All throughout the offseason, we at Scarlet and Gray Report will start the day by answering a question related to Ohio State football, whether it has to do with the team in 2022, recruiting or looking back at past teams and players.
Given what the 2022 class looks like, when was the last time five of the top seven recruits in a class were "homegrown?"
On Friday, when the January contact period began, each of Ohio State’s 11 recruiters remained within state lines, extending offers and checking in on players in Ohio that the coaching staff has prioritized and want in Columbus when their time comes.
As the premier school in the state, it makes sense that Ohio State usually gets the bulk of Ohio-based recruits.
The Buckeyes signed five of the top 10 players from Ohio in its class, including each of the top three: athlete Alex “Sonny” Styles, outside linebacker CJ Hicks and outside linebacker Gabe Powers.
This in itself isn’t out of the ordinary.
Ohio State has secured a commitment from the top player in the state in each of the past four recruiting classes, last losing out on offensive tackle Jackson Carman in the 2018 class to Clemson.
However, it’s the talent Ohio State is inheriting from in state that’s different than normal.
In 2022, five of Ohio State’s top 10 players in its signing class are from the state of Ohio, including Styles, Hicks and Powers in the top three, along with former Lakota West teammates defensive back Jyaire Brown and offensive tackle Tegra Tshabola.
Let’s put that in perspective.
Since 2012, Ohio State has only had more than three in-state recruits in their overall top-10 for the class twice: 2015, where the Buckeyes brought in four with four-star linebackers Justin Hilliard, Jerome Baker and Nick Conner, along with four-star athlete Eric Glover-Williams in the same class; and 2012, where seven of the program’s 15 in-state recruits were in Ohio State’s top 10: five-star defensive end Adolphus Washington, four-star defensive end Se’von Pittman, four-star linebacker Joshua Perry, four-star running back Warren Ball, four-star running back Bri’onte Dunn, four-star defensive back Najee Murray and four-star defensive back De’van Bogard.
However, Ohio State’s 2022 class is different.
The average rating for an Ohio recruit in the Buckeyes’ latest class is 5.95: the highest rating for a group of in-state recruits since the Urban Meyer era began in 2012. It’s nearly .06 points more than the average of the entire 2022 class, including four-star defensive end Omari Abor and four-star offensive lineman Carson Hinzman, who each have not officially signed with the Buckeyes yet.
But it’s not about Ohio State turning its focus back to in-state recruiting.
The Buckeyes have always had that, bringing in at least four top-10 players from the state of Ohio in eight of their last 11 recruiting classes, landing the No. 1 player in the state eight different times, including each season since Zach Harrison in 2019.
Ohio has just gotten better.
2022 was the first year since 2012 in which the state had multiple five-star athletes up for grabs. It was the third time since 2018 in which the state has had 15 five- and four-star recruits.
Ohio State remains a national entity with an extremely large reach for some of the biggest college football recruits in the country, grabbing some of the most highly-touted recruits from the powerhouse high school football states: Texas, Georgia, Florida and California.
But as Ohio State is getting stronger, more and more of its high-level recruits are being home-grown to be Buckeyes, something that can only help Ohio State moving forward.
