Hey, hey, where you been, but got to talk is about to begin, hey, hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome to Buckeye Talk. It is the first of what we plan to be the weekly Friday recruiting

podcast here on Buckeye Talk. I'm Nathan Baird. He's Steven Means from Cleveland.com.

And this is one of the things we're adding this off-season preseason, however you want to look at it, is to do sort of a weekly check-in on

where things stand with a high-o-state recruiting. And it's been sort of the theme all week for those of you who are loyal listeners.

Pretty much every day I think we've hit on some kind of recruiting topic. And it fit in really well on Wednesday obviously

because that was the first day of the late signing period, aka National Signing Day for the winter period.

And it was a quiet day for a high-o-state, but a bigger day for some other Big Ten programs.

So we're going to start there and look back at, we're going to do a recap of where the rest of the Big Ten stands right now.

And then the second half of this podcast or second two-thirds of this podcast, we're actually going to look into the future.

We're going to go a little bit deeper analyzing where a high-o-state stands with 2022 already because they've already been very active there.

And more importantly, I guess, where they need to go in 2022 or where is left to go in 2022.

Because there are some positions where they've made some big early searches and then some others where they still have some work to do, I would say, even in what we think might be a smaller than usual class.

And this period coming in here, you know, they had a great class in 2020 and then obviously the 2021 class, for a while we thought was going to be maybe the number one ranked team, the number one team in the nation recruiting wise and possibly a high highest ranked class recruiting wise.

And what did that mean, this juncture here is they're going from 2021 to 2022.

And what was sort of do you think, how much does the momentum of one carry into the other, because they've already kind of gotten off to this jumpstart for 2022.

And I think that the work that they were doing, the things that we were talking about last year at this time, the work that they'd already done in 2021 probably influenced that.

Ohio State really got out ahead of things when Ryan Day got hired and kind of got right to work recruiting the way you would expect an Urban Meyer established program to do.

And it really starts with that 2020 class and Ryan Day got hired and he immediately got on the phone with Paris Johnson, Zach Harrison and Jack Sawyer and he locked up the Zach Harrison recruitment and ended up getting him the five star guy out of Ohio defensive in.

2020, he make sure Paris Johnson doesn't go anywhere, even though Paris Johnson was looking around that spring took some visits. I know he was at Tennessee and whatnot and fans got all bent out of shape about it.

Paris, I actually talked to Paris about it. He did exactly what he should have done. He just didn't decommit the way you see some players do when they have a coaching change. He stuck around in the class, but acted as if he was a undecided, undecided recruit and took them necessary.

This is why he built the relationship with Ryan Day. And then when he felt comfortable, he got to work as a leader of that class and helping that class ability was there in that June when they had that version of a Buck I bash, which was more of a barbecue.

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