COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Audrey Gill could not wrap her head around why her son, Air Noland, would even want to consider Ohio State in a way that would require them to spend a weekend in Columbus.
She was from New York, spending a good chunk of her life dealing with cold weather before deciding it was something she never wanted to deal with again. The solution to that was raising her kids in Georgia, but now one of them was forcing her to return to that environment to watch him play football.
That disdain for the cold was one of two reasons she tried to poke as many holes as she could in the Buckeyes’ chances to land the nation’s No. 65 player and No. 6 quarterback.
“I’m gonna be honest with you, I didn’t want to come to Ohio State,” Gill told cleveland.com. “... But he just insisted. The week before, I was thinking maybe he’ll change his mind about going to Ohio State once we did all the other visits because he had good visits everywhere.”
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Gill doesn’t like the cold, but she’d also find a way to deal with it if that meant sending her son to the right place for him. Like the rest of the country, her only other question about the Buckeyes was why it was taking them so long to offer Noland, given the two had been in contact since his sophomore year. She’d wondered just how serious OSU could be if it still hadn’t made him an official target.
But Noland knew why. OSU coach Ryan Day and quarterbacks coach Corey Dennis had given him reason to believe that offer was imminent as soon as he reciprocated the energy by visiting Columbus.
That finally happened on March 31 and it set in motion a week-long process that landed Ohio State a 2024 quarterback.
‘Ohio State hit on all three levels’
Noland and Gill’s first trip to Columbus started with Gill staying on-brand with her anti-cold agenda. She liked all of his other options — Alabama, Arkansas, Clemson, Miami, Oregon and Texas A&M — because most of them wouldn’t require her to sit outside in the cold with a big coat on to support her son.
The inconsistent weather of the Midwest helped her make her case without much of a problem.
“We get up there and of course, the weather wasn’t good,” Gill joked. “It was cold. I looked at him and said, ‘You see son, you sure you want to be up here in this? And he said, ‘This is football weather, Mom. I love football weather.’ ”
That was the last time Gill could say anything bad about the idea of her son playing at Ohio State. The rest of the trip was the best possible first impression a school could’ve possibly given, and that started the moment OSU’s director of recruiting strategy Nick Murphy picked them up from the airport.
“Ohio State hit on all three levels,” Noland told cleveland.com. “From an offensive scheme standpoint, a business opportunity standpoint and a cultural standpoint.”
Noland spent the weekend touring the campus and Columbus. He sat in quarterback and team meetings, watched a spring practice during the Buckeyes’ Student Appreciation Day, got his first real introduction to The Game and spent time with other current and future 2024 class members.
By the end of the weekend, Noland was hooked and it was written all over his face. Gill was blown away too, and could it probably wouldn’t be their last time in Columbus. That hunch was confirmed back at the hotel.
“We get back to the hotel room that night and he gives me this look and starts smiling,” Gill said. “I told him, ‘Let’s not talk about it until we get back home. Let’s just take it all in and when we get back home we’ll talk about it.’ Because I had him going somewhere else.
“When we got home, I looked at him and said, ‘I think they just made it really hard for everybody else.’ And he was like, ‘Me too.’”
‘So you’re not 100%’
Gill and Noland left Columbus on Monday, April 3, but they didn’t head straight home. They first had to stop at Alabama for a Tuesday official visit. They were five days away from announcing a choice, a date they’d set regardless of how things went in Columbus.
He’d left with an Ohio State offer as expected, followed by the waiting game with the Buckeyes hoping the Crimson Tide didn’t kill off all the momentum they’d spent the weekend building.
“One thing that was different at Ohio State compared to all the other schools is you can tell that people really care for the players whether they’re at their best or their worst,” Noland said. “The whole staff was very authentic to me and shot me straight.”
OSU was winning this race by the time the two got home on Wednesday, but it hadn’t yet won. Most of the reason was that Noland is still a teenager, and sometimes teenagers can struggle to make decisions. That’s where responsible parents come into play.
It led to the following conversation:
Noland: “Honestly Mom, I think I’m 100% on where I want to go”
Gill: “Huh. Are you sure?”
Noland: “Yeah, it seems like it.”
Gill: “So where do you want to go?”
Noland: “It’s either Alabama or Ohio State.”
Gill: “So then you’re not actually 100% sure.”
Like any parent, Gill rolled her eyes are her child’s non-decision decision. Then she gave him a day to think about it before making a firm choice he could live with. She knew where the best place was for him, but he had to come to that realization on his own.
But she wouldn’t be who she was without one last jab about the weather.
“I called him into my room a day later and he goes, ‘I think it’s Ohio State, Mom,’” Gill said “I said, ‘You sure? You see how pretty the weather is in Miami and Texas?’ But that’s not where he felt at home. He felt at home at Ohio State.”
‘The money never moved us’
Air Noland and Ian Moore, 2024 Ohio State commitsDavid Petkiewicz, cleveland.com
Ohio State found out that Noland was coming on Thursday, April 6, but he elected not to tell the other contenders ahead of time. The good thing about that approach is not having the decision leak out ahead of time. The bad thing is that it can create a 48-hour period of madness as everyone tries to make a final plea.
That takes on a completely different meaning now that college athletes now can make money from their Name, Image and Likeness.
From the moment NIL became an option, the next question was how teams would use it as a recruiting tool. That can mean teenagers getting undisclosed amounts of money thrown at them. Some kids jump at those offers; some like Noland don’t.
But that doesn’t mean that the opportunity to be part of the former didn’t exist for him or his former teammate and now-OSU tight end Jelani ‘Tank’ Thurman.
“I know for a fact that they didn’t take the highest dollar amount,” Noland’s high school coach Brandon Williams told cleveland.com. “The dollar amount was definitely different at other places. But they loved what Coach Day and the guys are doing up there. Coach Dennis did a great job and Coach Kevin Wilson (now Tulsa’s head coach) recruited the hell out of Tank. They are very in tune with the program’s history and what it means to play at Ohio State. That mattered more than the money now in those two guys’ eyes.”
That’s because Gill and Noland set a tone for how things were going to go long before any dollar amount could ever be thrown at them. The money was never going to have any weight in where they ended up, and it shaped their recruiting process.
“Air and I had a conversation before we started what I called our ‘March Madness Tour,’ ” Gill said. “I told him schools are gonna offer him a lot of money.
“But I asked him, ‘Do you want that fast money now, or what is your end goal? Do you want the NFL to be in your future or does it matter that you get a big lump sum of money right now?’
“He wanted the NFL.”
They decided to do things “the right way,” but they still live in the real world. Just because they weren’t going to let it decide things for them didn’t mean they didn’t have moments where they were blown away by what was being offered.
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But setting the tone early brought them back down to what actually mattered. It also created some funny moments.
“I know money moves people, but I’ve been going to work every day since Air was born,” Gill said. “I knew the money wasn’t gonna move me now. It was one point when we were offered a lot of money, and Air and I looked at each there and froze up. Then we both just busted out laughing.
“Had we gone into it with a different mindset we probably would’ve taken the money when people called, but the money never really moved us.”
The Buckeyes won the battle for Noland because he, Gill and Williams felt like they were the most authentic of the programs recruiting him. From the first moment, Day and Dennis went down to Langston Hughes High School to watch him throw, they never lied about their intentions, even when five-star prospect Dylan Raiola — who later decommitted — was still their 2024 quarterback.
“That is one of the realest staffs in the country,” Williams said. “The conversations with those coaches are real conversations.
“His sophomore year, Ryan Day and Corey Dennis were the only coaches to see him throw, so this relationship has been intact. They kept it real with him with Dylan Raiola being committed, and if that ever fell through he was the guy they were coming after. They stuck to their word.”
And Noland stuck to his by finally making his way to Columbus. Seven days later, he was a Buckeye.
Then he came back a week later for the Spring Game and has been actively recruiting others to come with him ever since.
All it took was a little bit of patience and convincing his mother that spending the next few years of their lives in the cold might not be so bad.
“Hopefully,” Noland said, “I can get her some type of exotic coat to keep her warm.”
To see Ohio State’s full 2024 recruiting class, click here.
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