Story by Ryan Heller
Photos courtesy of Sarah Grubbs
Noah Ruggles calmly walked onto the field as 18,373 spectators screamed at him. Most of them wore Utah red and were trying to distract him so that he’d hook or shank or flub his kick. Anything to make the Odessa, Florida, senior miss the field goal attempt.
Ruggles had a chance to give his team the lead with 12 seconds remaining in the 2021 Rose Bowl. Nineteen yards separated him from bringing Ohio State to the brink of victory. The team that took a chance on him a few months ago now depended on him to be the hero.
Ruggles blocked out the noise, gave a small head nod and ran to kick the football.
***
Ruggles had been in this moment before. Different team, different game, different stakes, but the same pressure to convert. Oct. 19, 2019, suddenly became a day he would never forget.
North Carolina and Virginia Tech remained deadlocked well into the fourth overtime and Ruggles had the chance to clinch the game for the Tar Heels.
UNC took a timeout before his kick, so he stood alone mimicking his routine as the rest of the team huddled near the sideline. He started thinking about how he was going to aim his attempt, remembering that his offensive line had previously struggled to protect him.
After the ball was snapped, he saw a defender breeze past his man – he expected that. So, he adjusted his aim to the right to avoid the opponent’s outreached hand. The football reached the goalposts untouched, but he’d over-corrected, causing the ball to narrowly miss the right pole, nicking the flag on top of it.
The Virginia Tech crowd erupted as Ruggles put his hands on his helmet in dejection. He thought he’d lost the game for UNC.
“I definitely didn’t get over that kick for a while,” Ruggles said. “I took the blame.”
But he would get his shot at redemption a few plays later.
He lined up his next kick, this time from 39 yards away, and curled the ball into the center of the two posts. Agony turned into relief as he bounded back from his error.
But then he noticed a penalty flag.
Ruggles was forced to re-kick – this time from five yards farther away.
After the snap, another defender jumped in front of Ruggles’ kick, but once again, he navigated the ball away from danger – or at least he thought. But another defender launched himself above the UNC barricade and clipped the ball with the tips of his fingers, steering it off course.
North Carolina ended up losing the game in six overtimes, and Ruggles lost his job as the starting kicker.
“He went through a really hard time with that loss to Virginia Tech,” his mom, Jackie Ruggles, said. “I just think that it was really tough on Noah during that time, and then the rest of his time at UNC.”
***
While Ruggles was able to reclaim the starting spot later in the 2019 season, head coach Mack Brown brought in Grayson Atkins – a new kicker from the transfer portal – to play the following season. Despite believing he matched Atkins’ production during team practices, Ruggles could never win back the starting job
“I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, but I’m not getting a chance,” Ruggles said. “I wasn’t getting a look. I wasn’t getting anything.”
He did what he could to get back on the first team – attempting more than eight field goals each pregame warmup and making nearly every kick attempt during practice. He never gave up his hopes of getting back on the first team.
“He’s determined,” his former UNC roommate Mikey Selsor said. “He doesn’t want anybody to beat him. It doesn’t matter if you’re his best friend, or you’re just a random person. He takes kicking very seriously.”
He finally had some hope of playing that season after Atkins missed an easy 22-yarder against N.C. State, and the assistant coaches told Ruggles to begin warming up. When the next field goal opportunity came, he was ready to make his case for the first team. But Brown gestured for Atkins to come in.
That’s when Ruggles’ frustration reached its peak.
“I knew I had to leave,” Ruggles said. “I knew this wasn’t going to happen for me, for whatever reason. I can’t make it work here, which really sucks.”
***
On April 11, 2021, Ruggles filmed himself alone on a UNC practice field burying a 52-yard field goal. He imagined was for a victory, emphatically waved his right arm in the air in celebration. He concluded his recording by holding his phone up to his face and making a final plea.
“If you’re a coach out there listening to this, give me a chance because I’m hungry,” Ruggles said at the end of the recording.
This was the start of a series of videos he posted on Twitter to publicly showcase his skills. Each one displayed him drilling kicks from all over the field and blasting kickoffs into the endzone.
But as months went by, very few coaches called. After passing up on some offers from smaller schools, he eventually got in touch with coaches from Temple, Vanderbilt and Minnesota, but they moved on to other kickers.
Summer training camp was right around the corner, and Ruggles was sitting on a plane to Columbus without a team to play for. He was visiting Ohio State after Parker Fleming, the school’s special teams coordinator, saw his Twitter videos. Fleming called him to ask if he wanted to come to try out for them on June 1 – the day before his birthday.
Ohio State had a special place in the heart of the entire Ruggles’ family. His grandfather, Judy, went to a couple of the program’s College Football Playoff games and once bought season tickets for a year with his church friends.
“My dad just thought it would be amazing if Noah could go to Ohio State to kick,” Jackie Ruggles said. “I said ‘Oh no, that’s out of reach. That’s not going to happen.’”
Three days after he completed the workout, Ruggles drove to his brother Michael’s house in Raleigh with his girlfriend, Sarah Grubbs. Ruggles didn’t speak the whole ride over and had been quieter than usual as he nervously waited to hear back from Ohio State.
But then his cell phone rang. In 15 minutes, he had been given a scholarship and was now a Buckeye. He sat on the bottom steps of the stairs and cried.
If only Judy was alive to hear about it.
“Everything kind of just left his body,” Grubbs said. I’d never really seen him like that. But I was just so proud of him because I knew there was talent there that wasn’t being recognized when he was at UNC.”
***
Ruggles calmly walked onto the Rose Bowl field, with a chance to close out a season where he made all but one kick.
As the holder got the ball set, a defender came flying past the offensive line. But this time Ruggles struck the ball between the bright yellow posts before he could get there, giving his team the lead with less than 10 seconds remaining.
“If you miss this field goal, everybody’s watching that game and everybody’s going to have something to say, especially in the social media world,” Ohio State long snapper Bradley Robinson said. “That’s where it takes like a whole other level of mental strength to be prepared for that possibility and then deal with that. And he did just that.”
After the conversion, Ruggles looked down at the defender who tried to block him and gave him a salute before getting carried in the air by a 6-foot-8, 360-pound lineman.
“He told me that the minute he walked on the field, that there’s not a chance in hell that he’s missing this one,” Grubbs said. “Now, he’s the hero at Ohio State.”
One year before his winning kick, he was on the bench, taking snaps with backups. Seven months before it, he was planning on going into the summer without a kicking job. Now, he’s a Rose Bowl champion, ESPN All-American and will soon have a tree planted in his name next to Ohio Stadium because of his accomplishments on the field.
Ruggles posted on Twitter on Jan. 21 that he was going to return to Ohio State for his final year of eligibility, announcing he’d be declaring for the 2023 NFL Draft. After being the focal point of an embarrassing defeat, he now views his two misses at Virginia Tech as an occurrence that needed to happen in order to finally get his redemption two years later.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Ruggles said. “But you can either let that moment define you and back down and give it up or you can learn from it, figure out what you did wrong and make it a point not to make that same mistake again.”
