Buckeyes Now

Chase Young Follows Dobbins, Okudah from OSU to NFL

Buckeyes losing three All-Americans from College Football Playoff team

Bruce Hooley

Chase Young Follows Dobbins, Okudah from OSU to NFL
Chase Young Follows Dobbins, Okudah from OSU to NFL /

From the minute it put pen to National Letter-of-Intent, Ohio State's 2017 Recruiting Class held the promise of great things.

Looking back now, it was everything advertised.

And yet so painfully far from expectations.

Three of the headliners then are ex-Buckeyes now, with Chase Young's announcement Friday that he, like Jeffrey Okudah before him, and like J.K. Dobbins before him, would bypass his final season of eligibility at OSU to enter the NFL Draft.

Young will likely be the No. 2 overall pick to Washington behind Heisman winner, and former Buckeye Joe Burrow, now the quarterback at LSU via graduate transfer.

Okudah is a top-half-of-the-first-round cornerback, and Dobbins may sink to round two only because of the diminishing value of running backs in the NFL.

All three made consensus All-American this past season.

Young won numerous national defensive player-of-the-year awards, notably the Bednarik and Ted Hendricks, and finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy balloting.

Dobbins became the first running back in Ohio State history -- and think of the weight of that statement -- to rush for 1,000 or more yards each of his first three seasons, capping his career with the only 2,000-yard season in OSU history.

Not even the customary lofty anticipation that accompanies every Ohio State recruiting class would have foretold such achievements.

If you'd been clued into what was coming from Young, Okudah and Dobbins, you wouldn't have been surprised to hear they'd be cornerstones on the first Ohio State teams ever to win three straight outright Big Ten championships.

But you'd have been shocked and chagrined to learn those teams would claim only one College Football Playoff berth and wouldn't win a single Playoff game, let alone a national championship.

That underscores how absolutely exacting the standard is to achieve what Ohio State did in the first year of the Playoff following the 2014 season.

What Alabama has done since -- win two of the last five -- is not normal.

What Clemson is another victory from doing -- win three of the last five -- is outrageous.

Young leaves with OSU's single-season sack record of 16.5, but a two-game suspension in mid-season for accepting a loan in violation of NCAA rules cost him a chance at the school's career record.

He did not record a sack in any of OSU's last three games with Michigan, Wisconsin and Clemson devoting multiple blockers to him.

Ohio State cornerback Shaun Wade, ejected from the Fiesta Bowl for targeting in the second quarter, is to make his announcement about whether he will return for his junior season in a noon announcement Saturday in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla.

Wade's invited guess include persons that suggest he will be returning to OSU for the 2020 season.

If he departs for the NFL, Ohio State will lose its entire starting secondary from 2019.

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Bruce Hooley
BRUCE HOOLEY

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