Noah's arc: Spence is no trouble-child, but presents troubling dilemma for NFL teams
April 25, 2016 10:14am EDT April 25, 2016 9:46am EDT A first-round NFL Draft prospect with past drug issues that nearly ruined his career, Noah Spence presents teams with the most vexing questions. By
Mike DeCourcy@TSNMike
We had 10 minutes, 47 seconds to get to know Noah Spence. That was the extent of our time together at the NFL Scouting Combine, Spence and a few dozen reporters who cover the league. It seemed to move faster than a 40-yard dash.
The 32 NFL teams have had far more time to become acquainted with Spence, from his debut as a pass-rushing defensive end against the Miami RedHawks in September 2012 to his forced departure from Ohio State to his year in exile at Eastern Kentucky to this exhaustive process in advance of the NFL Draft, which involves timing him, measuring him, testing him, interviewing him and, indeed, investigating him.
When it is time to call his name during the draft, however, with some team making an exorbitant investment in his future — his salary over the first several years, and more so the opportunity cost of not selecting a number of other players who may turn out to be fantastic — how well will the members of that organization truly know him? Spence clearly understands by now what he must be when people are looking. Does he behave the same when he suspects people are not?
Every pick in the NFL Draft is a gamble at some level. Will the player be physically suited to endure the demands of the professional game without frequent injury? Do his skills translate to the NFL level? Does he love the game enough to pursue greatness, perhaps even after it has made him extravagantly wealthy? Spence has to deal with all of that, same as any other prospect available in 2016. And he has his own circumstance to explain.
It has been nearly three decades since Eastern Kentucky last produced an NFL first-rounder, so you know there has to be a story there. Spence’s story, reduced more or less to Twitter-length: elite talent in high school, young superstar at elite football college, prone to partying so hard and recklessly while playing big-time football that he gets booted from the team and an opportunity to play for a national championship; humble, wise and diligent enough to seize a discreet final chance to rescue his draft potential.
That is the story told about Noah Spence. That is the story he tells.
“I’m just telling the truth, my own story, just not holding anything back,” he said. “I feel like everything I’ve ever done is out in the open. I’ve never gotten away with anything. It’s all there. There’s nothing to hide.”
If it were that simple, someone with Spence’s rare and coveted talent would comfortably be chosen early in the first round.
But how do you know?
A second chance
In November 2014 — after being suspended for a 2013 bowl game and two games to start the following season because he tested positive for the drug known as Ecstasy, and after another failed test involving the same substance — Spence was ruled permanently ineligible to compete in the Big Ten. He could not help Ohio State coach Urban Meyer to win another football game. But Meyer was not done with him.
“We don’t give up on kids easily, especially if it’s a mistake that, in my opinion, is correctable,” Meyer said. “And this is correctable.”
The simplest thing for Meyer to do would have been to move along. He’d presented Spence with a scholarship, an opportunity, and Spence wasted it. Yep, that’s the ideal word: wasted. Meyer didn’t let it go there. He hooked up Spence with another opportunity by calling his friend Dean Hood at Eastern Kentucky and encouraging him to give Spence a spot with the Colonels.
No doubt Hood could use a first-round-type talent at EKU, but no coach is going out of his way to find someone with big-time attitude problems. Meyer made it clear Spence was not the person his problems suggested.
“He called and said, ‘Hey, this is a great kid, great family, made a mistake, has shown that he’s well on his way to correcting it and wants to be better, wants to be great,’” Hood told Sporting News. “Urban knows me and knew I’d do anything I could to help Noah, not only as a football player — get a chance to get some tape to get to the next level — but would care about him as a person and keep my thumb on him and make sure he was going to his counseling sessions and that we’re drug-testing him and not just letting him come play football.
“Our kids saw kids roll down from the FBS level all the time. They don’t care if he’s black, white, green or orange or necessarily what they did. They just want to know: Is he going to work, and is he a guy that’s going to put team above self? Noah answered those two questions almost immediately when he was on our campus. He was the hardest-working guy in the weight room, the hardest-working guy on the field, encouraging the other guys, not a ‘look at me’ or ‘you’ve gotta treat me different’ mentality. We started him on the bottom of the depth chart. He came in and was the last guy as a defensive end, had to work his way up. He earned the respect of our guys very quickly.”
Hood made certain during their first conversation that Spence was aware his first priority was to keep up with his counseling sessions and continue to pass regular drug tests. Spence responded by requesting that he be tested more often than was mandatory.
Eastern Kentucky played before an average of 10,350 spectators per game, or 10 percent of what you’ll find at a typical Ohio State home game. The team often travels by bus to road games. Hood said Spence never complained about the less glamorous circumstance he entered.
“I think the thing about Noah I appreciated the most, and I told a lot of scouts this: Noah had a competitive rage about him, and it was not only in games. It was anything in practice, any drill, any whatever,” Hood said. “You could see it in his eyes: When you were keeping score, it mattered to him.
“But the second piece to that, he was coachable in those moments. I’ve seen it before kids have had that, but they’re out of control and when you try to coach them it’s like throwing lighter fluid on a fire. With him, he’s still coachable in those moments.”
Spence played in all 11 games last fall for the Colonels, making 63 tackles — 22.5 for losses — and recording 11.5 sacks. He was the second-leading tackler on the team. Adding this to his sophomore year at Ohio State, when he recorded 7.5 sacks, the resume Spence has constructed is one of an elite pass rusher entering a league thirsting for that sort of player.
Now the defensive coordinator of the Charlotte 49ers, Hood called the defensive signals for EKU. He explains that having Spence on his line made choosing the proper alignment and coverages in third-and-long situations “easy.” Can you rush three defenders and drop eight into coverage, give the opposing quarterback fewer open targets? If one of those players is Spence and he’s likely to be in the QB’s face in a flash, absolutely.
Healing begins
His play was outstanding. His grades were terrific. There was no sign of any problem with Spence, except for the evidence. He failed a drug test. And then, with no real secret regarding the consequences of failing another, he failed another. How does that happen? The simple answer: taking drugs in advance of those tests on multiple occasions.
The real answer is almost always more complicated.
When Spence was suspended from the 2013 Big Ten Championship Game, he dismissed it as the product of someone slipping something into his drink when he wasn’t watching. That was an excuse. He had taken the drug willingly, perhaps eagerly.
“I was my own worst enemy. I was hiding everything,”
he told Bruce Feldman of Fox Sports last fall. “That made it easier for me to do it because I felt like nobody knew.”
Only after he failed a second test the following summer did Spence acknowledge he had a problem. He insists it was “never really an addiction,” but being dependent enough on Ecstasy to enhance his entertainment ultimately had a devastating impact on the rest of his life. Once the Big Ten ruled him permanently ineligible, he had to leave teammates he loved, a coach who believed in him and a team on the verge of a genuinely special season.
Spence told Feldman he first tried Ecstasy in high school and liked how it made him feel, liked it enough that he later broke off a relationship with a girlfriend who challenged him on it and enough to risk his standing with the Buckeyes — and, potentially, his future in the NFL — after failing the first test.
Spence now explains his problem as being rooted in a party culture that emphasized that sort of chemical escape. “There’s a group of people I can’t hang with,” he said. “I have to be more to myself, stay away from that party scene. Every time I did it, it was me going out and partying.”
Spence has passed perhaps 100 drug tests in the time since he failed his second nearly two years ago. He regularly attended counseling sessions at Ohio State and then EKU. He contends that passing so many drug tests is a clear indicator he has become a better person, has grown by overcoming the obstacles he established for himself.
I asked him what he does now with his free time. Having graduated from EKU, even with preparing for the draft there is plenty of that — and there’ll be loads more once he joins an NFL team.
“I spend a lot more time by myself,” Spence said. “I’ve got a girlfriend now. I go to movies and stuff like that. I don’t do much partying nowadays.”
The banishment from Big Ten play meant missing all of the 2014 season. He watched his television as Ohio State defeated Oregon in the first College Football Playoff championship game in January 2015, a little more than a year ago now.
So many of the Buckeyes who were a part of that great team were in attendance at the 2016 NFL Scouting Combine, and it was impossible to find any who’d offer less than a raving endorsement of Spence, even though they were fortunate that his behavior had not damaged their season.
“He’s awesome,” tight end Nick Vannett said. “He was honestly one of my best friends on the team.”
“I’m just happy to see he could turn things around, because I know he was going through some dark times,” tackle Taylor Decker said. “I like him as a person. I’ve always gotten along with him.”
“He’s a great kid,” defensive end Joey Bosa said. “Everyone makes mistakes. I made mistakes. It’s what you do with the second chance … He’s being looked at as a first-round pick, so I think he did a great job with a second chance.
