Stop me if you've heard this before: the Ohio State football team lost out on a five-star recruit in the 2026 recruiting class. That is a phrase that I have typed over and over this year, because it keeps happening. On Thursday night, they lost a safety they'd been the favorite for for months.
The Ohio State Buckeyes have just the ninth-best recruiting class in the country. That would be by far the worst class that Ryan Day has had in his head coaching career, minus the one transition year between him and Urban Meyer. He has had a top-five class every year.
On Friday, the Buckeyes lost another five-star recruit. This time, it was offensive lineman Darius Gray, who chose South Carolina instead. Gray is listed as the top interior offensive lineman in the country, and would have been the first five-star offensive lineman to come to Columbus since Paris Johnson Jr.
The Ohio State football team continues to fail to adapt to the NIL landscape
Once again, a lack of NIL funding is ultimately what did the Buckeyes in. They aren't going to pay top dollar for every recruit, no matter what their star ranking is. That's something that Day has made very clear since NIL packages became legal in college football.
That doesn't mean that they should be so far back when it comes to offering an NIL package that they don't even get serious consideration. Ross Bjork's failure to let outside collectives help fund NIL deals is leaving the Buckeyes behind in the dust of other programs.
At this point, the 2026 class might be too far gone to fix. They might slip out of the top ten and have a bad recruiting class. The fact that this is the case, coming off a national championship, is utterly absurd. Under no circumstances should this ever happen to a program like Ohio State.
Until Day starts yelling at Bjork, or more fans get angry enough to pull funding and donations from Bjork, nothing is going to change. If there's anything that has been crystal clear about Bjork's tenure as an athletic director in the last year or so, it's that he's incredibly stubborn.
As Bjork sets the Buckeyes back on the recruiting trail, Ohio State will just have to focus on winning games on the field this year. Next year, it will be a lot harder because of missing the depth they could have added from this class.