Ohio State has been a fixture in terms of programs that repeatedly put players into the NFL. You would have to go back to the 2013 draft class to find the last time that Ohio State put fewer than five players into the league by way of the draft.

In fact, Ohio State has put double-digit players in the draft through the past two classes, 16 into the first round over the past six classes and 55 total players over that same period.

It should come as no surprise that Ohio State has recruited well through the years, but that doesn’t always equate, sometimes highly-rated collegiate players don’t translate well to the NFL game and conversely, sometimes there are players who may have been lowly rated coming out of high school for one reason or another who flourish at the next level when football becomes a full-time job.

It got us to thinking about how the past dozen or so classes breakdown in terms of how the rankings numbers translate to the NFL for Ohio State. We will look at a list of questions and breakdown who we got right, who we may have missed on and a whole lot more. For the sake of this exercise, we are only going to talk about players who ended their career with the Buckeyes, so players like Joe Burrow, who signed out of high school with Ohio State, will not be counted but players like Justin Fields and Trey Sermon will count.

This is the smallest class of this entire project with only three players being taken, the last time that Ohio State only had three players is back to the 2008 draft.

Strangely enough, two players from this draft class played in the 2020 season (John Simon played in 2020, does not have a current team going into 2021), and we are closing in on a decade of service time for these players, again something that is out of the ordinary.

These were players that were drafted under the Jim Tressel regime with the Buckeyes and there were some years (2006 for example) where there were just big numbers in terms of the draft and other years (2008, 2005) where the numbers were much smaller.

2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 |

Total Number of drafted players: 3

Average star rating of drafted players: 3.0

Highest rated player to be drafted: John Simon, Reid Fragel

Lowest rated player to be drafted: Johnathan Hankins

Biggest surprise: Six players from the draft class went undrafted

Big Hank did not show up on many recruiting radars going into Ohio State, he was not built like many highly-ranked defensive tackles and it took Hankins a lot of work to emerge to get himself to the position where he could be drafted in the second round after earning first-team All-American honors in 2012. Hankins is now on his third team after being drafted by the Giants, later going to Indianapolis (things did not work out well there) and then going to the Raiders franchise. He has just signed a one-year 3.5-million-dollar extension earlier this month as he continues to thrive in the league. Through eight seasons, Hankins has 318 tackles, 14.5 sacks and three fumble recoveries.

Simon was a player that Urban Meyer raved about, maybe the first player that he said that he would name a kid after if he and Shelley were still having children at the time (many other players had the same treatment as well through the years). Simon racked up 97 games played over eight seasons with Baltimore, Houston, Indianapolis and New England, with 277 tackles, 21 sacks and two interceptions. The former Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year would also win a Super Bowl ring (LIII) during the course of his playing career.

Fragel would move from tight end to offensive tackle during his Ohio State career and was taken in the 7th round of the 2013 draft. He would bounce around between six teams, spending several years on practice squads but never really finding much service time in the league, credited with playing in one game in 2015 with Tampa Bay.

Six players, who all had solid Ohio State careers, would go undrafted for the Buckeyes and sign UDFA deals. Zach Boren, Travis Howard, Orhian Johnson, Etienne Sabino and Nathan Williams did not put up any NFL numbers, but Jake Stoneburner did, with two seasons where he was credited with game action, playing in 20 combined games, hauling in five receptions and two scores during the 2015 season with the Miami Dolphins.