Ohio State Football: Big Ten recruiting picking up

Ryan Day is loading up the Ohio State football team with his outstanding 2021 class but he isn’t the only Big Ten coach off to a fast start on the recruiting trail.

In addition to coach Ryan Day landing outstanding recruits to reload his Ohio State football team, four more Big Ten teams are among the top 12 in recruiting rankings and eight are in the top 20. Let’s look at the conference teams off to a great start in the 2021 recruiting cycle.

I have written plenty about Ryan Day’s recruiting class and there is more to come so I’ll keep this simple. Ohio State is blowing away everybody and 10 of coach Day’s 15 commits are ranked among the top 100 players in the country.

Enough said.

Wisconsin has the No. 7 ranked class and three are four-star recruits. Not surprisingly two highly ranked recruits are offensive linemen.

I have to admit I was surprised Maryland is ranked No. 9 with two four star recruits and nine total. The only thing I knew about head coach Mike Locksley was he was an outstanding offensive coach, but he must be a good recruiter also.

And he has plenty of talented high school players to go after a short distance from Maryland’s campus.

Iowa comes in at No. 11 with a couple of four-star recruits. It’s nice to see Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz off to a great start. He is one of the best coaches in college football.

It didn’t take Greg Schiano long to hit the recruiting trail for Rutgers and he has the No. 12 class. There is plenty of talent close by, and with the success he had coaching the Scarlet Knights during his first tenure he may be able to keep a lot of those players from going elsewhere.

Others in the top 20 are Michigan at 17 (Jim  Harbaugh should go back to tree climbing), Minnesota 19 and Nebraska 20.

Things are sure to change as the recruiting cycle moves on. But you can be sure Ohio State will be at or near the top, and there is a good chance plenty of very good prospects in the 2021 class will be playing Big Ten football.