Ohio State has a first-round wide receiver for the fourth straight year.
Emeka Egbuka became the fifth Ohio State wide receiver in four years to be selected in the first round of the NFL draft as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers chose him with the No. 19 overall pick in Thursday night’s first round of the 2025 NFL draft.
Emeka Egbuka's reaction to finding out he is a first-round draft pick for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers pic.twitter.com/8ppmTp45kr
— ESPN (@espn) April 25, 2025
Egbuka joins Marvin Harrison Jr. (No. 4 pick in 2024), Jaxon Smith-Njigba (No. 20 in 2023), Garrett Wilson (No. 10 in 2022) and Chris Olave (No. 11 in 2022) as Ohio State wide receivers who have been drafted in the first round since 2022. No other school has had more than two first-round wide receivers in that span.
Egbuka was the first Buckeye selected in the 2025 NFL draft. He’s the first Buckeye to be drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers since 2004, when they drafted Will Allen; going into the 2025 draft, the Buccaneers had gone longer than any other team without drafting a Buckeye.
Egbuka joins a receiving corps in Tampa Bay that also includes Mike Evans and Chris Godwin, forming one of the league’s elite receiving trios.
Teaming up with other elite receivers will be nothing new for Egbuka. When Egbuka arrived at Ohio State in 2021, he joined a wide receiver room that included five other first-round draft picks, including all of Olave, Wilson, Smith-Njigba and Harrison as well as Jameson Williams, who transferred to Alabama after the spring of 2021. He credits that competition with helping him become a first-round pick alongside them.
“The room that I stepped into at Ohio State, there was Chris Olave, Garrett Wilson, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Julian Fleming, Jameson Williams, Kamryn Babb, Marvin Harrison Jr.; that's probably one of the craziest rosters I've ever heard in my life,” Egbuka said at the NFL Scouting Combine. “And that was really the reason I decided to go to Ohio State was because I didn't want to go to a place where I wasn't going to be challenged by my peers. I wanted to go to a place where in order to see the field, I had to grow at an exponential rate because they were all growing as well. So being able to play with them and just being in that competitive atmosphere is why I'm standing before you all today.”
Ohio State’s all-time receptions leader, Egbuka caught 205 passes for 2,868 yards and 24 touchdowns across four seasons with the Buckeyes. Despite splitting targets with other elite receivers in all four of those seasons, Egbuka finished his Ohio State career with the second-most receiving yards in school history, trailing only Michael Jenkins, and tied for the seventh-most touchdown catches ever for a Buckeye.
As a senior, Egbuka caught 81 passes for 1,011 yards and 10 touchdowns as one of four captains for Ohio State’s national championship team.
One of a multitude of Buckeyes who could have been selected in the 2024 NFL draft but chose to stay at Ohio State for one more year, Egbuka has now been rewarded for that decision as both a national champion and a first-round NFL draft pick.
