”

His last visit before the pledge was the 14-7 win over Texas in the season opener, per Buckeye Sports Bulletin and Land-Grant Holy Land.

Two outlets projected that Jeremiah would leave for the NFL before Angelo arrives, Eleven Warriors as a top five pick and Land-Grant Holy Land as a possible No. 1. Those are forecasts and neither is a fact. The consequence they agree on is not a forecast about anyone’s play: the brothers are unlikely to be on the roster at the same time.

What the offer list even is

Nobody can tell you how many scholarships Smith held when he chose.

Eleven Warriors said he picked Ohio State over Miami, Oklahoma State, Akron, Georgia State and Toledo. Buckeye Sports Bulletin said in one sentence that he had “offers from just three schools” and in the next that the Buckeyes beat out Georgia State and Oklahoma State. Buckeye Huddle mentioned Miami and stopped. His 247 page now says 13 offers.

Three, five and thirteen are all in print. This site is not going to pick one and pretend the others were never published.

Where that leaves him

Matt Guerrieri has two safeties in this class. Eli Johnson is a four star at No. 208, and Smith is the other one, and the fuller argument about what Ohio State has historically done with defensive backs is in DBU. What is still open across the back seven is in the official visit story and on the needs page.

The number on his row will keep moving, and this site will keep sourcing it to whoever published it and dating it to the day. The next thing worth reading is not a new ranking. It is a new evaluation, and there has not been one in eleven months.

Every fact on his page is attributed to the outlet that reported it, at Angelo Smith.

Brody McNeel is the hardest man in Ohio State's 2027 class to rank

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State linemen wait near the line of scrimmage against Michigan State at Ohio Stadium, November 11, 2023. Photo: Ralph Branson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commonsnull

Brody McNeel committed to Ohio State on Tuesday, November 18, 2025. He was the seventh pledge in the 2027 class and the third offensive lineman in it, joining Kellen Wymer and Mason Wilt, who had both committed 16 days earlier. Eleven Warriors and Buckeye Sports Bulletin reported the same three facts that night, and Rivals reported them the next morning.

That is where the agreement ends.

Two outlets, four numbers, one player

Eleven Warriors and Buckeye Sports Bulletin both filed the 247Sports composite figures on the day he committed: No. 234 overall, the No. 23 offensive tackle in the country. Buckeye Sports Bulletin added that he was the No. 3 player in Virginia, and that he was the highest rated of Ohio State’s three linemen at that point.

Rivals had him somewhere else entirely. Steve Wiltfong’s story ran under the headline “Ohio State lands commitment from Rivals’ No. 5 2027 IOL prospect,” and it did not hide the gap. “Rivals is much higher on McNeel than the Industry,” Wiltfong wrote, “ranking him as the nation’s No. 5 interior offensive lineman and No. 125 prospect overall. The Industry collectively tabs him at No. 27 and No. 346 respectively.”

So one outlet, in one article, published a 221-place spread on one 17-year-old. Not a disagreement between two rival services with something to sell against each other. A disagreement inside a single paragraph.

The spread has not closed since. The number this site carries on the 2027 commit board is No. 310, the 247Sports composite as of July 7, 2026, per Eleven Warriors. That is 185 places below where Rivals had him in November and 36 places above where Rivals said everyone else had him.

They do not agree on what he plays either

Eleven Warriors called him an offensive tackle. Buckeye Sports Bulletin called him an offensive tackle. Rivals called him an interior offensive lineman, twice, once in the headline. 247Sports labelled him “Ohio State OT” in a July 2026 story. Rivals’ No. 5 ranking and the composite’s No. 23 ranking are not even ranking the same position group, which is part of why the overall numbers look nothing alike.

This board lists him at OL and nothing more specific, and that is deliberate. A tackle who projects inside and an interior lineman who projects outside are two different sentences about the same 6-foot-5, 285-pound player, and no outlet has published the one that settles it. Printing a position he might not play, to make a table look tidy, is a small lie with a long shelf life.

He is also the only one of the three whose number fell

Rankings move in every cycle, and a composite recalculates as a class fills in around a player. What is worth noticing is the direction.

In November 2025, Eleven Warriors placed the three linemen who were then committed at Wymer No. 210, McNeel No. 234 and Wilt No. 518. In the July 7, 2026 composite this board is kept in, Wymer is No. 67 and Wilt is No. 365. Both of them climbed, Wymer by a lot. McNeel went from 234 to 310.

No outlet has published a reason, and this site is not going to invent one. A recruit can slide because evaluators moved on him, or because the players around him moved, or because a service re-sorted a position group. Those are different stories and only one of them is about McNeel. What can be said with a source attached is that the composite liked him better on the day he committed than it does now, and that Rivals has never agreed with the composite about him at all.

The recruitment was short

Ohio State offered on June 23, 2025, per Buckeye Sports Bulletin, and he committed five months later. He held 15 Division I offers. Per Rivals, he chose the Buckeyes over an offer list that also included Penn State, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

He visited Columbus in the spring, again in the summer, and then for the season opener against Texas.

“It was amazing. Everything was perfect,” McNeel told Rivals’ Chad Simmons, in comments carried by Eleven Warriors. “I got to see Ohio State play in person for the first time ever. Also got to go in the locker room after the game and go on the field. … My biggest highlights were watching Ohio State win, meeting former players, going in the locker room after the game and seeing the offensive line coaches again.”

Per Eleven Warriors, he returned to Columbus for the UCLA game, a 48-10 win, with four other Ohio State recruits in the building, and he committed the Tuesday after it. Five days before that game, Eleven Warriors reported, McNeel had told On3’s Steve Wiltfong that Ohio State was “definitely leading the way” in his recruitment. Rivals got a shorter version of the why.

“My favorite things are the coaching staff, atmosphere and the legacy,” he said. “Really feel I can get developed very well at Ohio State.”

What he actually does for this class

The number the services cannot agree on is not the only thing McNeel contributes, and it may not be the most useful one.

In a July 6, 2026 story, 247Sports’ Garrick Hodge reported that Ohio State’s six offensive line commits run a group chat, and that McNeel is in it constantly.

“We have a group chat going together and we all talk all the time. It’s going really great,” McNeel said of the bond with his fellow line commits. “I think we’ll play better as a team because we already know each other so well. They’re all great guys and we love each other.”

Per Hodge, the group has used that chat to recruit. Caden Moss, the four-star tackle out of Jackson Academy in Mississippi who is now No. 74 on this board, committed on June 26, 2026. The same group turned its attention to running back target David Gabriel Georges ahead of his July 22 decision.

That one did not land. Georges picked Tennessee on July 22, over Ohio State and Ole Miss, and the 2027 class still has no running back at all. Peer recruiting is a real thing that real recruits do, and it is not a closing argument.

Where that leaves him

Ohio State has six offensive linemen in this class, the first six-lineman haul since 2020 per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope. Four of the six are Ohio kids. McNeel is one of the two who are not, and on the board’s July composite numbers he is the third of the six.

The full group, and the argument for why this class was built in the trenches, is on this site already, as is the case for what Ohio State has done with linemen once they arrive in Offensive Line U.

His own page, with every fact on it sourced to the outlet that reported it, is at Brody McNeel. What the class still needs is on the needs page.

Brady Edmunds says he decided in a Columbus hotel in June, then sat on it for a month

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ohio State University Marching Band forms Script Ohio at Ohio Stadium before the September 10, 2011 game against Toledo. Photo: Columbus Metropolitan Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / DPLAnull

The most important thing Brady Edmunds has said about his recruitment is that it was over before we knew it was over.

Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope published a sit-down with Ohio State’s 2027 quarterback on Sunday, July 26, three days after Edmunds shut down his recruitment. In it Edmunds walks through the summer he spent deciding, and the timeline he gives is not the timeline the public had.

He left Westwood thinking he was gone

Hope’s first line is the one that reframes everything: “Edmunds left his official visit to UCLA last month thinking he was going to be a Bruin.”

That visit was June 5, per Eleven Warriors’ Chase Brown, whose June reporting had Edmunds calling the trip one that “went really, really well” and saying UCLA “definitely won them over” about his family. What Edmunds adds now is what happened when he got home to Huntington Beach.

“I mean, I walk into my bedroom when I get home from the OV, and I have an Ohio State flag hanging on the wall. I got an Ohio State teddy bear, and my whole wardrobe is Ohio State. It was hard for me to separate from that fact that this was my goal, this was what I wanted to do, even without football.”

The text from the lounge

Edmunds took his Ohio State official visit two weeks after the UCLA trip, which puts it on June 19, the date A to Z Sports reported at the time. Hope writes that he went into it still unsure. He did not stay unsure for long.

“During my Ohio State OV, I think I got back to the hotel one night, my dad was in the lounge area he just got back to or whatever, and I think we talked for a second, and then I went upstairs, and he texted me and said, ‘You’re gonna be a Buckeye, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah,’ because the love that I got on that OV, and just how I felt throughout the whole thing, like, I didn’t think I could walk away from that.”

Hope’s next sentence is the part that matters for anyone who followed this in July: “Edmunds waited another month before officially shutting down his recruitment on Thursday, wanting to be sure he was making the right decision.”

So the question the class could least afford to lose was answered in a hotel in Columbus in the third week of June, and the answer stayed private until July 23.

What that month contained

It is worth saying plainly what Ohio State’s 2027 class did while its quarterback was quietly settled, because none of it was quiet. This site flagged Edmunds on July 5 as the least settled piece of the class, and on the reporting available that day, he was. Then, per our board, five-star receiver Monshun Sales chose Indiana on July 17 and five-star running back David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22. Edmunds’ announcement landed the next day.

Read in order, July looked like a class losing two of the best skill players in America and then getting a save. Read with Hope’s timeline, the save had already happened. The two misses are still misses. The quarterback was never the thing that was in the balance in July, whatever it looked like from outside, and that is a correction we are glad to print about our own watch.

The reason the watch existed at all has not changed. There was no replacement. Ohio State took a run this spring at five-star Nebraska pledge Trae Taylor, who reaffirmed with the Huskers and sits on our board as a miss, and Hope reported on July 23 that every top-100 quarterback in the composite for this cycle is already committed somewhere. That is the argument this site made in Quarterback U: carrying exactly one quarterback per class works right up until the one leaves.

The room he is walking into

Hope reports Edmunds is now expected to be the only quarterback in Ohio State’s 2027 class. He also lays out the depth chart honestly, and it is not a soft landing. Even if Julian Sayin leaves for the NFL after this season, Edmunds will likely wait behind sophomore Tavien St. Clair, the five-star Hope calls Sayin’s expected successor. By the time Edmunds’ first real shot arrives, he may be competing with Christopher Vargas, the No. 1-ranked quarterback in the 2028 class, where Hope writes Ohio State is an early frontrunner.

Edmunds says he has heard the version of this where UCLA was the better football decision.

“Whatever headlines or whatever gets drawn up online, I think I had a really, really good chance of playing there. I trusted my capabilities, and I trusted the way I work and everything like that, but I thought I was the best fit for that program. My confidence doesn’t come from what people tell me or narratives drawn up or anything like that; mine comes from how hard I work.”

The line he keeps returning to came from a coach who was not even recruiting him. “It was an Eastern Washington coach my freshman year,” Edmunds told Eleven Warriors. “He just told me, like, ‘When you’re making your decision, take away football and can you see yourself there?’” UCLA is 45 minutes from his house. He says Columbus still won that question.

Sixteen pounds, and a number that moved

The one hard physical fact in the interview is a body change. Edmunds is 6-foot-5. Hope reports he bulked to 242 pounds and fought an injury last season, then slimmed to 226 this offseason to get his mobility back, with the goal of being a bigger threat running the ball. Edmunds points at his sophomore film as the standard, noting he ran for 157 yards and two touchdowns in the first game of 2024.

Note the discrepancy rather than smoothing it: Eleven Warriors’ own file card on July 23 listed him at 220 pounds, and Land-Grant Holy Land’s July 24 write-up used 220 as well. The 226 figure is newer and comes from Edmunds himself, so that is what we are carrying, with both numbers on the record.

His ranking moved too, slightly. Our board carried No. 243 nationally from Eleven Warriors’ July 23 story. Hope’s July 26 piece has him at No. 242 overall and No. 20 at the position, and Land-Grant Holy Land’s Caleb Houser independently gives the same two numbers off the 247Sports composite. The board now reads 242, dated, the same way Karlos May’s number is dated.

He is not done being a high schooler

Edmunds told Eleven Warriors he does not want to rush the four and a half months he has left before he enrolls at Ohio State, and that his priority through the whole recruitment was his senior season at Huntington Beach, where he wants a deep playoff run and the Orange County career passing yards record. He plans to be back in Columbus for at least one game this fall, which Hope notes is workable because Huntington Beach plays five of its 10 regular-season games on Thursdays.

The closing quote is the one Eleven Warriors put in the headline, and it is the whole decision in two clauses:

“I think my dad used the phrase, but I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to look at myself in the mirror as a man and be like, OK, I had this opportunity, and I didn’t follow through with it when I wanted it all my life. Ultimately, I just thought I could get it done there, and I thought I’d just be the happiest there.”

Brady Edmunds shut down his recruitment, and Ohio State keeps the quarterback it had no way to replace

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A B-2 flyover after the national anthem at the 2019 Rose Bowl. The Ohio State and Washington marching bands are on the field. Photo: Blervis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Brady Edmunds is staying.

The four-star quarterback announced on Thursday, July 23 that he has shut down his recruitment and plans to sign with Ohio State in December, per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope. A to Z Sports credits the first report to Rivals’ Hayes Fawcett, who wrote that Edmunds “is locked in with Ohio State and has shut down his recruitment.”

That sentence ends the longest running open question in the 2027 class, and it lands one day after Ohio State lost David Gabriel Georges to Tennessee. Two decisions, two days, opposite directions.

The wobble Ohio State started itself

Edmunds committed in December 2024. Per Eleven Warriors, he was all in for more than a year after that: frequent trips from California to Columbus, public peer recruiting of other Ohio State targets, the early face of the class.

Then Ohio State went shopping. Hope writes that Edmunds’ commitment had been shaky for several months, and he names the cause plainly: after the Buckeyes ramped up their efforts to recruit other quarterbacks in the 2027 class this spring, Edmunds began listening to other schools. The only one he seriously considered was UCLA.

He took an official visit to Westwood on June 5, and per Eleven Warriors’ Chase Brown he came back sold on the new head coach there, Bob Chesney, who took James Madison to a College Football Playoff appearance last season. Speaking to Rivals’ Adam Gorney, in comments Brown carried on June 17, Edmunds said the trip “went really, really well” and that “UCLA definitely hit the spot. My family really loved it there. It definitely won them over.”

By mid-June it was a two-school race in his own words. “My biggest thing that I’m focused on is if football is taken away from me can I see myself there?” he told reporters. “There’s a lot of schools that I don’t see myself there. UCLA and Ohio State are just those major two.”

He also said the quiet part out loud, which is why this was a live flip and not a formality:

“If for whatever reason it ends up going the other way, it would be a tough thing to walk away from. I’ve been a part of this for so long, obviously committed for 18-plus months, one of the longest commits in all of the class, so it means a lot.”

What he wanted answered

Brown reported that Edmunds went into his Ohio State official visit with two questions: whether the Buckeyes planned to add a second quarterback to the 2027 class, and what his own early role would be. He was not asking them to promise him the room. He was asking them to be straight with him about it.

“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page with everything and how we go about this correctly,” he said in June. He added that he had no problem with another quarterback joining the class as long as Ryan Day and Billy Fessler shared the same vision.

He got both answers. Per Hope, Ohio State told Edmunds it could still take a second quarterback in the cycle, and Edmunds told Ohio State that was fine, because he expects to compete for the job either way. A to Z Sports dates his Columbus official visit to June 19. Hope’s account is that he arrived in Columbus genuinely undecided and left reassured.

The practical read on that second quarterback: Hope reports the expectation is now that Edmunds will be the only one in the class, because every top-100 quarterback in the composite for this cycle is already committed somewhere.

Why there was no plan B, and why this site was watching

We flagged Edmunds on July 5 as the least settled piece of the class, and the reason that watch mattered was never the player. It was the absence of an alternative behind him.

The staff had already tested the one obvious road. Ohio State took a run this spring at five-star Nebraska pledge Trae Taylor, who reaffirmed with the Huskers and sits on our board as a miss. Hope’s line on July 23 is the same fact stated from the other end: the top of the position is gone. So a flip to UCLA would not have meant replacing Edmunds. It would have meant entering the flip market at the one position nobody sells.

That is also the argument the site made in Quarterback U: Ohio State’s habit of carrying exactly one quarterback per class is fine right up until the one leaves.

The ranking arc, honestly

Edmunds is 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds. He was a five-star and the No. 10 overall prospect in the 2027 class when he pledged, per Eleven Warriors, and he is a four-star now.

Where exactly he sits depends on which line of Hope’s story you read. The file card and the commit table both put him at No. 243 overall, and the table has him No. 20 at the position; the prose in the same story says No. 245 overall and No. 20 at the position. A to Z Sports, working independently, reports 243 and No. 20. Our board carried No. 251 from Eleven Warriors’ July 7 taking-stock piece and now carries 243, dated, the way Karlos May’s number is.

None of that is the interesting part of his file. Hope reports he was selected as one of this year’s Elite 11 quarterbacks (Scarlet and Game calls him an Elite 11 finalist) and that he completed 68.1 percent of his passes last season for 2,724 yards and 32 touchdowns against two interceptions in 11 games. Two picks in a full season is the number that should follow him into camp.

He is not shy about the reason. “I think the thing that makes me, in my opinion, the best quarterback in the country is my confidence and how I approach every single day and every single practice and every single game, weight room, everything like that,” he said in June. “I just think mentally, I’m different.”

What it changes on the board

Nothing, and that is the point. The class stays at 19, because a recommitment adds nobody. What moves is the risk sitting under one of the 19, and that risk was the largest single item on this board a month ago.

What is still open is the running back spot, which Georges took to Tennessee on July 22, and tight end. The quarterback line is closed.

Ohio State’s quarterback recruiting now points at 2028, where Hope reports the Buckeyes are an early frontrunner for Christopher Vargas, the No. 1 quarterback in the rising junior class. That class has its own board here, and it is a long way from finished.

One caution before anyone files this away. A shut down recruitment is not a signature. Edmunds said in June, before any of this resolved, that “wherever I end up, I think I’m gonna make the most of it,” and what he has actually done is tell reporters he is done looking. December is when it counts. Scarlet and Game notes the obvious about what he is signing into: Julian Sayin and Tavien St. Clair are both in front of him, so the reward for winning this recruitment is the right to wait.

For now, the 2027 class has a quarterback who wants to be here, and says he has since fourth grade.

“This is the place that I’ve always kind of wanted to be at throughout my whole entire life, whether it was football or not. Before I even started taking football seriously, I wanted to just be a student here, when I was in like fourth grade or whatever.”

David Gabriel Georges picks Tennessee, and Ohio State's 2027 class has no running back and no one left to take

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Running back Mike Weber at Ohio State's 2017 spring game. Photo: Paula R. Lively, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

David Gabriel Georges committed to Tennessee on July 22, 2026. He announced the pledge Wednesday evening, choosing the Vols over Ohio State and Ole Miss after official visits with each school this spring, per ESPN.

The five-star running back is the No. 10 overall prospect in the 247Sports composite, and he ran for 1,756 yards and 27 touchdowns in 2025. Per ESPN, the decision closed a monthslong recruiting battle between Tennessee and Ohio State, and it gave the Vols their eighteenth commitment in the 2027 class.

The class is at zero, and the board is empty

This is the outcome we named on July 6, when we wrote that the decision would make or break the running back class. Ohio State has no running back committed in the 2027 class, and with Georges gone it has no running back target either. Those are two different problems and the second one is worse.

Running backs coach Carlos Locklyn recruited Georges harder than any player on the board, per Eleven Warriors. The fallback thinned out in June: Jayden Miles committed to Florida State one day after taking his Ohio State official visit. The path from here, as Eleven Warriors framed it before the decision, is a flip attempt, at a premium position, in the back half of the summer. That is not where anyone wants to be.

What it does and does not change

It does not undo the class. Ohio State’s 2027 group is still built on six offensive linemen, the first six-lineman class since 2020, and a defensive line that per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope is one of only two in the country with two five-star linemen and one of only two with three top-100 linemen. DJ Jacobs, the No. 4 player in the country when this ran, is still the headliner.

What it changes is the shape. A class with no back is a class with a hole its rivals will point at, and the rankings notice: Ohio State was No. 7 nationally on On3 in the July 7 snapshot and No. 11 on ESPN before today, and both of those numbers were set without a running back in the class.

What is still open

Two decisions landed before this one, and they cut in opposite directions. Karlos May committed to Ohio State on July 18, which gave the class its defensive tackle. Monshun Sales did not: he chose Indiana on July 17. That leaves two names on the board, both flip targets, Benny Easter Jr. at receiver and Gabriel Osborne Jr. at cornerback. The class still has no tight end and no tight end target, and after tonight no running back target either.

The full class, every rank sourced to the outlet that reported it, is on the 2027 commit board. What the class still needs is on the needs page.

Ohio State had two Alabama natives in its whole history. Karlos May would be the seventh in three years.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nick Saban at College Football Playoff national championship media day, January 2018. He retired six years later, in January 2024. Photo: Thomson200, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Karlos May’s commitment on Saturday gave Ohio State’s 2027 class the defensive tackle it did not have. It also moved a number that had moved twice in forty-five years.

Writing on July 18, Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope put the roster history in one sentence: before the 2024 season, Ohio State had only ever had two players from the state of Alabama. Donte Wheat, a defensive tackle from Montgomery, was on the roster for one season in 1981. Willie Salter, a receiver from Deatsville, was there for one season in 2001. Two men, twenty years apart, one season each.

May, per Hope, “is set to become the fourth high school prospect and seventh overall player from his home state to sign with the Buckeyes in three years.” Set to become is the right tense and this site is keeping it. He is a commit. Signing day is in December.

The date the count turns on

Hope’s piece hangs the change on one event: Nick Saban’s retirement, announced in January 2024. That is his reading of why a program that had signed two Alabamians in a century suddenly signs one a year.

An independent outlet recorded the mechanism at the time, on a single recruit, without any pipeline thesis to sell. ESPN’s Eli Lederman reported on June 24, 2024 that Zion Grady, a 6-foot-4, 230-pound edge rusher out of Enterprise, Alabama, had committed to Ohio State. Grady was No. 45 in the ESPN 300, the No. 7 defensive end in the class and the No. 5 prospect in his own state. He had committed to Alabama in November 2023, and he decommitted in January 2024 following Saban’s departure. He chose Ohio State over Tennessee and Florida State.

That is the whole chain in one player: an Alabama pledge, a coaching change, a reopened recruitment, a flight north. ESPN was writing a commitment story. It documented the pattern anyway.

The count, and what it counts

Hope published a table of every Alabama native to play for Ohio State. Four of the seven post-2024 names arrived as high school recruits.

In the 2025 class, the first cycle after Saban’s retirement, the Buckeyes took two of the top seven prospects in the state: Grady and running back Anthony “Turbo” Rogers of Montgomery. In 2026 they added another top-10 in-state prospect, defensive tackle Emmanuel Ruffin of Bessemer. Now comes May, out of Birmingham, whom Hope ranks No. 5 in Alabama and No. 135 nationally in the 2027 class.

The other three are transfers who happen to be Alabama natives: running back Quinshon Judkins of Pike Road, and defensive linemen James Smith and Qua Russaw, both of Montgomery. Saturday Down South’s Jacob Moss reported on January 12, 2026 that Smith and Russaw had both committed to Ohio State out of the portal, and that both had been five-star recruits coming out of high school in the 2023 cycle. Hope has them leaving Alabama itself this offseason.

Two different Alabamas, and they are not the same list

The count is of natives. It is not a count of players who transferred from the University of Alabama, and the two lists overlap less than the shorthand suggests.

Hope is explicit about one direction: Ohio State’s five Alabama natives on this year’s roster do not include starting quarterback Julian Sayin or cornerback Cam Calhoun, both of whom transferred to Ohio State from the University of Alabama and neither of whom is from the state.

It runs the other way too. Judkins is an Alabama native who did not come from Alabama. He signed with Ole Miss out of Pike Road and reached Columbus from Oxford in January 2024, a distinction this site has already had to make once when a pipeline claim leaned on him.

The arithmetic in Hope’s piece holds up against his own table, which is worth saying because it is the kind of number that usually does not. Nine names are listed. Subtract Wheat and Salter and seven remain, which is the figure in his sentence. Four of those seven came as high school recruits and three as transfers. Subtract Judkins, whose Ohio State career was the 2024 season, and May, who has not enrolled, and five are on the current roster, which is the roster number he gives. Hope adds that those five are tied with New Jersey for the sixth-most of any state, behind Ohio with 52, Florida with 11, California with eight, Texas with eight and Georgia with six.

One small thing the table gives away that nobody wrote a sentence about: four of the nine rows list the same hometown. Montgomery produced Wheat in 1981, and then Rogers, Smith and Russaw.

What this story is not claiming

Hope offers a cause: “NIL promises often supersede regional roots in today’s recruiting landscape.” That is his reading, and it stays his. No recruit in any reporting fetched for this piece says money moved him. What May himself gave as a reason, in comments to Rivals carried by Buckeyes Wire, was the official visit and the position coach, and that is on the record in his commitment story.

Hope also writes that all of the top 15 prospects from the state of Alabama in the 2027 class are committed to schools other than the University of Alabama. This site did not independently verify that, so it is printed with his name on it and it does not become one of our own claims.

One correction this reporting forces on our own board: the 2027 board carried May at No. 132 in the composite, the number Eleven Warriors used in its July 7 stock report. The July 18 reporting has him at No. 135. Ranks move weekly in a live cycle, and the board now carries the newer number with the newer date.

The traffic is not one way

While the best defensive tackle in Alabama was picking Columbus, Ohio was losing its own secondary. Per Eleven Warriors on July 1, four-star cornerback Monsanna Torbert Jr. chose Michigan over Ohio State, and the state’s other two top-rated 2027 corners also left: Ace Alston to Notre Dame and Kei’Shjuan Telfair to Penn State. The full version of that story is in our look at the in-state pipeline.

A program that has to import a defensive tackle from Birmingham while three Ohio corners sign elsewhere is not simply recruiting better. It is recruiting differently, and the map is doing the arguing.

What is still open

May is the 19th pledge in the class and the only defensive tackle in it. The one decision left this month was the biggest, and it went the other way: David Gabriel Georges, the five-star running back, chose Tennessee on July 22 over Ohio State and Ole Miss. The class still has no running back at all.

Every pledge, with the outlet that reported each rank, is on the 2027 commit board. What the class still needs is on the needs page.

Karlos May picks Ohio State, and the 2027 class finally has a defensive tackle

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Defensive lineman Adolphus Washington at Ohio State's 2014 spring game. Photo: Paula Lively, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Karlos May committed to Ohio State on Saturday, July 18. He announced Saturday afternoon on Rivals’ official YouTube channel, per Auburn Wire, and he did it as the recruit Ohio State could least afford to lose.

The four-star defensive tackle is 6-foot-3 and 305 pounds out of Ramsay High School in Birmingham, Alabama. Saturday Tradition puts him at No. 135 overall in the 247Sports composite, No. 15 among defensive linemen and No. 5 in the state of Alabama; Eleven Warriors gives the same national and position numbers. He is the 19th pledge in the 2027 class and, per Eleven Warriors, the 10th on defense.

He says he was going to Georgia

May told Rivals, in comments carried by Buckeyes Wire, that the visit is what moved him.

“That official visit to Ohio State changed everything,” he said. “Before that, I was going to Georgia. That visit made me realize exactly where I wanted to be. As soon as I got down there, I knew I was going to pick up and retain a lot of good information that would help me be successful.”

He named the position coach directly. “Some things I like most about Coach Johnson are how he was able to produce as many guys as he did and the way he was able to do it,” May said. “I get to be around one of the best to ever do it.”

The outlets do not fully agree on who was still in it at the end. Auburn Wire puts Auburn and Georgia on the other side of the table; Eleven Warriors adds Florida State. Saturday Tradition frames the field more broadly still, naming Alabama, LSU, Michigan and Texas among the programs he chose against. What every one of them carries is Auburn and Georgia, and what May himself says is Georgia.

The hole he fills is the only one this line had

Ohio State’s 2027 defensive line was already the story of the cycle. Per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope, writing on July 7, the Buckeyes are one of only two schools with two five-star defensive linemen in the class and one of only two with three top-100 defensive linemen, and it is the first time they have done both since the 2021 class that produced JT Tuimoloau, Jack Sawyer and Mike Hall Jr.

What it did not have was a true defensive tackle. DJ Jacobs, the No. 4 player in the country as of July 19, and Marcus Fakatou, the No. 26, are the headliners. Wyatt Smith is the third top-100 name. All three of them make their living on the edge or on the outside shoulder of a tackle, and the interior of the line was empty.

Hope wrote on July 7 that landing May would take the group from great to “an A+ for the cycle”. That is the position Ohio State is in this weekend.

The comparison to 2021 is not a compliment the staff handed itself. It is the last class that had this many high-end linemen at once, and it is the one Ohio State’s coaches keep being asked about. The 2021 blueprint is on this site in full: four linemen, two of them top-five nationally, and a defensive front that took three years to arrive and then won a national title. The 2027 group is being built on the same premise, and until Saturday it was being built without a nose.

What the board looks like now

May is the 19th commit and, in the composite order the board is kept in, he slots into the top half of the class. With him, Saturday Tradition has Ohio State No. 7 nationally in the composite team rankings, and Auburn Wire has the class No. 2 in the Big Ten.

The class is still built in the trenches: six offensive linemen, the first six-lineman class since 2020, and now four defensive linemen counting the edge players. Ten of the pledges play defense.

What is still open

The board does not empty out with him. David Gabriel Georges, the five-star running back, chose Tennessee on July 22 over Ohio State and Ole Miss, and the class still has no running back at all.

The receiver spot on that list closed the day before May’s announcement, and not the way Ohio State wanted: Monshun Sales picked Indiana on July 17, so he is a miss on this board, not a target on it. Benny Easter Jr. is the flip target left at the position. So is cornerback Gabriel Osborne Jr., at a spot where, per Hope, this class has no top-100 player for the first time in five years.

And there is still no tight end, and no target at the position.

The full class, every rank sourced to the outlet that reported it, is on the 2027 commit board. What the class still needs is on the needs page.

Monshun Sales picks Indiana, and Ohio State misses on the No. 1 receiver in 2027

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cardale Jones drops back during Ohio State's 2014 spring game. Photo: Paula Lively, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Monshun Sales committed to Indiana on Friday, July 17. He announced it live on The Pat McAfee Show, and in doing so, per Eleven Warriors, he became the first composite five-star prospect ever to commit to Indiana.

Sales is the No. 1 receiver in the 2027 class in 247Sports’ own rankings and the No. 2 receiver, No. 8 overall, in the 247Sports composite the board is kept in. Inside the Hall lists him at No. 13 overall by 247Sports and No. 7 overall by On3 and Rivals, which is the same disagreement this site flagged when he set his date: the outlets are reading different instruments, and all of them have him at or near the top of the position. He is a 6-foot-5 receiver out of Lawrence North in Indianapolis, and per 247Sports his junior season read 37 catches for 794 yards and nine touchdowns on offense to go with 56 tackles at safety. Ohio State was one of his final five, alongside Alabama, Indiana, LSU and Texas. It did not get him.

This was not the upset it would have been in the spring

Ohio State was once seen as the odds-on favorite for Sales. That is not where the race stood by the time he decided. Buckeyes Wire wrote on July 12 that the favorite sentiment “seems to have faded in recent months,” and on July 14 Land-Grant Holy Land had Indiana out in front, with Ohio State chasing. A five-star from Indianapolis staying closer to home is the outcome the last month of reporting pointed at.

Inside the Hall makes the in-state case plainly: Lawrence North has sent receivers to Indiana before, including Donaven McCulley and Omar Cooper Jr., both of whom went on to the NFL. Neither outlet we fetched carries direct quotes from Sales explaining the choice, so this site is not printing a reason he has not given.

The receiver room is not the hole this leaves

The cost of a miss is real, but it is not the cost the defensive line would have paid for losing Karlos May. Ohio State’s 2027 class already holds Jamier Brown, the five-star who was at Big Walnut in Sunbury in July and has since returned to Wayne in Huber Heights, the top-rated receiver in the state of Ohio and the No. 24 player in the country. Per Eleven Warriors, the class carries two receivers: Brown and three-star Jordan Donahoo. The room keeps its five-star. What it does not add is a second one, and the chance to pair the best in-state receiver with the player most of the industry had ranked No. 1 at the position.

There is also a flip target still on the board. Benny Easter Jr., the No. 64 player in the class as of July 7, is a receiver Ohio State is still recruiting, and Eleven Warriors names him as the likely third option at the position. Unlike the interior of the defensive line, this spot does not go dark with the decision.

What is still open

Sales was the first of three decisions in six days, and the second has already gone Ohio State’s way. Karlos May committed to the Buckeyes on July 18, which gave the class the interior defensive lineman it did not have and took it to 19 pledges.

That leaves one. David Gabriel Georges, the five-star running back, chose Tennessee on July 22 over Ohio State and Ole Miss, and the class still has no running back at all.

Cornerback Gabriel Osborne Jr. remains a flip target, at a position where, per Eleven Warriors’ Dan Hope on July 7, this class has no top-100 player for the first time in five years. And there is still no tight end, and no target at the position.

The full class, every rank sourced to the outlet that reported it, is on the 2027 commit board. What the class still needs is on the needs page.

Linebacker U? Ohio State put two linebackers in one NFL top 10, and recruited both itself

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sonny Styles at Big Ten Football Media Days, July 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On the night of the 2026 NFL Draft’s first round, the New York Giants took Arvell Reese with the fifth pick. Two picks later, the Washington Commanders took Sonny Styles seventh. Per Eleven Warriors, that was the first time in NFL draft history that two linebackers from the same school have been drafted within the top 10 picks.

Not the first time this decade. Not the first time since some year with a story attached to it. The first time it has ever happened, to anybody.

This site has now run the same test on six Ohio State position claims: O-Line U, Running Back U, DBU, the defensive line, Quarterback U, Tight End U. Every single time, the same thing was sitting in the middle of the record. Somebody else’s recruit. Max Klare produced at Purdue first. Will Kacmarek’s only FBS scholarship offer out of high school came from Ohio, not Ohio State. Caleb Downs picked Alabama. Justin Fields was Georgia’s No. 1 signee. The claim kept being a development claim wearing a recruiting claim’s clothes.

Linebacker breaks the pattern. This one is Ohio State’s, all the way down.

Both of them are Ohio kids, and neither one took a detour

Arvell Reese committed in August 2022, out of Cleveland Glenville. Ohio State’s own roster lists him with a hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and under “Last School” it says Glenville. That is a high school. There is no college in front of Ohio State on his record, which is the whole thing this site keeps failing to find everywhere else. Eleven Warriors noted at the time that he was the seventh prospect from Ohio to commit to Ohio State in that cycle, and the first Glenville player to commit to the Buckeyes in more than five years.

Sonny Styles was, per Eleven Warriors, “the five-star in-state 2023 safety/linebacker commit,” out of Pickerington Central. He reclassified from the 2023 class into 2022 and signed his National Letter of Intent on Dec. 15, the first day of the early signing period. He is also the son of former Ohio State linebacker Lorenzo Styles Sr.

An in-state five-star whose father played linebacker in Columbus, and a Cleveland kid out of Glenville. Ohio State recruited both of them, out of Ohio high schools, and three and four years later they went fifth and seventh. Nothing about that needs a caveat.

The caveat is somewhere else entirely.

Neither one arrived as a linebacker anybody wanted

Reese was not a blue-chip linebacker. Sports Illustrated, on the day he committed, had him as the 20th-best linebacker and the No. 277 prospect overall in the class of 2023. Good. Not a coup. He picked Ohio State over Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan and USC, so the competition was real, but nobody signed him thinking they had just landed the fifth pick in a draft.

And then there is the detail that reframes the entire record. Per Eleven Warriors’ analysis of his commitment, “his junior year was his first time ever playing linebacker and he only played in five games in 2022.”

Five games. That was the complete linebacker résumé of a man who would go fifth overall.

Styles is the same story told from the opposite end. He was a five-star, but read his listing again: “safety/linebacker.” Ohio State did not play him at linebacker. It played him at safety, on purpose, for two years, and the defensive coordinator has said out loud that this was the plan. Jim Knowles, in May 2024:

When I first met him or when I first got here, I think everybody talked about “He’s gonna be a linebacker, he’s gonna be a linebacker.” But I really wanted to see him at safety first.

Styles started all but one game at either nickel safety or strong safety in 2023. He moved to linebacker during the 2024 championship season, and linebackers coach James Laurinaitis described what he inherited: “I think Sonny’s made a really smooth transition to linebacker. He’s so used to breaking and going from safety, you had to slow him down.”

So the record that has never been set by any school in the history of the NFL draft was set by a kid with five career games at the position and a kid his own coaches deliberately kept away from it.

The hole in this, and it is a real one

There is one thing in this story that does not belong to Ohio State’s recruiting department, and it would be dishonest to bury it.

What moved Sonny Styles to linebacker was Caleb Downs. Once Ohio State added the Alabama transfer safety, the secondary was full, and Styles went down a level. The transfer portal is in this record after all. It just did not arrive carrying a linebacker. It arrived carrying the safety who took Styles’ job, and that is what turned a safety into the seventh pick in the draft.

Which means the honest verdict is narrower than the headline, and more interesting. Ohio State did not sign the best linebackers in America and watch them become the best linebackers in America. It signed two Ohio kids who were not really linebackers yet, moved one of them down a level because a transfer took his job, and got the first top-10 linebacker pair in the sport’s history out of it.

That is not a recruiting pitch. It is a development pitch with a recruiting pitch’s record attached, which is exactly what Quarterback U turned out to be. The difference, the one that matters, and the reason this piece reads differently from the other six: this time Ohio State recruited the men themselves.

What the 2027 class is actually buying

Ohio State’s 2027 class has 19 commits, and two of them are linebackers: four-star Prince Goldsby and four-star Quinton Cypher.

Both are recruited as linebackers. Which is, on the evidence above, not the bet that produced Arvell Reese and Sonny Styles.

That is not a criticism, and it is not a prediction. Nobody here knows whether Goldsby and Cypher become what Reese and Styles became, and anybody telling you otherwise in July 2026 is guessing. But it is worth saying plainly what the last three years actually proved, because the pitch a recruit hears this summer will be the simple version, and the simple version is wrong.

The simple version is that Ohio State is Linebacker U now, so come be a linebacker here.

The record says something stranger and better. Ohio State found a top-10 linebacker in a kid who had played five games there, and another in a safety it refused to move until it was ready. Whatever that is, it is not a position. It is an eye.

DBU has two machines, and only one of them is recruiting. The 2027 class is a test of the older one

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Caleb Downs on the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium after Ohio State won the College Football Playoff National Championship, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The man at the top of this page went 11th overall to the Dallas Cowboys, and he is the best argument against the thing his jersey is usually used to prove.

Ohio State is DBU. That is not a fan’s claim, it is a counting exercise, and Eleven Warriors did the counting: entering the 2022 draft the Buckeyes had put 20 defensive backs in the first round, with Texas and Miami seven behind at 13 each. Matt Gutridge wrote it plainly that April: many fans call Ohio State DBU, the Buckeye secondary calls itself BIA, best in America, and NFL teams agree.

But a first-round defensive back is proof of two different things at once, and recruiting is only one of them. A program can recruit a player, or it can acquire one. Both put a man in the first round. Only one of them is a promise you can make to a seventeen-year-old on a visit.

Caleb Downs is not evidence of the pipeline

Downs went 11th overall to Dallas in the 2026 draft, and per On3’s Spencer Holbrook he reached Columbus by the other road entirely. The Mill Creek native, out of Hoschton, Georgia, was a five-star in the class of 2023, and he chose Alabama over Georgia and Ohio State. Ohio State recruited him and lost him. He played one season in Tuscaloosa, entered the portal when Nick Saban’s retirement broke, and Ohio State, in Holbrook’s words, won the re-recruiting war against Georgia for him.

So the freshest and shiniest brick in the DBU wall is a portal brick. That is not a knock on Downs or on the staff that landed him, it is a fact about which machine produced him, and it matters here because this is a recruiting site. Ohio State’s ability to win a 21-year-old All-American out of the portal tells a high school junior almost nothing about what happens to him.

The recruiting case for DBU is real. It is just older, and it is better.

Three in one round, three different ways

On one night in April 2017 Ohio State did something no program had done more of. Per 247Sports, Marshon Lattimore went 11th overall to New Orleans, Malik Hooker went four picks later to Indianapolis at 15, and Gareon Conley went 24th to Oakland: three defensive backs in a single first round, tying Miami’s 2002 mark for the most ever taken.

All three were high school recruits. And the interesting part is that no two of them arrived the same way.

Lattimore was the blue-chip you would expect. Eleven Warriors’ Tim Shoemaker described a two-way star at Glenville High School in Cleveland, an Army All-American, a nationally coveted prospect and a top-50 recruit with scholarship offers from nearly every powerhouse program in the country. He committed on January 4, 2014. Ohio State won a fight it was supposed to win, over an Ohio kid it could not afford to lose.

Conley was taken off Michigan. Per Eleven Warriors’ Vico, on March 10, 2012, Conley became the fifteenth member of Michigan’s recruiting class when he committed to the Wolverines. He did not stay. On December 7, 2012, Conley committed to Ohio State, and four and a half years later he was a first-round pick for a program he had once pledged to beat.

Hooker was a three-star. This is the one that should reorganize how you read a recruiting ranking. Shoemaker’s account: a high school basketball phenom out of New Castle, Pennsylvania, who opted to play football in college despite only playing it for a few years at the prep level, seen more as a developmental prospect than an instant-impact player. He picked the Buckeyes on July 29, 2013. Four years later he was the 15th pick in the NFL draft.

Win the elite in-state kid. Flip the rival’s commit. Develop the three-star nobody else saw. Three defensive backs, one first round, three separate mechanisms. That is what a pipeline actually looks like from the inside, and it is a far more useful thing to show a recruit than a portal win.

The 2027 class is running all three plays again

Ohio State has four defensive backs committed in its 2027 class, and our board has every one of them verified.

At safety, Eli Johnson is a four-star, No. 208 nationally as of July 16, out of Cibolo Steele in Cibolo, Texas, committed since November 15, 2025. Angelo Smith is a three-star, No. 882 nationally in the July 16 snapshot, out of Chaminade-Madonna in Hollywood, Florida, and he has been committed since September 21, 2025, which makes him the longest-standing defensive back in the class.

At corner, Jaden Carey is a four-star, No. 383 nationally as of July 16, out of St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, and he pledged on June 17, 2026. And Deontay Malone is a four-star, No. 285 nationally as of July 16, who committed on June 14, 2026, out of Massillon Washington.

Read that last school name again. Gareon Conley went to Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio. Ohio State’s 2027 corner comes from the same building.

That is a fact, not a forecast. Malone is not Conley and a high school does not confer anything. But this is precisely the shape of the older machine still running: an Ohio corner out of a program Ohio State has recruited before, landed in June, a year and a half before he signs.

The mechanisms are all visible in this class if you know to look for them. Angelo Smith is the three-star safety, which is the only detail Malik Hooker’s file and his have in common and is worth exactly that much, because Hooker’s ranking is history and Smith’s career has not happened yet. We are not predicting anything. We are pointing out that the last time Ohio State put three defensive backs in one first round, one of them was rated where Smith is rated now, and the program took him anyway.

What is still open

One corner is still live. Gabriel Osborne Jr., the No. 5 cornerback in the class, committed to Oklahoma in June, and per Eleven Warriors on July 1 Ohio State is still pursuing him. That would be the Conley play, run in the other direction: take a corner off a program that already has his pledge.

And one is gone in exactly the way that stings. Monsanna Torbert Jr., a four-star and No. 106 nationally, took an Ohio State official visit from June 12 to 14, visited Michigan the next weekend, and pledged to the Wolverines on July 1, per Eleven Warriors and Buckeyes Wire. Fourteen years after Conley left Michigan for Columbus, a Cincinnati corner left Columbus for Michigan. The flip runs both directions, and it always has.

Four defensive backs in, one corner still on the board, one lost across the rivalry. The wall says 20 first-rounders. Downs is the reminder that the wall has two builders. The 2027 secondary is the older one, still working.

Quarterback U? Three Buckeye first-rounders in nine years, and two of them were recruited by somebody else

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Julian Sayin warming up before an Ohio State game in 2024. Alabama recruited him. Ohio State got him from the transfer portal. Photo: Ruralexpat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Update, July 23: Edmunds shut down his recruitment and plans to sign with Ohio State in December. The one-quarterback class this piece describes is now a settled one-quarterback class, and Eleven Warriors reports the expectation is that he will be the only one in it. The argument below, about what happens when the one leaves, stands as written on July 16.

The quarterback at the top of this page is the most accurate passer in college football, per Eleven Warriors, and Dan Hope has him in the running to be the first quarterback taken in the 2027 NFL draft. That would make him Ohio State’s fourth top-15 pick at quarterback in nine years.

Alabama recruited him.

The case for Quarterback U

Start with the part that is not in dispute. When Houston took C.J. Stroud with the No. 2 overall pick in 2023, Sports Illustrated noted he was “the fourth-ever and third-straight Ohio State starting quarterback to be taken in the first round.” Before him it was Justin Fields, the No. 11 selection in 2021. Before him, Dwayne Haskins, the No. 15 pick in the 2019 draft. Before all of them, and a long way before, Art Schlichter went No. 4 overall in 1982.

Three first-round quarterbacks in five drafts, and a fourth in that run on the way if Hope is right about Sayin. There is no other way to say it: the NFL keeps taking Ohio State quarterbacks early, and the pitch writes itself for any high school passer with an offer.

The pitch just is not, on inspection, a recruiting pitch.

Where they actually came from

Take the four names one at a time and ask a single question about each: which school’s recruiting department signed him out of high school?

Dwayne Haskins. Ohio State’s. He was ranked No. 23 overall in the ESPN 300 and the No. 3 quarterback in the 2016 class when he switched his pledge from Maryland to Ohio State in January 2016, per ESPN’s Tom VanHaaren, after Maryland fired Randy Edsall mid-season. “It has been a dream of mine to play for Ohio State,” Haskins said at the time. That is a flip, and a flip is recruiting. Ohio State went and took the No. 3 quarterback in the country off another Big Ten program while he was still in high school and unsigned. That is the machine working exactly as advertised.

C.J. Stroud. Ohio State’s. Eleven Warriors’ Zack Carpenter had him as the “No. 2-ranked pro-style quarterback in the 2020 class” out of Rancho Cucamonga High School in California when he committed in December 2019, over Georgia and Michigan. Also a genuine recruiting win, also over a blue blood.

Justin Fields. Georgia’s. Fields was “the No. 1 recruit in the 2018 ESPN 300,” per ESPN’s Mark Schlabach, and he signed with Georgia, where he spent his freshman season behind Jake Fromm and threw 39 passes all year. He arrived in Columbus in January 2019 as a transfer. The best recruit in America at any position in his class was recruited, signed and enrolled by another school. Ohio State got him second.

Julian Sayin. Alabama’s. He was “ESPN’s top quarterback recruit in the 2024 class” and “ESPN’s No. 3 overall prospect” in it, per Pete Thamel, and he committed to Alabama, enrolled at Alabama in early January, and entered the portal within weeks when Nick Saban retired. Ohio State got him second too.

So the modern Quarterback U case is 50/50. Two of those four were recruited here. Two were recruited somewhere else and acquired later. (Schlichter, the 1982 pick, sits outside the nine-year run, and I have no source for who recruited him, so he stays a number and nothing more.)

And then there is the one who won it

The quarterback who actually delivered the national championship is not on the first-round list at all, and his route is the bluntest of the lot. Will Howard “played his first four years at Kansas State,” per the Associated Press, and told CBS Sports he left because “they kind of took advantage of me and got me for cheap, so I decided to go somewhere else and make a little money.” He went 12-5 over 17 starts in Manhattan before he ever wore scarlet.

Then he opened the College Football Playoff title game with 13 straight completions, a record for that game, finished 17 of 21 for 231 yards, and was named its offensive MVP. Across four playoff games he completed 75.2 percent of his throws for 1,150 yards and eight touchdowns.

Ohio State’s most important quarterback season of the last decade was played by a man Kansas State recruited.

What this actually means, and what it does not

Here is the conclusion this piece will not draw: that Ohio State has stopped recruiting quarterbacks, or prefers the portal at the position. Nothing in the reporting says that, and our own board contradicts the strong version of it. The 2027 class has a quarterback, and he has been committed for more than 18 months.

What the record does support is narrower and more useful to a recruit. Quarterback U is a development claim, not a recruiting claim. Ohio State’s evidence that it turns quarterbacks into first-round picks is real, and roughly half of it was assembled from other programs’ recruiting classes. Haskins and Stroud prove the pipeline can start in high school. Fields, Howard and Sayin prove it does not have to.

That is not a scandal. It is arguably a compliment: the coaching staff has twice identified the best available passer in the country after somebody else did the recruiting, and made him better. But a 17-year-old being shown three first-round jerseys should know which of them the Buckeyes signed on signing day, because it changes what the number is evidence of.

This site has now caught the same shape three times. The O-Line U pitch leaned on two linemen in one draft when one of them arrived from San Diego State. The Running Back U pitch leaned on two backs in one draft when one of them, Quinshon Judkins, spent two seasons at Ole Miss first. The DBU pitch leaned on Caleb Downs, who chose Alabama over Ohio State out of high school. Every one of those facts is true. None of them is a fact about recruiting.

The 2027 answer

Which brings it back to the board.

Ohio State has nineteen players committed in the 2027 class as of July 18. Exactly one is a quarterback: Brady Edmunds, a four-star from Huntington Beach, California, ranked No. 251 nationally at the time of writing, committed since December 2024. Through the middle of July he was also, as this site reported on July 5, the least settled piece of the class: he took June official visits to both Ohio State and UCLA, and told 247Sports’ Blair Angulo that the Buckeyes “made it clear that they want me in this class.”

There is no second quarterback on the board. If the pattern of the last nine years holds, that is not necessarily the crisis it looks like, and that is exactly the problem with the pattern.

Full class: the 2027 commit board. Where the holes are: class needs.

Running Back U? Ohio State owns the record book and has no running back in the 2027 class

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Archie Griffin in 2015. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1974 and 1975 and is still the only player to win it twice. Photo: Paula R. Lively, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Tight End U? Ohio State set a school record at tight end in April and recruited none of it

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rotunda at Ohio Stadium, 2012. Photo: Sam Howzit, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

O-Line U: the NFL pipeline behind Ohio State's six-man 2027 offensive line class

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Center Josh Myers sets over the ball for Ohio State. Photo: AlfredoGXA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Monshun Sales announced Friday, and Ohio State was no longer the favorite

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Resolved. This story was filed before the decision. The outcome, reported JULY 19, 2026: Monshun Sales picks Indiana, and Ohio State misses on the No. 1 receiver in 2027

Fans arrive outside Ohio Stadium before the Michigan game, November 2014. Photo: Mwlloyd1216, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Monshun Sales has a date. The five-star receiver announces at noon on Friday, July 17, live on the Pat McAfee Show, and he is choosing between Ohio State, Alabama, Indiana, LSU and Texas.

That is three days from now, and it makes him the first of three Ohio State decisions in six days. Karlos May follows on Saturday. David Gabriel Georges follows on the 22nd. By the end of next week the shape of this recruiting class is settled, and Ohio State is favored in exactly one of the three.

The best receiver on the board, and the numbers behind him

Sales is 6-foot-5, he plays at Lawrence North High School in Indianapolis, and he is the rare recruit whose ranking depends on which ranking you read. In 247Sports’ own evaluation, per Jeff Rabjohns, he is the No. 1 receiver in the country and the No. 13 prospect overall. In the 247Sports composite, the average that our commit board uses for every player on it, he is the No. 2 receiver and No. 8 overall.

Both are true. They are different instruments, and every outlet covering Friday has picked one. We list him at No. 8 because that is the number the rest of the board is measured in, and a board that mixes ranking systems is a board that cannot be compared to itself.

As a junior he caught 37 passes for 794 yards and nine touchdowns, an average of 21.5 yards a catch, and added 56 tackles playing safety, per 247Sports. The scouting note attached to his profile there calls him “one of the biggest freakshows in the country with his hulking frame and elite athletic markers.”

Ohio State was the favorite. That was a while ago.

This is the part Buckeye fans will not enjoy. Buckeyes Wire put it plainly on Sunday: “There was a time when the Buckeyes were seen as the odds-on favorite to land Sales, but that sentiment seems to have faded in recent months.”

Sales grew up in Alabama and lives in Indiana, and the reporting has converged on Indiana as the school to beat, with Alabama the other name that keeps coming up. Writing on Tuesday, Land-Grant Holy Land’s Dan Hessler has the Hoosiers ahead and adds that Ohio State’s staff “will not give up easily in this one.”

So we are not going to tell you what happens Friday, because nobody covering this recruitment knows. What we can tell you is what it costs. Ohio State has two receivers committed in this class, five-star Jamier Brown and three-star Jordan Donahoo. Sales would be the third, and he would be the highest-rated player in the entire class. The only other receiver on the board is Benny Easter Jr., who is committed to Texas Tech and would have to be flipped.

Saturday: the one they are supposed to win

Karlos May announces the next day, July 18, choosing among Auburn, Georgia, Florida State and Ohio State. Hessler reports Ohio State is “viewed as the slight favorite.”

May is the four-star defensive tackle at No. 132 overall, and he matters out of proportion to that number. This class has zero true defensive tackles. Not a thin room, an empty one. Our 2027 needs page counts it straight from the board every time the board changes, and it has been reading the same thing all summer.

The 22nd: Ole Miss is in it now

And then the biggest one. Georges, the five-star running back, announces Wednesday, July 22 at 5:30 p.m. ET on the CBS Sports College Football YouTube channel.

Here is what changed since we last wrote about him: this is no longer a two-team race. Every report through early July framed it as Ohio State against Tennessee. As of this week, Sports Illustrated’s CFB HQ and Land-Grant Holy Land both list three finalists, and the third is Ole Miss. We have corrected his profile and the board accordingly.

Georges himself does not sound like a young man who has decided. He told reporters, in comments SI published Monday, “It’s hard. You feel this way, like you know, and then it’s sort of 50-50. People will say the 22nd of July is far off, but honestly for me, it’s pretty close.”

The stakes there are the plainest on the board. Ohio State has no running back in this class at all. Georges is the No. 10 overall prospect in the composite and the No. 2 back in the country. On3’s Pete Nakos has reported he is expected to become the highest-paid running back recruit ever, with a deal that could approach two million dollars. That is a reported expectation and not a signed number, and we will not print it as one.

Six days

Eighteen commitments as of July 14, No. 7 in the class rankings, and three of the best remaining players in America all answering the same question inside one week. Ohio State could finish next Wednesday with a five-star receiver, a defensive tackle and a five-star running back. It could also finish with the defensive tackle and two polite thank-you posts.

The board moves on Friday at noon. We will move with it.

Ohio State's 2027 offense after visit season: six linemen, and nobody to hand the ball to

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Emeka Egbuka at Ohio State's national championship celebration, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Split the 18 commitments Ohio State held as of July 6 down the middle and the two halves do not look like they belong to the same class. The defense has nine pledges and a defensive line Eleven Warriors ranks with the best the program has ever signed. The offense also has nine. Six of them are offensive linemen.

That is the whole shape of this side of the ball after official visit season. Ohio State has built a wall, and it has not yet found anyone to run behind it.

Update, July 18: defensive tackle Karlos May committed and the class moved to 19. The even split this piece opens with is now ten defenders and nine on offense. Nothing on the offensive side of the board has changed.

Update, July 23: two of the three open questions below are answered, and they went opposite ways. Brady Edmunds shut down his recruitment and is staying; David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22, so the running back room is still empty. Correction, July 25: the quarterback section below originally said Edmunds visited UCLA after Columbus. He visited UCLA on June 5 and Columbus on June 19, per Eleven Warriors and A to Z Sports. The order is corrected in place and stated here rather than quietly fixed.

The line is the class

Start where the work is done. Justin Frye holds six offensive linemen, and Dan Hope calls the group “the strongest and most complete position in Ohio State’s recruiting class on the offensive side of the ball.”

As of July 11, Kellen Wymer, the four-star from Liberty Center in Ohio, was the highest ranked at No. 67 overall. Caden Moss, the tackle out of Jackson Academy in Mississippi who pledged in late June, was No. 74 when this ran. Behind them: Brody McNeel of Godwin in Virginia at No. 310, Jimmy Kalis of Central Catholic in Pittsburgh at No. 323, Mason Wilt of St. Clairsville at No. 365, and Davis Seaman of Bishop Watterson in Columbus at No. 423. Four of the six are Ohio kids. All six are four-stars.

Six linemen is not a shortage. It is close to a finished room, in a cycle where the rest of the offense has barely started.

No running back, and one date

The class has no running back. Not a low-rated one, not a project. None.

Ohio State’s answer was David Gabriel Georges, the No. 10 overall prospect in the country. When this ran, the Buckeyes and Tennessee were his two finalists; by mid-July, SI’s CFB HQ and Land-Grant Holy Land both had Ole Miss in the group as a third. Hope’s framing was not subtle, and it is worth quoting exactly: he called it “arguably the most consequential decision of the entire 2027 recruiting cycle for Ohio State.” On July 22, Georges chose Tennessee over Ohio State and Ole Miss, per ESPN and CBS Sports.

He was right about the stakes, and the reason is arithmetic rather than hype. A class that signs the No. 10 player in the country at its emptiest position finishes with a top-heavy offense and a filled hole. A class that loses him has nine offensive commits, six of them linemen, and no back to take a handoff in a room that has to be rebuilt from scratch next cycle. There was no third outcome, and the class got the second one.

No tight end either, and no visits

The second hole gets far less attention and is arguably more damning, because losing a recruitment is one thing and never contesting it is another.

Ohio State has no tight end in the class. Per Eleven Warriors, the Buckeyes “didn’t even host a single official visitor at tight end this summer,” a situation Hope calls “certainly not ideal.” The one uncommitted name attached to the position is Colton Johnson, a three-star out of Tennessee. For a program that has put tight ends in the NFL out of this exact pipeline, an empty room and an empty visit list in the same summer is the quietest problem on the board.

The quarterback took a visit somewhere else

Brady Edmunds, the four-star from Huntington Beach and the No. 251 overall prospect at the time of writing, is still committed to Ohio State. He also took an official visit to UCLA, on June 5, before he took his to Columbus on June 19, and he has not said plainly that he is staying.

What he has said, on the subject of walking away from his Ohio State pledge, is that “it would be a tough thing to walk away from.” That is a sentence with a door in it. We have been tracking this one for a week, and nothing in the last month has closed it.

Receiver is fine, and it cost them one

Brian Hartline has the one position group on offense that looks like a normal Ohio State position group. Jamier Brown, the five-star who was at Big Walnut in Ohio when this was written and has since gone back to Wayne in Huber Heights, is the No. 24 overall prospect in the class. Jordan Donahoo of Oviedo, Florida joins him as a three-star.

Two names were live when this ran. Monshun Sales, a five-star out of Indiana, has since committed to Indiana. Benny Easter Jr., the No. 64 overall prospect as of July 7, is committed to Texas Tech and named as an Ohio State flip target. One name is already gone: Blake Wong picked BYU.

What the rankings see, and what they miss

None of this is why Ohio State slid in the industry rankings, but it explains why the slide does not scare the staff. Rivals moved the Buckeyes from No. 5 to No. 7 in its updated 2027 industry team rankings, per SI’s Matt De Lima on July 6. The same article concedes the part the number hides: Ohio State’s average rating per commit is among the highest of any program in the top seven.

That is the rankings paradox this class keeps running into. Volume-weighted formulas punish a class that is nine deep on offense with six linemen and one enormous unanswered question. They did not know the question would be answered on July 22, and not in Ohio State’s favor.

What to actually watch

The offensive line is finished and it is very good. Everything else on this side of the ball is a hole, a maybe, or a date on a calendar. Georges answered on July 22, and chose Tennessee. Edmunds answered on July 23, and stayed. Tight end may not get answered at all.

See where every one of them stands on the 2027 commit board, and what the class still needs on the needs page.

The last tight end on the board is gone: Colton Johnson picks Ole Miss

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Block O student section before kickoff at Ohio Stadium. Photo: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On July 6, Eleven Warriors took stock of Ohio State’s 2027 class at every offensive position and reached the tight ends with almost nothing to report. No commits. No official visitors, not one, all summer. Dan Hope’s summary of the position was blunt: as things stood, three-star Tennessee prospect Colton Johnson was the only uncommitted tight end who held an Ohio State offer.

Three days later, Johnson committed to Ole Miss.

The pledge came Thursday, July 9. Johnson, a 6-foot-4 tight end from Upperman High School in Cookeville, Tennessee, chose the Rebels over Alabama, Florida State, North Carolina and Purdue, per On3’s Chad Simmons. Ohio State is not on that list. The Tennessean, reporting the commitment the same day, does name the Buckeyes among the programs that came after him when his junior film got out, alongside Tennessee, Alabama, Indiana and Oregon.

So this is not a near miss. Ohio State offered, and the recruitment moved on without them.

How the position emptied

The tight end room in this class was not lost in a day. It was lost in three separate moments, and only the last one arrived with a name attached to Ohio State.

Brock Williams was the priority, and had been since last fall. He went to Texas after Ohio State declined to meet his NIL terms, per Eleven Warriors. Sean Currie was booked into Columbus for the first official visit weekend at the end of May and committed to Penn State before he ever made the trip. Ohio State did not schedule another official visit at the position with anyone else.

That left Johnson, who was less a plan than a leftover. And now he is an Ole Miss commit.

What it actually changes

Very little on the field, and quite a lot on the board. Our 2027 needs page computes each position group straight from the commit board, and tight end has been reading STILL OPEN for as long as the page has existed: zero commits, zero targets. What has changed is that the emptiness now has a reason printed under it. Until Thursday, the position was a hole with somebody theoretically in front of it. Now it is a hole.

Ohio State has nine offensive pledges in the class and six of them are offensive linemen. There is no running back, which is what makes the David Gabriel Georges decision on July 22 the biggest date left on the calendar. And there is no tight end, which is what makes this week quietly worse than it looks.

The staff’s own history is the case for calm. Keenan Bailey has done late-cycle tight end recruiting before, and Eleven Warriors reports the hope is a repeat of the Nick Lautar recruitment from last cycle, when the answer arrived in the fall rather than the summer. New names will emerge. They usually do.

But they have to emerge, and that is not the same as being recruited. For now, the class of 2027 has no tight end committed, no tight end on the board, and no tight end who took an official visit. Three ways of describing the same empty room.

Five of Ohio State's 19 pledges are from Ohio, and the state's best cornerbacks all left

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1893 Ohio State football team. Photo: Ohio State Yearbook, public domain, via Wikimedia Commonsnull

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.

The 2021 blueprint: the defensive line class Ohio State's 2027 front is chasing

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

JT Tuimoloau, part of the 2021 defensive line class, at the January 2025 title celebration. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Every time Ohio State assembles a defensive line class, the same year gets invoked as the measuring stick: 2021. When Eleven Warriors called the 2027 front the program’s best since that group, it was not reaching for a round number. The 2021 class is the standard, and it is worth knowing exactly what the standard was before deciding how close the current one has come.

What 2021 actually looked like

The 2021 recruiting class was the highest-rated in Ohio State history. Its 247Sports composite average rating landed at 0.9476, the best mark the program had ever posted, per Eleven Warriors’ July 2021 accounting. It carried six five-star commits, and for the first time ever, five of the top ten prospects in 247Sports’ own rankings chose the same school: JT Tuimoloau, Jack Sawyer, Donovan Jackson, Emeka Egbuka and TreVeyon Henderson. Nationally the class finished second only to Alabama’s seven-five-star haul.

The defensive line was the spine of it. Per Sports Illustrated’s 2023 retrospective, the composite had the group ranked like this:

JT Tuimoloau, defensive end, No. 4 overall and the No. 2 defensive lineman in the country.
Jack Sawyer, defensive end, No. 5 overall and the No. 3 defensive lineman.
Mike Hall Jr., defensive tackle, No. 53 overall and the No. 10 defensive lineman.
Tyleik Williams, defensive tackle, No. 166 overall and the No. 25 defensive lineman.

Two ends inside the top five prospects in the entire country. Two tackles inside the top 25 at the position. That is the shape of a class that anchored the defense Ohio State rode through its 2024 national championship season, and it is the shape the 2027 group is being held up against.

Where the 2027 line stands

The current front does not match 2021 name for name, and the honest read is that no class does. What it shares is the structure that made 2021 rare: elite ends on the edge, ranked talent inside.

Larry Johnson holds three defensive linemen inside the top 100 of the composite. As of July 10, DJ Jacobs was the No. 4 overall prospect and the No. 1 edge rusher in the class, the same slot Tuimoloau occupied. Marcus Fakatou sat at No. 26 overall and the No. 2 defensive lineman when this ran. Wyatt Smith was the third, an end at No. 82. Per Eleven Warriors, that gives Ohio State one of only two classes in the country with two five-star defensive linemen, and one of only two with three defensive linemen ranked inside the top 100.

The Buckeyes have not done both in the same cycle since 2021. That is the specific bar the comparison rests on, and the 2027 class clears it.

The one piece 2021 had that 2027 is still chasing

There is a real gap, and it is the same position that made the 2021 class complete: defensive tackle. Tuimoloau and Sawyer were the headliners, but Hall and Williams gave that class two blue-chip interior linemen. The 2027 class does not yet have a true tackle committed.

That is why Karlos May’s July 18 announcement matters more than the calendar suggests. May is the No. 132 overall prospect, and Dan Hope’s read is that landing him would earn Johnson “an A+ for the cycle.” He is, in other words, the piece that would move this line from an elite edge class to a complete one, which is the exact thing the 2021 group was.

For the full picture of who is committed, who is still on the board, and who got away, the 2027 commit board carries the class as it stands. And for how visit season reshaped the rest of the defense, read the state of Ohio State’s 2027 defense after official visits.

Ohio State's 2027 defense after visit season: a historic line, and a hole at cornerback

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State celebrates the national championship, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Official visit season is over, and as of July 7 nine of Ohio State’s 18 pledges in the class of 2027 play defense. Read the group from the line backward and it splits cleanly in two: a defensive front that Eleven Warriors ranks among the best the program has ever assembled, and a secondary that is still missing the player it needs most.

The line is the story

Larry Johnson’s haul is the headline. As of July 10, Ohio State held three defensive linemen inside the top 100 of the 247Sports composite: DJ Jacobs, the 6-5, 235-pound end from Blessed Trinity Catholic who was the No. 4 overall prospect in the country and the No. 1 edge rusher in the class; Marcus Fakatou, the 6-6, 275-pounder out of Sierra Canyon in California, No. 26 overall and the No. 2 defensive lineman; and Wyatt Smith, a 6-6, 235-pound end from St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale who sat at No. 82 and No. 11 among edge rushers.

Per Eleven Warriors, that makes Ohio State one of only two schools in the country with two five-star defensive linemen in this class, and one of only two with three defensive linemen ranked inside the top 100. The Buckeyes have not done both in the same cycle since the 2021 class that signed JT Tuimoloau, Jack Sawyer and Mike Hall.

One job was left. As of July 7 the class had no true defensive tackle, and the staff had spent the summer on Karlos May, the No. 132 overall prospect. May announced on Saturday, July 18, choosing between Auburn, Georgia, Florida State and Ohio State, per Auburn Wire. Dan Hope’s read was that Johnson would deserve “an A+ for the cycle” if May picked the Buckeyes. That decision, not the July 22 running back announcement most of the fan base had circled, was the next domino on this board.

Update, July 18: May committed to Ohio State. The class moved to 19, and the defensive tackle hole this piece describes is closed.

Two linebackers, quietly

Behind the line, James Laurinaitis has taken two: Prince Goldsby, the 6-3, 205-pound four-star from Blue Springs South in Missouri, and Quinton Cypher, 6-2 and 220 pounds out of Millbrook in Raleigh.

Goldsby is the one worth watching, because the industry keeps moving him up. When he committed in late May, before he had even taken his official visit, Eleven Warriors listed him at No. 101 overall and the No. 7 linebacker in the composite. In the July 7 snapshot he is No. 96 and the No. 6 linebacker. He picked Ohio State over a list that included Alabama, Oregon, Penn State, Miami and his home-state Missouri, and announced it plainly: “100% committed. Go BUCKS!”

Hope’s assessment of the pair is honest rather than promotional. The room does not “jump off the page quite as much” as recent Ohio State linebacker classes, he writes, but it “still includes two linebackers with the talent to be future starters.” The Buckeyes may not take a third. They would have, had Kaylon Bailey not chosen Colorado; Eleven Warriors reports he would have been the No. 3 linebacker in this class.

The hole is at corner

This is where the class is genuinely short. Tim Walton has two cornerbacks committed. As of July 10 they were Deontay Malone of Massillon Washington at No. 285 nationally and Jaden Carey of St. Thomas Aquinas at No. 383. Both are four-stars. Neither is a top-100 player, and Eleven Warriors notes what that means if it holds: this would be Ohio State’s first recruiting class in five years without a cornerback ranked among the top 100 overall prospects.

It holds because of who left. The three highest-rated cornerbacks in the state of Ohio all committed elsewhere. Monsanna Torbert Jr. picked Michigan on July 1, Ace Alston went to Notre Dame, and Kei’Shjuan Telfair chose Penn State. Beyond the state line, John Meredith III committed to Texas and Gabriel Osborne Jr. to Oklahoma, and Ohio State is still working the Osborne recruitment. Walton needs at least one elite corner to finish this class, and the pool of them is thinning by the week.

Safety is steadier without being solved. Matt Guerrieri holds Eli Johnson, a 6-3, 200-pound four-star from Cibolo Steele in Texas who ranked No. 208 overall and No. 17 at the position when this ran, and Angelo Smith, a three-star from Chaminade-Madonna in Hollywood, Florida. Ohio State wants one more.

What to actually watch

The defensive front is finished work, and it is very good. Everything left in this class is in the back seven, and the calendar is unkind: the corner board has fewer names on it every month, and the one player who can push the line from great to historic answers on July 18.

Track every name above on the 2027 commit board, which carries the full class, the prospects still on the board, and the ones who got away.

18 and counting: where Ohio State's 2027 class stands after official visit season

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio Stadium from the air, September 2018. Photo: Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Official visit season is over, and Ohio State’s 2027 class sits at 18 commitments as of July 6. Five of those arrived in the last month alone, and the group now carries three five-stars, thirteen four-stars, and two three-stars in the 247Sports composite.

The headliner is DJ Jacobs, a 6-5, 235-pound defensive end out of Blessed Trinity Catholic in Roswell, Georgia. Jacobs is the No. 4 overall prospect in the country and the No. 1 player at his position in the composite. Behind him sit two more five-stars: Jamier Brown, a 5-11 wide receiver ranked No. 24 nationally as of July 7, who was enrolled at Big Walnut High School in Sunbury on this date and has since returned to Wayne in Huber Heights, and Marcus Fakatou, a 6-6, 275-pound defensive lineman from Sierra Canyon in California who picked the Buckeyes over Georgia and Texas at the end of June.

Still on the board

Update, July 22: all three names in this section have since decided. Karlos May committed to Ohio State on July 18; Monshun Sales chose Indiana on July 17; David Gabriel Georges chose Tennessee on July 22. The snapshot below is as of July 6.

The class is far from closed. Running back David Gabriel Georges, wide receiver Monshun Sales, and defensive tackle Karlos May all remain live targets, and the staff is working a flip on Texas Tech wide receiver commit Benny Easter Jr., the No. 64 overall player in the composite as of July 7.

Who got away

Visit season cuts both ways. Ohio State lost Blake Wong to BYU, Kaylon Bailey to Colorado, and Jayden Miles to Florida State, and Cincinnati corner Monsanna Torbert Jr. picked Michigan on July 1. The Miles and Torbert misses sting the most, and we broke both down separately.

The takeaway: this is already a top-ten class by most outlets’ math, the front seven haul is historic, and the three weeks after this snapshot decided whether it finished with a running back and a locked-in quarterback. July 22, the day Georges announced, was circled in scarlet. It went to Tennessee, and the running back hole is still open.

Circle July 22: David Gabriel Georges will make or break the running back class

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Resolved. This story was filed before the decision. The outcome, reported JULY 22, 2026: David Gabriel Georges picks Tennessee, and Ohio State's 2027 class has no running back and no one left to take

TreVeyon Henderson at the January 2025 title celebration. The 2027 class is still looking for its back. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Update, July 22: Georges committed to Tennessee, choosing the Vols over Ohio State and Ole Miss, per ESPN and CBS Sports. Our story on what the miss means for the class is here. The preview below ran before the decision.

The most important domino of Ohio State’s summer falls on July 22. Five-star running back David Gabriel Georges, the No. 10 overall prospect in the 247Sports composite, announces his commitment that day at 5:30 p.m. ET on the CBS Sports College Football YouTube channel, and the reporting now frames it as a three-team race between Ohio State, Tennessee and Ole Miss. Ole Miss joined the picture in mid-July, when SI’s CFB HQ and Land-Grant Holy Land both listed the same three finalists, and Georges is not tipping his hand: he told SI’s CFB HQ it feels “sort of 50-50.”

Georges is a Baylor School product out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the production is absurd: 1,756 rushing yards and 27 touchdowns in 2025. The fit is obvious. And the need is total, because Ohio State currently has zero running backs committed in the 2027 class.

Locklyn’s biggest swing

Running backs coach Carlos Locklyn has recruited Georges harder than any player on the board, per Eleven Warriors. This is the kind of recruitment where the position coach’s credibility is the pitch, and Locklyn has bet his summer on it.

The fallback options thinned out in June. Jayden Miles committed to Florida State one day after taking his Ohio State official visit. If Georges picks Tennessee or Ole Miss, the likeliest path is a flip attempt, possibly at Miles, which is never where you want to be at a premium position in late July.

Win this one and the class jumps a tier in every ranking that matters. Lose it and the back half of summer becomes a scramble. July 22. Circle it.

QB commit or QB question mark? Brady Edmunds weighed Ohio State against UCLA into July

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Buckeyes take the field at Ohio Stadium. Photo: David E. Lucas, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / DPLAnull

Update, July 23: resolved, and Ohio State won it. Edmunds shut down his recruitment and says he plans to sign with the Buckeyes in December. Our story on how the summer actually went is here. The watch item below ran on July 5, while it was still open.

Brady Edmunds has been committed to Ohio State for more than 18 months. He is also, right now, the least settled piece of the 2027 class.

The 6-5, 220-pound quarterback from Huntington Beach, California took official visits in June to both Ohio State and UCLA, and he has not definitively recommitted since. He told 247Sports’ Blair Angulo that the Buckeyes “made it clear that they want me in this class,” which is reassuring right up until you remember that recruits who are fully locked in do not usually need to say it.

Why the stakes are so high

Edmunds is the only quarterback committed in the class. He was a five-star when he pledged back in 2024 and has since settled in as a four-star, ranked No. 251 nationally and No. 19 at the position in the 247Sports composite.

The staff has done its diligence on alternatives. Ohio State took a run this spring at five-star Nebraska commit Trae Taylor, who has repeatedly reaffirmed his pledge to the Huskers. And that is roughly where every road leads: per the composite, every top-100 quarterback in the 2027 cycle is already committed somewhere.

So the math is simple. If Edmunds stays, Ohio State has its quarterback and nobody remembers the summer wobble. If he flips to UCLA, the Buckeyes are shopping in the flip market at the sport’s most protected position. Watch this one closely through July.

7th, 11th, or better? Why Ohio State's class ranking depends on who you ask

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ryan Day at Ohio State's national championship celebration, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Depending on which tab you have open, Ohio State’s 2027 class is either cruising or slipping. On3’s team rankings have the Buckeyes at No. 7. ESPN’s late-June update dropped them to No. 11, down from No. 8 earlier in the month and No. 5 in the spring. Same class, same commits, very different stories.

What ESPN is measuring

ESPN’s slide says less about Ohio State than about everyone else’s June. Their methodology leans heavily on volume of SC Next 300 prospects, and while the Buckeyes held steady, other classes exploded: Notre Dame surged to No. 2, Texas to No. 8, Michigan to No. 9. Texas A&M sits at consensus No. 1 with 23 commits, 15 of them blue-chip. When your rivals add bodies faster, a volume-weighted ranking punishes patience.

There is also a timing problem. That No. 11 was published June 26, before five-star DL Marcus Fakatou committed on June 29 and only hours after OT Caden Moss pledged. It was arguably stale on arrival.

Even the player ranks disagree

The outlets cannot even agree on names. ESPN lists “David Jacobs” as the No. 1 edge in the class; 247Sports, in the July 4 snapshot, calls him DJ Jacobs, the No. 4 overall player and No. 1 defensive end. Jamier Brown is ESPN’s No. 3 receiver and 247’s No. 4. Same humans, different math.

The through line: Ryan Day has signed seven straight top-five classes in the 247 composite, and the average star rating of this group is elite even when the volume rankings wobble. Rankings in July are a snapshot of a moving object. Check back on July 22.

The WRU dynasty timeline: from Garrett Wilson to Jett Harrison

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jeremiah Smith at Ohio State's national championship celebration, January 2025. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wide Receiver U is not a slogan, it is a ledger. Since 2019, Ohio State has signed a five-star wide receiver in nine of ten recruiting classes, including six in a row through the 2028 cycle. No other program in the country can print this list:

2019: Garrett Wilson. The one who set the modern standard. Top-ten NFL pick.
2020: Julian Fleming and Jaxon Smith-Njigba. Two five-stars in one room.
2021: Emeka Egbuka. The No. 1 receiver in his class.
2022: The only miss in the run.
2023: Brandon Inniss. The streak restarts.
2024: Jeremiah Smith and Mylan Graham. Smith may end up the best of all of them.
2025: Quincy Porter.
2026: Chris Henry Jr.
2027: Jamier Brown. A Huber Heights kid out of Wayne, No. 24 nationally in the July 3 snapshot, who shut down his recruitment in May. He spent one semester at Big Walnut in Sunbury and went back to Wayne in August.
2028: Jett Harrison. Marvin Harrison Jr.’s younger brother, committed July 1, 2026.

The room survives the coach

The remarkable part of the 2028 entry is who closed it. Brian Hartline, the architect of most of this list, left in January 2026 to become South Florida’s head coach. His successor, Cortez Hankton, needed six months to prove the brand outlives any one recruiter: Harrison committed, 2029 receiver Austin Miller became the program’s first commitment in that class, and Brown never wavered.

Dynasties at a single position are rare in college football because they depend on a pipeline of proof: recruit, develop, draft, repeat. Ohio State has run that loop at receiver for a decade. The list above is the receipt, and it is still growing.

Michigan reaches into Ohio: Monsanna Torbert Jr. spurns the Buckeyes

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State and Michigan meet in The Game, November 2022. Photo: Maize & Blue Nation, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This one hurts twice. Monsanna Torbert Jr., a four-star cornerback from Cincinnati ranked No. 106 overall in the 247Sports composite, committed to Michigan on July 1. An Ohio kid, at a position of need, to the rival.

Torbert chose the Wolverines from a final four of Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana, and Louisville. The sequencing tells the story: he took his official visit to Columbus June 12 through 14, then visited Ann Arbor the following weekend, and the momentum never came back. He had been an Indiana commit until decommitting in May, so a second pledge always felt close.

The bigger problem

Zoom out and the in-state picture is rough. Ohio’s three top-ranked 2027 cornerbacks are all now committed elsewhere: Torbert to Michigan, Ace Alston to Notre Dame, and Kei’Shjuan Telfair to Penn State.

Ohio State’s cornerback room in the class, as of July 2, consists of Deontay Malone of Massillon Washington (No. 285) and Jaden Carey of Florida’s St. Thomas Aquinas (No. 383). Solid players, but no committed defensive back sits inside the composite top 200, and the top remaining target at the position, Gabriel Osborne Jr., the No. 5 corner nationally, committed to Oklahoma last month. The staff is still pursuing Osborne, and they may need to land that flip to keep Tim Walton’s room stocked at the standard this program expects.

Losing recruits happens. Losing Cincinnati kids to Michigan is the kind of thing this site exists to track until it gets corrected.

Another Harrison in scarlet: Jett Harrison keeps the five-star WR streak alive

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Marvin Harrison Jr. warms up before an Ohio State game, 2022. Photo: Alexander Jonesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The last name alone would have made news. On Wednesday, July 1, Jett Harrison, the 2028 five-star wide receiver and younger brother of Marvin Harrison Jr., committed to Ohio State.

The commitment extends a streak that has become the program’s calling card: six consecutive recruiting classes with at least one five-star wide receiver, and nine of the last ten dating back to 2019. The full run reads like a first round mock draft:

2019: Garrett Wilson
2020: Julian Fleming and Jaxon Smith-Njigba
2021: Emeka Egbuka
2022: the lone miss
2023: Brandon Inniss
2024: Jeremiah Smith and Mylan Graham
2025: Quincy Porter
2026: Chris Henry Jr.
2027: Jamier Brown
2028: Jett Harrison

The Hankton era is working

The quiet story here is the coach. When Brian Hartline left in January to become South Florida’s head coach, the fair question was whether Wide Receiver U would skip a beat under Cortez Hankton. Six months in, the answer is no. Hankton has landed Harrison, secured 2029 receiver Austin Miller as the program’s first commitment in that class, and got five-star Jamier Brown to shut down his recruitment entirely back in May.

Receivers want to play here, whoever is coaching the room. That is what a dynasty position looks like.

Built in the trenches: how two postseason losses rewired Ohio State's 2027 strategy

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ohio State's offensive line against Michigan State at Ohio Stadium, 2023. Photo: Ralph Branson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commonsnull

Ten sacks. That is what Indiana and Miami combined for against Ohio State in last season’s two postseason losses, and you can draw a straight line from that number to what the staff did in the final week of June.

On Friday, June 26, the Buckeyes landed Caden Moss, a 6-5, 320-pound offensive tackle from Jackson Academy in Mississippi ranked No. 74 overall in the 247Sports composite at the time of his pledge. Three days later, five-star defensive lineman Marcus Fakatou picked Ohio State over Georgia and Texas. Two trench commitments in four days, both top-100 players.

The numbers behind the shift

The context makes it a strategy, not a coincidence. From 2020 through 2026, Ohio State signed 26 top-100 skill position players but only 5 top-100 offensive linemen. The 2027 class flips that ratio on its head:

Six offensive line commits: Moss, Kellen Wymer (No. 67, Liberty Center, Ohio), Brody McNeel (Richmond, Virginia), Jimmy Kalis (Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic), Mason Wilt (St. Clairsville, Ohio), and Davis Seaman (Bishop Watterson in Columbus). That is the first six-lineman class since 2020.
Moss is the program’s first top-100 out-of-state offensive line commit since Donovan Jackson in 2021.
If Moss and Wymer both sign, it would be Ohio State’s first pair of top-100 offensive line signees in a single class since 2018.
Only four schools in the country hold two top-100 OL commits in the 2027 cycle: Ohio State, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, and Florida.

The defensive line is keeping pace. Per Eleven Warriors, the Buckeyes are tied with Texas Tech for the most five-star defensive line commits in the cycle and tied with Texas A&M for the most top-100 DL commits.

Ryan Day has signed seven straight top-five classes in the composite. The star power is a constant. What changed is where the stars line up on the field, and that change started in January.

Four days, two top-100 linemen: the weekend that changed the 2027 class

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Donovan Jackson, the last top-100 out-of-state OL commit before Caden Moss, at the January 2025 title celebration. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Recruiting momentum is usually a narrative invention. Last week it was just the calendar. On Friday, June 26, offensive tackle Caden Moss committed to Ohio State. On Monday, June 29, five-star defensive lineman Marcus Fakatou followed. Four days, two top-100 linemen, one message about where this program is investing.

Moss is a 6-5, 320-pound tackle from Jackson Academy in Jackson, Mississippi, ranked No. 74 overall in the 247Sports composite. He is Ohio State’s first top-100 offensive line commit from outside the Midwest footprint in years, the first top-100 out-of-state OL pledge since Donovan Jackson in 2021.

Fakatou is the bigger headline. The 6-6, 275-pound lineman from Sierra Canyon in Chatsworth, California is the No. 26 overall prospect and the No. 2 defensive lineman in the composite, and he picked the Buckeyes over Georgia and Texas. When you beat those two programs for a West Coast five-star in the trenches, that is not a recruiting win, that is a statement of program health.

What it adds up to

With Fakatou in the fold, Ohio State is tied with Texas Tech for the most five-star defensive line commits in the 2027 cycle and tied with Texas A&M for the most top-100 defensive line commits. With Moss, the class holds six offensive linemen, the program’s first six-man OL haul since 2020, and one of only four two-top-100-OL classes in the country alongside Texas A&M, Notre Dame, and Florida.

Larry Johnson’s room and Tyler Bowen’s room both got younger, bigger, and meaner in the span of one weekend. The full strategic picture, and the January losses that forced it, deserves its own breakdown. We wrote that too.