Now that the 2024 class has largely finished up, I wanted to take a look at how the talent coming in compares to the talent on our roster.
The reason for this analysis is recruiting site position bias. Basically, in order to make money, they tell all the fanbases about all the top 50 and 100 QBs, Rbs, and WR they have coming in. A more neutral analysis, however, would posit that there would be proporional amounts of OG, Ot, DT and other positions sprinkled throughout.
My ranking system is thus: each player who would make a 1st team AA recieves a rank of one. 2nd team AA recieves a rank of two. Each AA team consists of 1 QB, 1 RB, 2.5 WR, 1.5 TE, 2 OT, 3 IOL on offense. On defense there are 2 Edge, 2 DL, 2.5 LB, 2 Safeties and 2.5 CB. For all positions that have .5,s the first three players would be 1st team and the next 2 second team. Position Adjusted Recruit Ranking (Or PARR) is which AA team a recruit is on.
When I did the analysis for OSU last year:
25 % of the roster ranked 1-3, these players are T1
25 % of the roster ranked 4-6, these players are T2
25 % of the roster ranked 7-15, these are T3
25 % of the roster ranked 16+, these players are T4
Now we will look at all T1 players
1. Jeremiah Smith- WR
1. Aaron Scott- CB
2. Ian Moore- IOL
2. Bryce West- CB
3. Mylan Graham- WR
3. Eddrick Houston- DE
T2 players
4. Air Noland- QB
4. Garret Stover-LB
T3 players
7. James Peoples- RB
7. Payton Pierce- LB
8. Gabe VanSickle- IOL
10. DeVontae Armstrong- IOL
11. Max LeBlanc- TE
13- Myles Lockhart- NCB
14. Jeremiah McClain
T4 Players
17. Deontae Armstrong- IOL
20. Demarion Witten- TE
45. Erik Mensah- DT
53. Leroy Roker- S
61. Sam Williams-Dixon- RB
Position by Position Analysis:
QB: Highest ranked OSU qb in a long time. Last year I was crucified for stating that based off of position adjusted recruiting rankings OSU was highly overrated at QB. This year showed that I WAS correct in that, but I hope Air is a big part of fixing that problem.
RB: One T3 player and one T4 player...... although I'm hoping Peoples is better than his ranking
TE: I liked this class a lot better until I saw the rankings.... They are also sandwiched between Thurman and what I believe will be an incredible 2025 TE class. Hope these guys outperform their rankings
WR: Two T1 players. JJ is the best WR in the nation. I personally love Mylan Graham, and think he will be an incredible. WR
OT: We didn't get the blue chip OT. That sucks. The transfer portal, as we are seeing, will be much more useful in the future. Also, for the 2nd year in a row that we have a player projected to play OT at OSU who 247 projects as a guard (Ian Moore)
IOL: solid. People underrate OSU's IOL recruiting.
DL: One T1 player- great. One T4 project- interesting.... Only 2 players? Not sufficient.
LB: Decent class, one T2, one T3.... getting KVA would have been huge here.
S: Classes ending like this are, IMO, what got Perry Eliano fired. Every single position group was recruited stronger than S.
CB: OSU is recruiting this position better than WR. That is not a slight to Hartline, but a compliment to Walton!
Talent Analysis:
OSU appears to be able to maintain its position of top talent, but appears to have to take more projects on than it has in the past. Some of these are projects the buckeyes chose (Armstrong twins, Witten, SWD), and some of these are involuntary (Roker and Mensah)
If the buckeyes add Kirk to the class, he would rank as a 17- an additional player in the T4 Catagory.
