Almost 60 years ago, one college program accounted for nearly half of the NFL Draft's top ten.
You will undoubtedly hear about this on Thursday night during the 1st round when current odds favor it happening again. Four of the first ten players taken overall will have been teammates.
The 1967 NFL Draft had Bubba Smith taken 1st overall, Clint Jones went 2nd, George Webster 5th and Gene Washington 8th. They all played together at Michigan State. It was the first common draft in professional football history, as the AFL and NFL had merged the previous summer.
The Spartans could claim national titles in both 1965 and 1966, so seeing four guys from that run being taken atop the NFL Draft was unmysterious, even to casual college football observers. It also provided testimony to MSU's integrated recruiting strategy, which was differentiated right up until the rest of the world saw the value.
MSU hasn't been the same ever since. Four from one school has still only happened once.
Notre Dame had four taken in the top 10 pre-merger back in 1946, but like everything else college sports-related that decade, there's a Dresden-sized asterisk bombing it out of any reasonable discussion. Four from one has happened once in a fully-functioning NFL Draft where America's best college-aged athletes were not deployed elsewhere.
Ohio State not winning as many national titles as people think they should is as much of a tradition as Ohio State filling the top of the NFL Draft with talENT.
Four from one should happen again on Thursday. Big spoiler coming - the four will be Buckeyes.
And all of that elite and coveted talent coming from Ohio State will produce a guttural reaction across every network covering the Draft, countless social media posts and if you plan on watching at a bar - from a guy seated to your left who likes his wings plain and his beer as watery as possible: How did the Buckeyes not win the national title with those guys?
They did. Better question is why they failed to win two, like mid-60s Sparty. Hold that thought.
One decade ago, Ohio State had three players taken in the top 10 when Joey Bosa went 3rd, his roommate Ezekiel Elliott went 4th and Eli Apple went 10th. How did Ohio State not win the national title with those guys? The better question back then was how did they not win three.
A decade prior to 2016, five Buckeyes went in the 1st round of the 2006 NFL Draft. How did Ohio State not win the national title with those guys? Well, several of them did. Two other seasons, they were right there. The program they left behind would make it to the BCS championship game in each of the following two seasons after their departure. Both would finish as national runners-up.
You want to rewind another decade? Just for fun? Just to see if anything is different?
The 1996 NFL Draft featured three Buckeyes among the first 14 picks, including the Biletnikoff winner and Heisman winner. How did Ohio State not win a national title with those guys? You know what, mild wing-eating Michelob Ultra guy, we've been asking ourselves that question for literally decades.
That Michigan State dynasty from the mid-1960s happened and then Sparty vanished, because like most programs it has no staying power at the level required to be nationally elite. Ohio State is different. The blessing is that every year brings championship energy. The curse is that so close is mathematically probable. And being so close so often stains the achievement.
The 2015 season became a Harvard Business Review case study for coaching malpractice and failed change management when Tom Herman left for Houston. The 2014 one featured resilience and circumstances we'll never experience again - just take a deep breath and consider 3rd string quarterback quality in the NIL era.
The 2013 defense was the only unit in football that could stop that team, and it did. Coaching turnover (2015) and coaching that needed to be turned over (2013) failed what has been elite recruiting since John Cooper decided that would be the standard.
The coaches change, the players matriculate, the standard remains and the floor does not get lower. Ohio State not winning as many national titles as people like you, me and everyone else think they should is as much of a tradition as Ohio State filling the top of the NFL Draft with talent.
Here's a tight snapshot of what that looks like from four Drafts ago.
WRU pic.twitter.com/3AgSV7WrF4
— Mark Pantoni (@markpantoni) April 29, 2022
Those three receivers went 10th/11th/12th overall and have zero national titles among them, though that photo is from the CFP championship in what was an eight-game season against an opponent that got to play 13 times and didn't have half of its defense erased by contact tracing prior to kickoff.
A fourth wide receiver - not pictured - forced the 12th guy taken overall to transfer to somewhere easier to get playing time, which was the team they were playing that night for the national title. Jaxon Smith-Njigba was taken 20th overall the following year.
That 2020 team got close, like every single Ohio State team does. That's the best explanation.
Winning one, let alone back-to-back national titles is incredibly difficult. In the CFP era we have only one repeat, and Georgia couldn't have pulled it off without the Buckeyes' special teams in what is still one of the most celebrated Ohio State CFP performances to date.
That's because Buckeye fans are unintentionally hilarious. Deploying NFL talent the way fans are begging for it to be used is such an effective drug for us, it can almost overshadow a loss. That deployment never happened in 2025. It almost didn't happen in 2024, but then that season's postseason began and oh man, you should rewatch that right now.
You'll see the guys getting drafted on Thursday night featured prominently. Last season in an attempt to achieve that rare repeat national title, Ohio State operated without a full-time, dedicated offensive coordinator or wide receivers' coach. There were reasons for that, but one lesson is that the football program in Columbus should only partially reflect what's happening in the American labor market.
Ohio State is uniquely positioned, constructed, privileged and magnetic enough to be in the conversation every year, which means the floor in Columbus is higher than most ceilings.
You might have heard about this! Younger people are having trouble finding jobs these days, while older people are staying employed and in the workforce longer than ever. That's unfortunate for keeping labor markets the same age, but it's exactly what competitive college football composition should look like today.
The partially part is the middle of the workforce, where that segment of the labor market has experience and only one W2 - but is doing several jobs under the auspices of efficiency. That should never happen in Columbus. If you aren't grasping why that's a self-destructive practice - imagine if Ohio State's wide receivers coach and offensive coordinator were the same person.
In 2024 Ohio State had Chip Kelly running the offense and Brian Hartline coaching wide receivers. A year later, they had half of one of those guys doing both jobs. Which responsibility would suffer more - the offense or the receivers? Oh, it's both? It's both.
Three of the four guys (probably) going in the top 10 on Thursday night are from the defense. The fourth is one of the guys who wasn't overexposed to the reduced gains of multitasked coaching efficiencies. So why didn't those guys win two national titles? It's been the same reason as long as we've been asking that question.
Ohio State is uniquely positioned, constructed, privileged and magnetic enough to be in the conversation every year, which means the floor in Columbus is higher than most ceilings. Whenever the coaching regime of the moment realizes that - it might take a loss to Virginia Tech, or a generational choke against a Michigan team with no quarterback - the Buckeyes rise to the occasion and become the fully-operational monster their fans know they always have in them.
The problem plaguing most Buckeye teams is rarely composition and never a lack of resources. It's being unnecessarily conventional and treating Ohio State like it's a garden variety football program playing to win garden variety football games. So close is pretty close to the floor in Columbus. That's why it happens so often.
Four guys in the top 10 is quite an achievement. Can't wait to see who goes 1st overall next year!
