Early and late, Ohio State was great.The national champion Buckeyes were again, and predictably, the best in the Big Ten in this year’s recruiting class. Yes, ranking teenagers by talent before they’ve ever played a down of college football is a highly subjective and largely irrelevant process. One win always trumps five stars in this game.The names and numbers on national signing day, though, often open another window into how the mightiest programs stay that way. Take a look at the list of the other teams that offered scholarships to the players who picked Ohio State, and it becomes obvious these are elite prospects if the high school statistics, highlight videos or gaudy ratings didn’t already make that clear.To further frustrate the competition, the Buckeyes added five players who made up their minds in the final 12 hours. That included three from states in the conference’s footprint, running back Michael Weber and defensive tackle Joshua Alabi from Detroit and offensive lineman Isaiah Prince from Maryland.Weber, who rushed for 2,000 yards at Cass Tech High School, considered staying closer to home and playing for rival Michigan. The Wolverines, who hired coach Jim Harbaugh barely five weeks ago, have been trying to make rapid inroads in territories that Ohio State has been successfully mining under coach Urban Meyer.Meyer, naturally, said securing a player from the backyard of the Wolverines was important.”We do keep score against our rivals in everything we do,” Meyer said.After a full year for Harbaugh on the job, perhaps the Wolverines will start to win a few of those fights.”Nobody’s going to wave a magic wand right now in Ann Arbor,” ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill said this week. ”But that was both a splash hire and hopefully a long term hire, and this is important when I say this, somebody I think can truly challenge Urban Meyer in work ethic, evaluation tools and creating a very competitive recreating landscape within those two and within the conference overall.”Ohio State’s national championship wasn’t just a feel-good moment for the rest of the Big Ten, tired of hearing about the dominance of the SEC. The Buckeyes gave schools like Illinois a recruiting tool to use, too.”When you go down south and you talk about a team in your conference winning a national championship, yes, that does help, no question,” said coach Tim Beckman, whose class included players from Texas, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.Here are some key nuggets to know about signing day this year for the Big Ten:BEST CLASS: Duh. Ohio State owned this title last February, too, before becoming national champions, so there was little doubt that the Buckeyes would again top the recruiting analyst rankings in 2015. How about the next-best? That honor belonged to Penn State, which signed its first full class since 2011 after emerging from NCAA sanctions that stripped scholarships for the child sex abuse scandal that ravaged the program. …
Continue Reading: Ohio State keeps score in recruiting vs. Michigan, too
