Breaking Down Ohio State's 2017 Roster by Recruiting Stars

When it comes to winning at the highest level of college football, recent results show that recruiting rankings do matter. In fact, four of the last five national champions have finished among the Top 5 of 247Sports Composite Team Rankings within that same time period, while the other — Clemson — has an average finish of 13th.

Schools like Alabama, Florida State and Ohio State have rosters filled with four- and five-star talent, and it's not a wonder all three are expected to return to the College Football Playoff this fall.

“It cracks me up when [people] say the ratings don't matter,” Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer said on National Signing Day. "If they're keeping score, we’d like to win that thing. I do look at that. The recruiting services, although they are not 100 percent correct, they’re very close. A lot of those guys that are highly-rated guys turn out to be great players.

“You have the Darron Lees and some other under-the-radar guys that turn out to be phenomenal. The Josh Perrys. But that’s not always going to happen,” Meyer continued. “When you start throwing around numbers like [a composite score of] 94 and five-stars and four-stars, those aren’t the end all, but sure they matter. We’re all competitive. We’re very competitive here. And to say we had one of the historical classes of all time, a lot of hard work went into that.”

Ohio State, of course, brought it what many have called the best pound-for-pound recruiting class of all time. It was headlined by five-stars Baron Browning, Wyatt Davis, Jeffrey Okudah, Shaun Wade and Chase Young, all of which have seemingly taken the Buckeyes' roster to new heights.

With the season opener against Indiana just over two weeks away, most roster breakdowns you'll see will include the two-deep depth chart. We've gone in a different direction, though, and categorized where each player was ranked as a high school recruit.