Barring what would be a shocking slide down the draft board for either one of them, Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson will be the ninth and 10th wide receivers from Ohio State to become first-round NFL draft picks on Thursday night.
Both Buckeye wide receivers have been consistently projected as Round 1 draft choices, with most mock drafts projecting that both will be selected within the top 20 picks. Assuming both are selected during Thursday night’s first round in Las Vegas, they’ll become the first Ohio State wide receivers selected in the first 32 picks of the NFL draft since Ted Ginn and Anthony Gonzalez were both chosen in Round 1 of the 2007 NFL draft.
Although it has been 15 years since Ohio State last had a wideout selected in the first round, the Buckeyes have plenty of history of wide receivers being drafted early, and many of them have gone on to prove worthy of those early selections with prolific NFL careers.
With just a couple of days to go until Wilson and Olave officially become the newest Ohio State receivers in the league, we take a look at the Buckeyes’ history of first-round wideouts and what they went on to accomplish in the NFL.
Paul Warfield (1964, No. 11 overall, Cleveland Browns)
While Paul Warfield played running back at Ohio State, he became a wide receiver upon being drafted by the Cleveland Browns, and the first-ever first-round wide receiver from Ohio State went on to become one of the all-time great receivers in NFL history.
An eight-time Pro Bowler, Warfield became a first-ballot Hall of Famer after a 13-year NFL career in which he caught 427 passes for 8,565 yards and 85 touchdowns. At the time of his retirement from the league, Warfield ranked fourth in NFL history in receiving touchdowns and sixth in receiving yards, while his 20.1 career yards per reception are still the most ever of any NFL receiver with at least 400 career catches.
Warfield was also selected by the Buffalo Bills with the 28th overall pick in the 1964 AFL draft, but the Northeast Ohio native signed with his hometown Browns, where he spent the first six years of his professional career before he was traded to the Miami Dolphins, where he helped lead the Dolphins to two Super Bowl championships. After a one-year stint with the Memphis Southmen in the short-lived World Football League, Warfield returned to the Browns for his final two NFL seasons.
Joey Galloway (1995, No. 8 overall, Seattle Seahawks)
After Warfield, Ohio State went 31 years before it had another wide receiver selected in the first round of the NFL draft. Joey Galloway ended that drought by becoming Ohio State’s first-ever top-10 pick at wide receiver when he was selected by the Seattle Seahawks with the eighth overall pick.
Known for his elite speed coming out of Ohio State, where he caught 108 passes for 1,894 yards and 19 touchdowns in his four-year Buckeye career, Galloway went on to play in the NFL for 16 seasons, in which he caught 701 passes for 10,950 yards and 77 touchdowns – the most yards and touchdowns ever for any NFL receiver who never made a Pro Bowl.
While Galloway was never selected as a Pro Bowl, he topped 1,000 receiving yards in three of his five seasons in both Seattle (1995, 1997, 1998) and Tampa Bay (2005, 2006, 2007).
Terry Glenn (1996, No. 7 overall, New England Patriots)
Ohio State had top-10 wide receivers in back-to-back years when Terry Glenn was selected with the No. 7 overall pick in the 1996 NFL draft – still the highest any Ohio State receiver has been drafted going into the 2022 draft – just one year after Galloway went eighth.
Glenn was the second wide receiver off the board in the 1996 draft, behind only No. 1 overall pick Keyshawn Johnson, after he earned consensus All-American honors and won the Biletnikoff Award in 1995, when he replaced Galloway as Ohio State’s top wide receiver and caught 64 passes for 1,411 yards and 17 touchdowns – still the most in a single season by a Buckeye pass-catcher.
The Columbus native went on to play in the NFL for 12 seasons – six with the New England Patriots, one with the Green Bay Packers and five with the Dallas Cowboys – in which he caught 593 passes for 8,826 yards and 44 touchdowns. He made one Pro Bowl and topped 1,000 yards four times in his NFL career, leading the NFL with 18.3 yards per reception when he caught 62 passes for 1,136 yards and seven touchdowns for Dallas in 2005.
David Boston (1999, No. 8 overall, Arizona Cardinals)
David Boston became the third Ohio State wide receiver in a five-year span to be selected in the top eight picks of the NFL draft when the Arizona Cardinals took him with the No. 8 overall pick in 1999.
A three-year starter for the Buckeyes who ranks second in Ohio State history in career receptions (191), receiving yards (2,855) and touchdowns (34) and is OSU’s all-time leader in punt return yards (959), Boston joined Ohio State’s list of top-10 picks after an All-American season in 1998 in which he caught 85 passes for 1,435 yards, both of which were also Ohio State records at the time (since broken by likely 2023 first-round pick Jaxon Smith-Njigba).
Boston’s NFL career got off to a strong start in Arizona, highlighted by his third season in 2001, when he earned first-team All-Pro honors after catching 98 passes for a league-leading 1,598 yards. After that season, however, Boston wound up playing only 27 more games in the NFL as his career was derailed by injuries and off-field issues.
Michael Jenkins (2004, No. 29 overall, Atlanta Falcons)
Ohio State’s all-time leader in receiving yards, Jenkins was selected with the fourth-to-last pick of the first round in 2004 after he caught 165 passes for 2,898 yards and 16 touchdowns in his career with the Buckeyes.
Jenkins went on to play in the NFL for nine seasons – seven with the Atlanta Falcons and two with the Minnesota Vikings – in which he caught 354 passes for 4,427 yards and 25 touchdowns.
He had a career-high 777 yards on 50 receptions in 2008.
Santonio Holmes (2006, No. 25 overall, Pittsburgh Steelers)
After catching 140 passes for 2,295 yards and 25 touchdowns in his Ohio State career, Holmes was the only wide receiver selected in the first round of the 2006 NFL draft when the Pittsburgh Steelers took him with the 25th overall pick.
The explosive wide receiver and punt returner went on to play in the NFL for nine seasons, catching 389 passes for 6,030 yards and 36 touchdowns over the course of four years with the Steelers, four years with the New York Jets and one final season with the Chicago Bears.
Holmes’ best statistical season came in his final year with the Steelers in 2009, when he caught 79 passes for 1,248 yards and five touchdowns. The defining moment of his NFL career, however, came at the end of the 2008 season, when Holmes caught nine passes for 131 yards – including the game-winning touchdown with just 35 seconds left to play – to earn Super Bowl MVP honors in the Steelers’ 27-23 win over the Cardinals.
Ted Ginn (2007, No. 9 overall, Miami Dolphins)
Ohio State’s fourth and most recent top-10 pick at wide receiver, Ginn was selected as the No. 9 overall pick in the 2007 NFL draft after an electric Buckeye career in which he caught 135 passes for 1,943 yards and 15 touchdowns, returned 64 punts for 900 yards and six touchdowns, returned 38 kickoffs for 1,012 yards and two touchdowns and ran for 213 yards and three touchdowns.
Although Ginn never quite became the star playmaker in the NFL that he was at Ohio State, he went on to have a 14-year career in the league across six different teams (Miami Dolphins, San Francisco 49ers, Carolina Panthers, Arizona Cardinals, New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears) and caught 412 passes for 5,742 yards and 33 touchdowns.
Like at Ohio State, Ginn also made plays as a runner and returner in the NFL, gaining 15,742 all-purpose yards over the course of his career in the league, in which he had 262 punt returns for 2,624 yards and four touchdowns, 307 kickoff returns for 6,899 yards and three touchdowns and running the ball 68 times for 486 yards and two touchdowns.
Anthony Gonzalez (2007, No. 32 overall, Indianapolis Colts)
As previously mentioned, Ginn and Gonzalez became the first pair of Ohio State wide receivers to be selected in the first round of the same NFL draft – a feat Wilson and Olave are likely to match this week – when Gonzalez was chosen with the final pick of the first round by the Indianapolis Colts in 2007.
Gonzalez, who became a first-round pick on the strength of a 51-catch, 734-yard, eight-touchdown season in 2006 that earned him first-team All-Big Ten honors in his final year at Ohio State, spent only five years in the NFL.
Nearly all of his production came in his first two NFL seasons, in which he caught 94 passes for 1,240 yards and seven touchdowns. In his last three years in the league, Gonzalez caught just five passes for 67 yards, all in 2010.
