How Jeremiah Smith Became the Greatest Ohio State Receiver

It had come down to signing day, and even after the commitment announcement, it wasn’t over. On Dec. 20, 2023, in Hollywood, Fla., Jeremiah Smith put an Ohio State hat on his head in the gym at Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory and did a round of interviews.

Up in Columbus, Ryan Day was informed during his press conference that day that Smith had formally agreed to join his program, and the Buckeyes’ coach feigned a knee-buckling collapse at the podium in relief.

That seemed to end a sustained chase of the highest-rated wide receiver in the history of recruiting outlet 247Sports’ rankings. Smith had committed to Ohio State a year earlier, but other schools—particularly in the Sunshine State—were not discouraged. He was among the most well-traveled prospects ever, according to his recruitment timeline on the website, making 10 visits to Miami, nine to Florida State, five to Florida and seven to Ohio State. Ten other schools got at least one campus visit from Smith.

The drama dissipated after he put on the hat—at least publicly. But his paperwork didn’t come in at Ohio State for several more hours.

Ohio State wide receiver Jeremiah Smith — CFP/Getty Images

“At that point, it was in the hands of his agent, finalizing the details of his NIL,” says Brett Goetz, founder of South Florida Express, Smith’s seven-on-seven team. “But he was real close on signing day to flipping to Miami.”

After South Florida–based recruiting analyst John Garcia completed a video interview with Smith about Ohio State, he started getting calls from people telling him the hometown Hurricanes were still pitching. Garcia says Smith turned off his phone and his father, Chris, stopped answering calls.

“It was a fiasco,” Garcia says. “Miami really turned up the heat that day. Every option was exhausted to try to flip him.”

Smith has South Florida in his soul—he came home this summer to hold a free youth football camp, and he counts two pieces of property there among his investments. “I mean, that’s what made me who I am today,” he says of his roots.

But he had to leave home to be the best player he can be.

The allure of joining the most prestigious position group in college football was too strong to overcome. “He’s next,” prophesied former Ohio State star wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba in June 2023. Smith hasn’t just become the school’s next great at wideout; heading into his junior season, he might be the best yet.

Unless something unforeseen and unfortunate happens between now and the 2027 NFL draft, Smith will extend the Buckeyes’ streak of seasons with a first-round wide receiver selection to six years. Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave started the run in 2022, with Smith-Njigba following in ’23, Marvin Harrison Jr. in ’24, Emeka Egbuka in ’25 and Carnell Tate this past spring.

Jeremiah Smith will likely be the seventh Buckeyes receiver drafted in the first round over the last six years. | Robin Alam/ISI Photos/Getty Images

Needless to say, the stars of the position group at Ohio State known as “Zone 6”—as in end zone, six points—have translated extremely well to the NFL. After leading the league in yards receiving and helping Seattle to the Super Bowl title, Smith-Njigba signed the biggest wide receiver contract in league history in the offseason, with $120 million guaranteed money and $168.6 million in total value. Wilson signed a deal worth up to $130 million to remain with the Jets. Olave was eighth in the NFL in yards receiving last season with the Saints. Egbuka had an instant impact as a rookie, with 938 yards receiving for the Buccaneers.

The highest draftees of the group, Harrison and Tate, were both picked at No. 4 (by the Cardinals and Titans, respectively). Even in a quarterback-heavy 2027 draft and a quarterback-starved league, Smith might beat that.

“He should be the No. 1 pick,” says Olave. “When you’ve got that much talent and you work hard, there’s no limit on him. He has no ceiling.”

Entering the cafeteria at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center after a summer workout, Smith is the personification of a bad matchup. He’s 6'3" and 225 pounds, bigger and still as fast as ever. He was the first freshman to win the program’s Iron Buckeye award for offseason workouts, and he’s won it twice more since then.

“Jeremiah’s talent has been well-documented, but what people don’t always see is how hard he works,” Day says. “He’s relentless in everything he does, and he’s earned everything that’s come his way.”

Obsessive training has been a way of life for Smith since he was a child, when the slap of rejection lit a fire within. His avatar on X is a picture of Michael Jordan, quite likely because Smith has his own Jordanesque story of an unsuccessful tryout for a team as a child. At age 7, he didn’t make the cut for the Miami Gardens Ravens.

“I took a year off, came back and was the best player ever since on the team,” Smith says. “A little motivation.”

He ran sprints up a hill in Broward County, always beating the other neighborhood kids. He jumped rope. He learned the nuances of playing wide receiver—route running, separating coming off the line of scrimmage, recognizing defenses—and also developed a flair for the spectacular. The onehanded catches that have become famous at Ohio State began long before college.

Even in an area awash in talent, word began to spread in youth football circles about the fast, rangy kid known as “JJ.”

“I kept hearing his name,” says Goetz, who has had many college and NFL stars come through South Florida Express, such as Geno Smith, Amari Cooper and Ryan Shazier. “When I got to watch him, he was elite as a young kid. There’s just guys that are physically better. We had a lot of great players, and then there’s guys on another level.

“But with the ones that are physically better, they don’t always have it mentally. JJ had both. He’s very humble, very quiet. He’s not into partying. He’s just about football.”

Jeremiah Smith works out in July. — “He’s very humble, very quiet. He’s not into partying. He’s just about football,” says Brett Goetz, founder of South Florida Express, Smith’s seven-on-seven team. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Says Garcia, “He might have the best combination of God-given ability and mental focus that I’ve come across.”

In February 2021, Miami, coached by Manny Diaz at the time, offered Smith a scholarship, not even three months after his 15th birthday. So did Georgia. The rest of the nation jumped on board shortly thereafter.

That October, a South Florida Express trip to a competition in Ohio and an unofficial visit to Ohio State laid the groundwork for his career path. Brian Hartline, the recruiting force behind the program’s wideout legacy, locked in on Smith.

“As soon as Ohio State jumped in, it was going to be hard for anyone to really challenge them,” Garcia says.

After enrolling early, in January 2024, video from spring practices emerged showing Smith running past older defensive backs and catching long bombs. Even at a school with plenty of other receiving talent, it was clear he was going to play a starring role in his first year. School records began falling quickly, starting with Hall of Famer Cris Carter’s freshman receiving marks—Smith racked up 76 catches for 1,315 yards and 15 touchdowns in his first season.

Jeremiah Smith catches a pass in front of Indiana defensive back D’Angelo Ponds in the 2025 Big Ten football championship. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

He was unstoppable in the first two games of Ohio State’s charge through the 12-team College Football Playoff to the national title, scoring twice against both Tennessee and Oregon. In the CFP championship game against Notre Dame, a clever play call by OSU offensive coordinator Chip Kelly resulted in a wide-open, walk-in touchdown for Smith, but his biggest play in that game—and in that season—did not result in six points.

Having lost momentum and clinging to a one-score lead with fewer than three minutes remaining, Kelly and Day went bold on a third-and-11 play from Ohio State’s own 34-yard line. They told quarterback Will Howard to chuck it deep to the Buckeyes’ best player.

Smith’s thought process when the call came in? “Just catch the damn ball,” he says with a laugh. “That’s all I was thinking.”

He caught the damn ball for a gain of 56 yards after streaking past Fighting Irish cornerback Christian Gray, setting up the clinching field goal. A national title that seemed highly unlikely after the Buckeyes’ disaster against Michigan to end the regular season (the unranked Wolverines won 13–10 to knock OSU out of the Big Ten title game) was secured. If freshmen were eligible for the draft, somebody would have taken Smith in the first round.

Instead, he had to come back to school, with a new coordinator (Hartline) and a new quarterback (Julian Sayin). Ohio State was undefeated and No. 1 before being upset by Indiana in the conference championship game, then watched the Hoosiers complete an improbable, 16–0 season.

Now the head coach at USF, Brian Hartline built Ohio State’s vaunted receiving corps and helped recruit Jeremiah Smith. | James Black/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

“That’s a great football team right there,” Smith says of Indiana. “They showed us some stuff that had us confused a little bit, but we’ll see them again this year and hopefully it’ll be a different outcome.”

Ohio State was still considered one of the favorites to win the national title but was shocked in the playoff quarterfinals by the school that tried so hard to sign Smith out of high school, Miami. Those two losses were by no means Smith’s fault—he had 301 yards receiving in the two games, with catches of 50-plus yards in each. His 2,557 yards receiving and 27 touchdowns are the most by a Big Ten player through his first two years of college. But the playoff loss marked the first time Smith had finished a season without a title since 2020.

So he threw himself into offseason work with even more gusto, prepping for his last college year to be his best one. With Hartline departing to be the head coach at South Florida, Miami sensed an opportunity for one more try at landing the local prodigy who got away. Smith told On3 in the spring that he could have made “$10 million, easy” if he transferred, although he veered away from that number in the interview for this story.

“I had a lot of teams coming at me, but I know where I wanted to be for my last season,” he says. “It was a no-brainer to stay here.”

At age 20, Smith already has endorsement deals with Red Bull, Adidas and KeyBank, which has its headquarters in Ohio. So he’s going to finish college the way he started it, as a Buckeye. He’s looking forward to a second season with Sayin and a first season with his third offensive coordinator in three years (Arthur Smith, who spent three seasons as the Falcons’ coach and was most recently the Steelers’ OC).

“I love Coach Smith, man,” Jeremiah Smith says. “He’s a player’s coach. Somebody you could always go to and talk about anything in life, no matter what it is. I mean, I respect that man so much and he’s only been here a couple of months here so far. I know he’s going to give us his best and we know the offense will give him our best as well.”

Last November, Jeremiah Smith helped the Buckeyes break a four-game losing streak to Michigan with a second-quarter, 35-yard TD catch. | Samantha Madar/Columbus Dispatch/USA Today Network/Imagn Images

On Smith’s to-do list for 2026: more physical blocking in the run game and more yards after the catch. He wants to be an All-American, the Biletnikoff Award winner, the Big Ten Player of the Year and a Heisman Trophy finalist. (“I want to win it, but that’s QB bias,” he says.)

“I think there’s a lot to prove,” he says. “A lot of people still doubt me, even though I had two great years here. Still feel I got a lot of doubters out there. I still got to prove a lot of people right, got to prove a lot of people wrong.”

Mostly, though, he wants to be named a captain and chase another national championship.

“He loves to win, and he’s motivated by the opportunity this team has in front of it,” Day says. “He understands how rare it would be to help lead a team to two national championships during his career. There aren’t many players in college football history—including at Ohio State—who have achieved that historic feat. That’s what drives him every day.”

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