Sonny Styles and other Buckeyes destroyed the NFL Combine: How does that make you feel about the 2025 season?

Doug and Bill will talk about this on the Sunday Soundoff.

Sonny Styles had a vertical jump of 43.5 inches at the NFL Combine. (Screenshot courtesy of NFL.com)

COLUMBUS — As Peter Schrager of ESPN described it after talking with NFL talent evaluators at the NFL Combine, “Sonny Styles’ day (Thursday) might go down as one of the greatest combine performances we’ve ever seen.”

Among linebackers, Styles had the fastest 40 time, the highest vertical jump and the longest broad jump. He was sixth in the three-cone shuttle agility drill and tied for third in the 20-yard shuttle.

It’s not just a good combine for this year.

His linebacker broad jump was the fourth-best at the combine since 1999.

His vertical jump at the time was the highest for anyone 6-foot-4 or taller and the highest for anyone 240 pounds or heavier since 2003.

Raw Athletic Score (RAS), as created by football analyst Kent Lee Platte, is a metric that combines height, weight, 40 time, the agility drills and other testing to create a single number of athleticism. A perfect score is 10. Styles checked in at 9.99.

Through combine testing among defensive linemen, linebackers, secondary players and tight ends who went in the first two days, Styles was first.

Among all Buckeyes in the combine testing database going back to the 1980s, Styles is tied for second behind one perfect OSU score of 10: linebacker Andy Katzenmoyer in 1999. Styles is tied with cornerback Marshon Lattimore from 2017.

The only two linebackers at his position who also scored 9.99 and higher and went in the first round, as Styles will, became NFL Defensive Players of the Year — Brian Urlacher and Luke Kuechly.

By Next Gen Stats, which started its combine tracking in 2023, Styles has the best score for a defensive player.

Oh, and after posting a 4,.27 time in the 40, easily the fastest combine time this season, Lorenzo Styles has the fifth-best Buckeye combine RAS score ever.

And Arvell Reese, classified as an edge player in the combine tracker, ran the fastest 40 time at his position.

It was a lot of talent on display — and that was with Caleb Downs choosing to sit out drills and save his workout for Ohio State’s Pro Day on March 25.

So what do you think of this?

Bill and I have discussed this some, but we want to talk about it more on a Sunday Soundoff. The basic idea — how does the elite talent being displayed by OSU defenders at the combine make you think about the 2025 OSU defense?

Share any thoughts at the bottom of this post or post them in our weekend chat.

Also, some poll questions.