MOBILE, Ala. — By the time Rodrigo Blankenship’s collegiate career at Georgia was wrapping up, he was nothing short of a local folk hero. At home games, Blankenship received a louder ovation than teammates and position players Jake Fromm and D’Andre Swift.

That’s quite rare to accomplish as a specialist.

But the bespectacled place-kicker made his share of clutch field goals during his four seasons with the Bulldogs. In turn, he earned the love and affection of Georgia’s fan base.

Blankenship, who won this year’s Lou Groza Award as the nation’s best collegiate place-kicker, is participating in this week’s Senior Bowl and is considered the best prospect at his position in the 2020 NFL Draft class. His rise has been the result of a strong work ethic and determination, which was spearheaded before his redshirt freshman season in 2016.

Long before Blankenship was a well-known name in football circles, he was on the losing end of a position battle that has been easy to forget when it comes to Blankenship’s story arc. A preferred walk-on at the time, Blankenship was expected to become Georgia’s primary place-kicker after Marshall Morgan’s tenure came to an end.

Instead, Blankenship came up short during an offseason competition for the field goal job.

“It was a very difficult time in my college athletic career,” Blankenship said. “It was some adversity I’d faced that I’d never had up to that point. I’d never had somebody that was better than me and had taken a spot away from me. That was some adversity I’d never had before. I was in uncharted waters.”

Revisiting the competition

Standing in a ballroom at the Mobile Convention Center, Blankenship held court for nearly an hour as a consistent stream of reporters stopped by to ask him a multitude of questions. As this year’s top place-kicker prospect, Blankenship commanded this attention due to his draft status. Keep in mind, being drafted as a place-kicker is a remarkable feat when you consider that only 10 place-kickers have been selected since 2015.

But in 2016, the NFL draft was far from Blankenship’s mind. He was trying to fend off a competitor looking to take Georgia’s primary place-kicker position.

William Ham decided to join the team after the 2015 season ended, although he was no stranger to Georgia’s program. He actually walked on to the team in 2014 before leaving the following season. But near the end of the 2015 season, then-head coach Mark Richt reached out to him — Richt actually called Ham during a management information systems class — to see if he would be interested in returning to the team. At the time, Richt’s staff was unsure about Blankenship, who was redshirting during his first season on campus. Needing another option, the Georgia staff asked Ham to come back. After Richt’s dismissal and Kirby Smart’s hiring, the offer stood.

Ham accepted and was ready to take the job.

It wasn’t as if Ham returned to the team cold with his kicking. He continued to get reps on his own at a local high school in Athens. Over time, he actually began to regret the initial decision to leave Georgia the first time. After he rejoined Georgia’s program, it didn’t take long for the coaches to believe Ham, a third-year sophomore in 2016, could be their primary place-kicker for field goals.

In practice, Ham impressed. During the spring and summer, he consistently outperformed Blankenship in practice. Ham couldn’t recall the numbers but noted his percentages on field goals were better than Blankenship’s. With the first game of the 2016 season approaching, the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game against North Carolina, the coaches notified the players of their decision.

“Eventually, I started on field goals; he was a little better on kickoffs than me,” Ham said in a phone interview. “That’s where it started. A month before the first game, they said this is how we’ll do it. Eventually, they just told us these are what the numbers look like, and so that’s where we’ll go for now.”

The news was tough for Blankenship to take. While the teammates embraced the competition and supported one another, Blankenship never had been in a position where he wasn’t considered the top option at place-kicker.

At Sprayberry High School in Georgia, he was a three-year starter at place-kicker from the moment he set foot on campus. Florida defensive end Jabari Zuniga, who played with Blankenship at Sprayberry and is also participating at this year’s Senior Bowl, was shocked to learn that Blankenship initially lost the place-kicking job in 2016.

“Rodrigo always had a wooden leg,” Zuniga said. “He’d be at practice kicking 70 yarders. He was wowing everybody.”

But as the competition played out, Ham earned the coaches’ trust for field goals. While Blankenship admitted his disappointment with the outcome of the competition, he didn’t want to alter his approach in the event his name would be called upon.

“At the end of the day, you have to have the mindset of what’s best for the team,” Blankenship said. “Obviously you want to play and be the guy to get it done, but if you’re playing football, you’re playing a team sport. You should want the best interest of the team, regardless if it means you’re playing. It was a little bit of an interesting situation because you’re both trying to do as well as you can. You want to be the best guy at the end of the day, but I could never say I was rooting against him. I just wanted whatever was best of the team.

“If he was kicking better and giving us the best chance to win games, that’s what I wanted.”

Once the place-kickers were notified of their roles, Ham wanted to make sure Blankenship was in good spirits. Ham pulled Blankenship aside to let him know that at any moment, he could be asked to step in.

“I told him, ‘I’m here for you, I know you have my back. If something happens, I know you’re going to do just fine,’” Ham said. “We had a smooth relationship. I totally understood his adversity because obviously I felt it coming in a few games later.”

Rodrigo Blankenship ended his time at Georgia hitting 82.5 percent of his field goals, which is a program record. (Vasha Hunt / USA Today)

The first three games

Entering Georgia’s opener against North Carolina, Ham was exuding confidence. He recalled feeling more confident in his kicking heading into that game than with anything he had done previously in his life. That included feeling self-assured after the team arrived at the Georgia Dome and went through pregame warm-ups.

“In warm-ups, I felt right. In the game, I felt right,” Ham said. “It’s so easy to get the ball rolling confidence-wise.”

While he made all four of his extra-point attempts, Ham missed a 42-yard field goal attempt in the third quarter. He did return later to make a 29-yarder. A week later against Nicholls, Ham made two of his three attempts but missed a 52-yarder.

With two misses in two games in front of friendly crowds, Ham had an upcoming road test at Missouri.

“When you miss a field goal, there are all these things running through your head: ‘What did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? How can I fix the situation?’” Ham said. “It’s so important to go to the next kick, but it’s so easy to think about your last kick.”

Against Missouri, Ham experienced his first taste of what it can be like as a place-kicker on the road. It was much different than kicking in privacy at practice or even in front of the home crowd at Sanford Stadium. While Missouri, relatively speaking, isn’t exactly known for having the most hostile college football crowd, there were still tens of thousands of people screaming for him to miss.

As a result, the mental aspect set in. Two short attempts — from 23 and 38 yards — failed to split the uprights in the second half.

“For me, in the Missouri game, it was the rush,” Ham said. “It’s weird when everybody’s yelling at you. It’s different than practice where you’ve done it before. It’s just a totally different feeling. I know you have to get used to it over time. It’s similar to executing throws as a quarterback. I can do it in practice, but when there are external factors, it’s getting used to that. It’s just experience over time.”

Days after the game, Smart told reporters that Ham and Blankenship would resume a competition. Still, in practice, Ham repped with the first team and was prepared to start Georgia’s fourth game against Mississippi. The team traveled to Oxford, Miss., the Friday before the game and went through the regular pregame routine without any change of plans.

Then, with roughly 10 minutes to go before kickoff, the place-kickers were notified that Blankenship would get the starting nod. While stunned, Ham said he wanted to make sure Blankenship was ready for the moment.

“I gave him space,” Ham said. “I supported him right away. He was now absorbing a ton of pressure all of a sudden. It was my duty to encourage him and get his head right.”

Blankenship ended up missing his only attempt, a 36-yarder, in a 42-14 loss. While Blankenship missed his first-ever field goal attempt, he didn’t practice with the first team in practice that week. Therefore, in the ensuing week of practice, the coaches gave Blankenship the full allotment of reps with the first team to see how he would perform. From there, a decision was made to stick with Blankenship moving forward.

While Blankenship’s first game kicking field goals ended 0-for-1, his next five set the foundation for his legacy.

“When I wasn’t the guy, I just tried to prepare and have my process and my routine going at all times like I was the guy,” Blankenship said.

‘A renewed vigor and work ethic’

During those first three games, Blankenship used the kicking net any chance it was free. When Georgia’s offense got close to scoring range, he would cede the net to Ham, so he could get loose for attempts. But Blankenship wanted to do everything possible to ensure he would be ready to take over if need be.

“Not having the position right away gave me some more motivation and determination in me that I didn’t have previously,” Blankenship said. “I got to Sprayberry as a sophomore and started right away. Up until that point, I had always been the guy. For the first time, not being the guy put me in a different state of mind. It gave me a little bit of a renewed vigor and work ethic that I didn’t have previously up to that point.”

Against Tennessee the following game, Blankenship made his first career field goal. He got zero attempts against South Carolina a week later but followed that game with three makes against Vanderbilt. He made another field goal against Florida, giving him five in a row.

Against Kentucky, Blankenship made field goals from 25, 42 and 49 yards. The game then came down to Georgia needing a fourth field goal from Blankenship to win. He hit a 25-yarder with no time remaining, which gave the Bulldogs a walk-off 27-24 victory.

He then gave an on-field interview with the SEC Network wearing his rec-specs and his helmet. From that moment, his popularity boomed.

“It was awesome, surreal,” Ham said. “Being on the bus after the game against Kentucky when he hit the game-winner, he was getting all this cool press. Obviously I wanted the same thing; who doesn’t? We’re all human. But at the same time, it was great to see. It’s a good story. Everyone has adversity.”

Ham would have loved for his career to take off the way Blankenship’s did. And in the moment, he admitted how tough it was for it not to work out in the manner he hoped. As time passed, Ham said the humility he endured helped him in the long run.

Ham, who lives in Atlanta, is now an information security consultant with Ernst & Young with a “side hustle” as a musician. When it comes to his post-college professional career, Ham said the highs and lows of his brief stint as Georgia’s starting place-kicker have helped shape him into the person he is today.

“For me personally, if you would have asked me three years ago, ‘Is this what I wanted?’ Heck no,” Ham said. “Looking back, I know what I really love doing and want. It was a very humbling experience for me. I got to ride a real big high but fall. I’ll take that learning and being humbled as pure gold.”

While Blankenship ended the 2016 season as Georgia’s starter, he still hadn’t cemented himself as Georgia’s place-kicker. He went into the 2017 offseason without a scholarship, with Georgia bringing in Wofford graduate transfer David Marvin on scholarship. This time, Blankenship held onto the job, opened the season by handling both field goals and kickoffs and earned a scholarship prior to Georgia’s win over Notre Dame. During the next three seasons, Blankenship elevated himself to become regarded as the best place-kicker in college football.

He ended his time at Georgia hitting 82.5 percent of his field goals, which is a program record. He made 80 field goals, which is second only to Billy Bennett’s 87. Blankenship made all 200 of his extra-point attempts. He also shattered the career touchback record with 234.

Seeing how his career turned out, it’s somewhat startling to remember how it started. But losing the place-kicker battle as a redshirt freshman turned out to be a valuable lesson in Blankenship’s career.

“I think it just gave me a little chip on my shoulder that I needed to prove that I belonged and proved that I deserved to be a part of the team, and prove that I could be a kicker for a big-time school,” Blankenship said. “It definitely gave me a better appreciation for what it meant to work and grind. It’s paid off for the long run.”

(Top photo: Vasha Hunt / USA Today)