How one of Noah Fant's greatest football failures served as a springboard for his rise

Overtime.

4th-and-3.

Down seven.

Iowa-Northwestern.

Out of the shotgun, Hawkeyes quarterback Nathan Stanley looks left and sees his man. It’s 6-foot-5, 250-pound tight end Noah Fant, and he’s come wide open on a stick route two yards past the sticks.

Without hesitation, Stanley releases a strike right onto the numbers.

But as the ball approaches the massive target, he takes a slight glance upfield, and before he knows it, almost in slow motion, the ball falls to the ground.

It’s a drop. Ballgame over. Hawkeyes lose.

Fant’s mother, Kathy, remembers it like it was yesterday.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, the thought of her son’s pain causing her to pause for a second. “That was a tough one.”

“That was a tough one for him because he felt like he failed in that moment.”

Fant was crushed.

After the game, he headed out to the visitor’s family area, where he was greeted not only by his parents but his mom’s whole side of the family, most of which lives in the Chicago area.

Despite all of their efforts to prop him up after a game in which he did score a touchdown, he was still inconsolable.

“He broke down a little bit,” mom says. “But, you know what? He dried his eyes and went back in and did media.”

It was a mature moment for a true sophomore, who easily could have headed straight for the bus.

“It hurts,” he told a group of reporters, his eyes still bloodshot.

For a young player who was chalked full of potential that he hadn’t quite reached yet, a heartbreaker like that could have very well stunted his development. He could have gone into a shell and drifted away from the spotlight.

But a familiar message from his father and long-time football coach, Willie Fant, rang inside his head.

“He prides himself on pushing through adversity,” Noah said. “It’s what I learned most from my dad… Things aren’t always going to go well, and he’s a big believer in always pressing forward and always taking advantage of your opportunities.”

So when Fant spoke with his father a few days after the game, he knew the message that was coming, but Willie delivered it anyway.

“These are the times,” he said, referring to the lesson he had been preaching for life. “It’s not your first one and it’s not going to be your last one, but you have to push through the adversity.”

Thanks to his father, Noah Fant was entirely prepared for this moment and how to approach it. What could have been a highway to hell turned into a springboard for success.

In his next game, Fant scored a touchdown in a win over Minnesota. In the game after that, two more scores in a win over Ohio State. The next week, another TD against Purdue. The game after that, against his hometown Nebraska Cornhuskers, a career game of 116 yards and two more scores. To finish the season against Boston College, another touchdown.

Adversity turned Noah Fant into a beast.

All in all, after one of the toughest football moments of his life, Fant went on to score seven touchdowns in just five games to end the season, nearly doubling his career total up to that point.

The stretch, coupled with six touchdowns in six games to start his 2018 season, took Fant from a talented player with unlocked potential to a potential first-round draft pick.

Almost exactly a year and a half after that fateful drop, the Denver Broncos selected Fant with the 20th-overall pick in the first round of the 2019 NFL Draft.

As he stood upon the dais at Denver Broncos headquarters during his first full day as an NFL player, he gazed over toward Willie and Kathy, both welling up with pride.

“My parents supported me all the way through,” he said, perhaps reflecting on lessons learned. “They’re great parents.”