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Welcome to Buckeye Talk. It is Buckeye Football Futures. I'm Nathan Baird, Stephen Means from Cleveland.com.

We are talking offensive line recruiting today. We've been going week by week through the various position groups.

And we've come around to one of the most crucial positions. I think one of those positions that sometimes goes overlooked in some ways because

if it's when it's going at its best, it sometimes is easy to ignore or easy to overlook because a guy isn't failing and sometimes an offensive line doing his job well doesn't show up the way that he does it receiver or defensive end or something like that, certainly like quarterback, but Ohio State has has built a pretty solid foundation on its offensive line.

Stephen, I guess just as you watch how Ohio State recruits and the priorities that it sets, where do you feel like offensive line falls in that list of priorities or do you feel like everything is pretty balanced position wise as the way Ohio State approaches things.

Yeah, I think for the most part, everything's pretty balanced position wise, offensive line being different because it's the one place where you have to have a variety of different human beings within a recruiting class.

It's I don't know a recruiting class in the country that has all, you know, five top 50 recruits only offensive line where you have the number one center, the number one tackle the number one guard and the number two, you know, tackle and guard along with that to finish out a class.

Now Alabama came pretty close. They have the number one tackle the number two tackle the number one center, but they still had some other developmental guys as well, because there's a physical aspect to this that doesn't necessarily always exist in other positions where

if you play wide receiver, if you come in and you're six one and 190 pounds, you might end up playing at that way. It just might look a little differently if they cut get you a little bit more cut up and whatnot.

But for an offensive lineman, you could be a five star guy who six foot seven, 265 pounds, and we all know that's not going to cut it in any conference, let alone the big 10 and be able to play offensive line.

And so because there is a variety, I think the 2020 recruiting class was the best version of that where you had a guy like Paris Johnson leading the way, but you also had guys like Grant Tutont and Josh Friar and Trey LaRue as more, you know,

developmental guys and hopefully one of those guys hits and it seems like Josh Friar has emerged as one of those guys. So it's kind of hard to just say is an assistant coach doing his job, the white radio the wrong way, while just looking at the recruiting rankings and thinking that's all that's supposed to be there.

But even when you look at the recruiting rankings, I think it doesn't look that different than other positions at the end of the day or at least that's the kind of the conclusion I came to when I went back over.

So as we always do here on BFFs, we like to kind of reset the room and go back to how we got here, which is what the Ohio State roster will look like this fall.

They are month for sticking around Texas all the way back to 2017. So he's back as a super senior. He was a four star guy ranked number 285 in the country, kind of an under recruited guy had some academic issues at the time.

I think that might have played into which schools were pursuing him. Ohio State came on kind of late. There's there's a fun story that I've been trying to tell there about how he got to Ohio State and in some of things.

It's one of my sort of summer projects. It's been hanging out there for a while. And hopefully I will get to that soon.

So he's the only left over member though from that 2017 class 2018 Nicholas Petit Flair was a five star ranked number seven in the country seventh overall player and Matt Jones a four star ranked number 68.

So they really got a high impact out of those the two guys that they got for 2018 2019 Harry Miller five star ranked number 30.

Enoch Vamahi a four star ranked number 124 Ryan Jacobi a four star ranked 283 and Dewan Jones a three star who does not have a 24 seven composite ranking.

So that put him somewhere outside. I think the next lowest guy for Ohio State that was the had a composite ranking was like 756. So Dewan Jones was quite a ways down the list and a very developmental project at the time and has not made a huge impact on the field yet.

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