COLUMBUS, Ohio – Few people will debate the ability of Urban Meyer and his staff's ability to recruit at a high level. Ohio State's recruiting classes under Meyer have been some of the highest rated classes not only in school history but among the best ever of the Rivals.com-era.
We have been waiting for enough years to go by however before opening up the books and looking position-by-position during Meyer's tenure at Ohio State to see who some of the highest rated players have been at each spot and more importantly, if the rankings held true and the highest rated players in fact had the best careers with the team.
Largely, that is not always the case. Ohio State has had some of its best players come from the ranks of the three-star range while some of the highest rated players did not fare as well or the jury is still out on them.
We are going to spend the next several days going through each spot and ranking the players by way of the rankings and seeing who had the best careers. These lists are only open to players that were recruited by Meyer and his staff and not players who Meyer may have coached that were recruited before he arrived in Columbus.
Previous Positions: Offensive Line | Wide Receiver | Tight End | Running Back | Athlete | Quarterback | Defensive End | Defensive Tackle | Linebacker
We finish up this two week series at the defensive back spot. We could not break things up into corner and safety the way we could on the defensive line because so many times corners in high school can move to safety and even the opposite happens as well and it is hard to keep the integrity of the piece with a position that has that much movement (plus 10 pieces works perfect for two weeks of weekdays).
Ohio State certainly has a claim on being DBU but some of the biggest names in the league right now with guys like Denzel Ward, Marshon Lattimore, Malik Hooker and Gareon Conley not on the list (based on their rivals rankings).
Tyreke Johnson leads the way with the No. 14 spot in the class of 2018 and he was a player that always mentioned Ohio State among his schools but nobody really believed he was going to end up in Columbus until he signed. He had a lot of options from across the country and the Buckeyes were able to prevail with help from former high school teammate Shaun Wade. Johnson will now enter the program looking to try and get into the two-deep as quickly as possible and find early playing time.