Verbal football commitments are just that -verbal, with nothing yet permanently put down on paper.
But Ohio State, with 47 fourth or fifth-year players on this fall's team, has done a spectacular job already looking ahead to next season and beyond with 24 oral commitments toward its 2009 recruiting class.
Tony Gerdeman, who tracks Ohio State football recruiting for the www.theozone.net Web site, cited "a snowball effect"
for future recruits jumping on the Buckeye bandwagon.
The ripple effect started with a rock-solid 2008 recruiting effort, one of the best in the country that addressed most of OSU's immediate needs. Then a couple months later, Terrelle Pryor came on board, and "the fish began jumping into the boat,"
said Gerdeman about the early 2009 haul of top players. "Getting so many commitments early built momentum, causing somewhat of a snowball effect."
With 20 seniors on scholarship who are in their final year of eligibility this season and a number of other players who will lost through attrition for various reasons, the final list of '09 commitments next spring could be the largest since 2002, said Steve Helwagen of the Ohio State sports Web site www.Bucknuts.com, when Troy Smith, A.J. Hawk, Bobby Carpenter, Doug Datish, Nick Mangold, Quinn Pitcock, Santonio Holmes and Maurice Clarett among others entered the program.
OSU has "have done an outstanding job of identifying prospects that they wanted to fill their needs over the next two or three seasons,"
said Helwagen. "Losing two straight national title games apparently hasn't slowed their recent recruiting momentum one bit."
Especially when it comes to landing the best in the Buckeye State first, with 14 of the 24 commitments for 2009 being from Ohio.
Nevertheless, Helwagen said, recruiting pressure from out-of-state colleges on key in-state players for early commitments for next year may have not given the Buckeyes the luxury of sitting back and surveying the other scenery before making final decisions on most of the Ohio players they actually wanted anyway. "Ohio State was forced to make early-offer decisions on a lot of kids and, as it turned out, a lot of them accepted,"
said Helwagen.
One significant 2009 Ohio State verbal commitment in Gerdeman's eyes came from Michigan wide receiver James Jackson, whose speed and play-making ability seems more suited to new Michigan head coach Rich Rodriguez's spread offense. "He was arguably the fastest player in the state and had offers from all over the nation, but there weren't too many players more tailor-made for Rodriguez's offense than Jackson,"
noted Gerdeman. Thus, he indicated, landing "Jackson was a terrific get, because Jim Tressel went into Michigan and stole a prototypical Rich Rodriguez recruit."
Plus, Helwagen added Ohio State won other major out-of-state recruiting battles to get 2009 commitments from linebacker Dorian Bell of Pennsylvania and running back Carlos Hyde from Florida. "The Buckeyes got Terrelle Pryor last year in Pennsylvania, and now have three of that state's top five guys already committed for this year,"
he said. "Penn State is treading water, and it shows. The same applies for Florida State and Miami, opening the door for Ohio State to walk in and steal some key kids from those states."
