Seven Ohio State position claims, tested against the record
7 PARTS / A SERIES, IN ORDEROhio State fans claim a lot of positions. Between July 10 and July 17, 2026, this site ran the same test on seven of them: take the claim, take the NFL draft record behind it, and ask who actually recruited the players holding it up. Six times the answer was somebody else. The seventh broke the pattern, and it is the last piece in the run for that reason.
What it found: A development claim wearing a recruiting claim's clothes. Max Klare produced at Purdue first. Will Kacmarek's only FBS offer out of high school came from Ohio. Caleb Downs picked Alabama. Justin Fields was Georgia's No. 1 signee. Then two Ohio kids went fifth and seventh in the same NFL first round, and nothing about that one needed a caveat.
Two five-star ends, two top-25 tackles, and the highest-rated class in program history. Here is what the standard actually was, and how close the 2027 line has come to it.
Two first-round linemen in one 2025 draft, the first such pair in fifty years, is the pitch that landed the Buckeyes' deepest line haul since 2020. Here is the record the recruiting is selling.
Dwayne Haskins, Justin Fields and C.J. Stroud all went in the first round, and Eleven Warriors has Julian Sayin in line to make it four top-15 picks in nine years. Georgia recruited Fields. Alabama recruited Sayin. Kansas State recruited the quarterback who won the national title. The 2027 class has one quarterback, and he took a June visit to UCLA.
Archie Griffin still leads the Buckeyes' all-time rushing chart fifty years on, and Ohio State put two backs in the same NFL draft in 2025 for the first time since 1994. The 2027 class does not have a running back in it at all, and on July 22 the last five-star on the board, David Gabriel Georges, chose Tennessee.
Ohio State put three defensive backs in one NFL first round in 2017, tying the record, and all three were high school recruits who arrived three different ways. The newest first-round Buckeye defensive back arrived from Alabama. The 2027 class has four defensive backs committed and one corner still on the board.
Ohio State became the first school this decade to put two tight ends in one NFL draft, and the first in its own history to do it in a single class. One came from Purdue. The other was a two-star whose only FBS scholarship offer was Ohio University. The 2027 class has no tight end and nobody left to sign.
Arvell Reese went fifth and Sonny Styles seventh in April, the first time in NFL draft history two linebackers from one school have gone inside the top 10. Six times this site has tested a Buckeye position claim and found somebody else's recruit at its heart. Not this time. And neither man arrived as a linebacker anybody wanted.
See also: Wide Receiver U: the dynasty timeline
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