The Hurry-Up is your nightly dose of updates from the Ohio State football recruiting trail, keeping tabs on the latest from commits and targets from around the country.
Spindler drops final five
We continue seeing blue-chip recruits dropping their lists of ”top” and “final” schools, and the latest to do so was Clarkston (Mich.) High School's Rocco Spindler, the No. 2-ranked offensive guard and No. 44-ranked overall player in the country.
The FINAL FIVE... pic.twitter.com/iJqv3GEDmE
— Rocco Spindler (@RoccoSpindler92) May 22, 2020
Spindler's list puts Ohio State up against Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State and LSU – the same list we projected about a week ago despite some growing beliefs that Oklahoma was making a run at the 6-foot-5, 315-pound talent.
Spindler told us previously he had been hoping to make a decision sometime late in May, or perhaps early June, but that timeline was obviously pushed back because of him being unable to take his official visits in the spring.
This still feels like a three-team race between Michigan, Notre Dame and Penn State (and probably in that order) with Ohio State at No. 4 and LSU at No. 5. With his offensive tackle teammate Garrett Dellinger reportedly an LSU lean, perhaps the Tigers could make a late charge here if they land Dellinger.
Either way, I don't like the Buckeyes' chances here, but they will continue making a push for JC Latham and Jager Burton.
Adeleye explains why he didn’t go to Texas
Following April’s NFL Draft, we talked ad nauseam about the No. 1 reason Ohio State recruits – at least the vast majority of them – end up committing to the Buckeyes after they were coming off a hell of a run with 10 draftees. That was one of the main reasons borderline five-star defensive end Tunmise Adeleye decided his college career was best served being in Columbus – and his home state school having the exact opposite success is the reason he decided the Midwest was a better option than the South.
On Instagram, Adeleye said that the reason he chose not to consider Texas as an option for his future was because “in the past five years, they’ve only sent 15 percent of their four- and five-star recruits to the NFL Draft.”
The data backs up Adeleye’s assertion. In a 247Sports story written by Chris Hummer a few days after the draft had concluded, he provided data that showed Ohio State has had the highest percentage of players drafted from the 2011-2015 recruiting classes (63.8 percent) and the second-highest development rating (1.13) behind Alabama (1.22).
Those numbers are further proof of one of Ohio State’s biggest recruiting chips being accurate, and if you look further down the list, you’ll see that Texas is ranked No. 31 out of 32 qualifying teams on that list.
“Nobody has a lower hit rate at 15.2 percent of Top247 players drafted,” Hummer wrote. “Texas, which signed a pair of top-five classes within this 2011-15 stretch, is the only program to sign a top-10 class and finish with a development rate below .50.”
That explains why the Longhorns – who play only about two hours from Adeleye’s former program, Tompkins High School, before he transferred to IMG (Fla.) Academy – did not even crack his top-five list that he told Eleven Warriors about in March, as he had planned out visits to Ohio State, Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas A&M.
As Hummer pointed out later in the story, Texas has been doing a better job under Tom Herman, but the Longhorns have “a long way to go before it crawls out of the cellar,” Hummer wrote.
That provides another reason for why Ohio State is able to pull players out of the Longhorn State every cycle – like Garrett Wilson in 2019, Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Ryan Watts in 2020 and Adeleye in 2021. And that’s another reason why Ohio State is likely to pull, at minimum, one player from Texas in the 2022 class of the 18 players it has offered thus far.
“We know this class has a chance to be historic. When the draft comes around, they’re gonna be talking about how we formed this class.”– Ohio State commit Tunmise Adeleye
If Texas was humming along and recruiting like a national power, that would obviously make it harder on programs like Ohio State to pull those players out of the talent-rich state.
In the 2020 class, only three of the state’s top-15 players (each ranked inside the top 110 overall in the nation) committed to Texas, and in 2019, only two players ranked among the state’s top-15 players committed to Texas (each ranked in the top 100). That was after the Longhorns absolutely locked down the state in the 2018 class by landing 11 of the top 15 players (seven of those 11 commits were ranked in the top 100).
In the meantime, Ohio State continues to show its dominance in terms of developing pro-caliber players, and Adeleye believes it's only going to increase with he and his fellow classmates.
“We know this class has a chance to be historic,” Adeleye told Eleven Warriors previously. “When the draft comes around, they’re gonna be talking about how we formed this class. From the guys and the talent that we’re getting, if you really sit down and look at the film of every single commit and look at the talent – just look at what we do on the field – it’s gonna be a problem for a couple years. We all know what’s coming. The coaches know what’s coming. It’s gonna be a lot of fun in Columbus for a couple years, and we all have a vision of being at that draft one day.”
Rocco Spindler photo courtesy of 247Sports
