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.
The Buckeyes had two players taken in the first round and three more taken on the second day of the draft in the 2019 NFL Draft. Nick Bosa of course got the lion’s share of the headlines, on the heel of his older brother going to the NFL three drafts before and the younger Bosa bested Joey by going a draft pick ahead of him as the No. 2 overall pick.
The other news of this draft is Dwayne Haskins going No. 15 overall to the Washington Football Team, a franchise that would draft Haskins, replace its head coach and leave Haskins in a situation where he was not ‘the guy’ for his coach. We will get into that a little bit more in a second.
We are starting to get to the point where we can see which players worked out and which ones did not have as much success but when it comes to someone like Isaiah Prince, the jury is out when he played in four games in 2019 for Miami and then opted out for the 2020 season and now looks to get into the mix in Cincinnati.
Total Number of drafted players: 9
Average star rating of drafted players: 4.1
Highest rated player to be drafted: Nick Bosa
Lowest rated player to be drafted: Terry McLaurin
Biggest surprise: Terry McLaurin has emerged as a top receiving threat for WFT and it is not even close
Another NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year developed under Larry Johnson for the Buckeyes with Nick Bosa who would go on and have five sacks in 12 games as a rookie, better that number the following season with 8.5 and then an ACL injury would end the 2020 season early, but not before Bosa had four sacks in just two-plus games.
As we said, Haskins did not get off to a good start in Washington, a suspect offensive line, an immature quarterback and just a bad fit led to Haskins getting bounced from the “Football Team” and now he calls Pittsburgh home as the hopeful understudy to Ben Roethlisberger.
Parris Campbell has not had a chance to show his world-class speed with the Colts as injuries have been a major stumbling block, but a new number and a new year could lead to a breakout season.
Of all the players in this class who don’t get talked about enough, how about Dre’Mont Jones who has had a solid start in Denver with 10 sacks over his two seasons and lost several games to an injury but still has 27 games played with 55 total tackles, 34 of those solo.
Then there is Terry McLaurin, one of our favorite players to talk about, a third-round pick, someone who had to camp at Ohio State multiple times to earn an offer. Should we be shocked that he is overachieving now in the NFL? Can we even consider it overachieving at this point, or is this just what we should expect?
Through two years, McLaurin has 145 catches for 2,037 yards and 11 touchdowns, including a 1,118-yard season in 2020. Washington has gone out to get more help around McLaurin with former Ohio State star Curtis Samuel, but is there any reason to believe anyone other than McLaurin will be the main target for WFT?
