Ohio State wide receivers coach Zach Smith walked out onto the indoor practice facility at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center on Monday morning with a wide smile on his face.
After what happened just an hour or so earlier, how could he not?
“It’s a typical Monday in Buckeye Nation, right?” Smith said, rhetorically, as his smile flashed from ear to ear.
Smith is focused on getting his current crop of wide receivers ready for Ohio State’s upcoming season, but on Monday he got good news about the future of his position when a pair of five-star prospects — Tyjon Lindsey and Trevon Grimes — committed to the Buckeyes.
Smith can’t address those prospects by name until they're officially signed — that’s an NCAA violation — but he spoke in a general sense about what it was like hauling in a pair of highly-coveted prospects on the same day.
“I heard a big boom out there on the field today. We like booms around here.”– Ohio State coach Urban Meyer
“Right now, Ohio State is hot,” Smith said. “It’s a great product, a great place to recruit for and it seems like every week somebody is coming. … It’s really easy to recruit to this culture, to this university, to this product and this head coach. It’s not hard to do. It’s really about selection and developing a relationship so it’s going really well.”
That’s an undersell considering what both Grimes and Lindsey add to an already-loaded class for Ohio State in 2017. The Buckeyes strengthened their hold on the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class, and they don’t appear to be finished as there are still a number of top-ranked players who are heavily considering Ohio State.
Smith, though, hit a home run within his position group and he knows it.
“I think I do a good job of identifying those kids early — the kids that we want, the best in the country — and then going out and developing a relationship with them and then just being real,” Smith said. “I’ve said it a bunch of times, but how I recruit is I’m just myself. I don’t really recruit and I think that’s why I’m successful at it. It’s why everyone here is successful. We’re selling Ohio State. It’s really easy to recruit this place and our head coach right now.”
Speaking of the head coach, Urban Meyer, Smith and the rest of the Buckeyes’ coaching staff were out on the practice field this morning when Grimes and Lindsey announced their commitment.
The pledges had been done for a while, but once the official announcement was made, the reaction was probably what you’d expect.
“I heard a big boom out there on the field today,” Meyer said. “We like booms around here.”
There are likely a few more to come.
