That same year, Nick Purichia and Kyle Ray arrived at Franklin College, where the Grizzlies played their home games at Stewart “Red” Faught Stadium (shown below in a 2009 Joe Konz photo) under the guidance of head coach Mike Leonard.
Leonard had played quarterback at Hanover College in southern Indiana, where he graduated in 1984 with a double major in business administration and physical education. He served two coaching stints as offensive coordinator at Hanover in the years thereafter. In fact, he came to Franklin College to be head coach in 2003 after his second stint (1999-’02) at Hanover, and in four seasons at Franklin, he’d compiled a record of 21-19, including an impressive 9-1 mark the previous year, 2006.
Leonard started his coaching career in 1984, right out of Hanover, as a graduate assistant at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. In 1986, he served as a graduate assistant at the University of Alabama.
Then came the first stint as offensive coordinator at Hanover, then a year coaching wide receivers at Holy Cross College, and a year coaching quarterbacks at Butler University in Indianapolis before taking the first of two stints in the 1990s as offensive coordinator for the highly successful Seagulls1, an American football team in the X-League, the top-level of gridiron football competition in Japan. After two years as offensive coordinator for Wittenberg University, Leonard returned to the Seagulls for a year in 1998. Then came his second stint at Hanover.
One thing about Mike Leonard has been constant: He has been beloved by players and coaches alike throughout his coaching career, which lasted through the 2019 season, when he stepped down from the Franklin job. In a July 2014 interview with the Johnson County Daily Journal, he said coaching isn’t about him.
“It’s about team,” he said. “Some people have egos that can’t fit through that door frame. I sure hope people don’t think I have one. We host football camps here in the summer, and as I watch some of these assistant high school coaches teach their players, there are guys out there that are 24 years old that know more football than I do right now.
“I think my strength is trying to rally everyone together for a common cause and get them going in the same direction.”
Nick Purichia and Kyle Ray had been among the top Indianapolis area high school quarterbacks in 2006. Both had been among that area’s top five in total passing yardage – for all classes of competition – at the end of the 2006 regular season. Ray and Eric Watt also had been among the top quarterbacks – at least in total passing yards per game – in the whole state of Indiana.
And Nick’s high school team, Indianapolis Cardinal Ritter, had made it to the 2006 state high school championship game before losing to Sheridan in overtime.
In the second game of Rupp’s sophomore season, 2006, he had entered the game against intrastate rival and No. 22-ranked Wabash College in the second quarter, relieving Ty Fritz.
Rupp stayed in the game the rest of the way and led the Grizzlies to a stunning 45-38 overtime upset of the Little Giants. He completed 20 of 24 passes for 238 yards and four touchdowns, including the decisive one in the extra session. That performance earned him the job as starting quarterback the rest of the season. And, as it turned out, for the rest of his college career.
Only a year before that dramatic debut, things at Franklin were not as peachy for Rupp. He had starred at Evansville (Ind.) Memorial High School, and like many athletes confident about their skills when moving up to the next level, Rupp expected to do the same after he arrived at Franklin College in 2005.
But Rupp struggled in freshman-year practices and barely got into any games that first year. In a September 2008 interview for an article by Johnson County Daily Journal Sports Editor Rick Morwick, Rupp disclosed that he had contemplated leaving Franklin after his freshman season to enroll in a larger school, give up football altogether and focus on getting an academic degree. It was a refrain that would ring familiar at the campus in just two years.
Rupp did remain at Franklin, and coach Leonard credited the player’s father, Pete, with encouraging his son to stay with the Grizzlies.
Rupp led the Grizzlies to a 9-1 record in 2006 and followed that with consecutive Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference championships his junior and senior years, and each of those seasons was followed by trips to the NCAA Division III postseason tournament. The Grizzlies made it to the quarterfinals in 2008, the program’s historical apex in postseason play, beating teams ranked higher than them in the first two rounds. In the third round, the Grizzlies bowed out, losing to Wheaton College, a lower seed.
Rupp finished his Franklin College career holding or equaling several Franklin career, single-season and single-game passing records. His 576 yards of total offense, 527 passing yards and 41 pass completions – all against Otterbein in 2008 in the first round of the NCAA Division III postseason tournament – stand as school records today. There are quite a few others.
Purichia and Ray recognized Rupp’s greatness immediately and accepted that they would have to spend two years as backups, setting their sights on a fair shot to take over the starter’s job in their junior years, 2009, when Rupp would be gone.
Three games into the 2007 season, head coach Leonard gathered the team’s top four quarterbacks – junior Rupp, sophomore Coty Bragdon and freshmen Ray and Purichia – to talk about how he could get each of them more playing opportunities.
“We were all pretty similar,” Bragdon said. “Chad had the upper hand (having started the bulk of the 2006 season) and had more playing time. But everyone in the group knew the playbook well. We all got along and helped each other. We were a jovial bunch.”
Bragdon, who had quarterbacked his team at Eastern Hancock High School east of Indianapolis, recognized the situation that Leonard had discussed with the quarterbacks, so he went to coach Leonard and offered to join the team’s receiving corps, thinking that doing so might also get him more playing time.
“I knew the plays and the pass routes, so I thought it was a good way” to help solve the quarterback logjam, Bragdon said. Leonard accepted the offer and assigned Bragdon to practice with the team’s receivers, and that’s the position Bragdon would play – along with assignments on some special teams – most of the rest of his time at Franklin College.
An interesting exception came in the Grizzlies’ win over Rose-Hulman on Nov. 1, 2008, when on the Grizzlies’ second play of their first possession, Bragdon threw and completed a 36-yard pass – to none other than the team’s starting quarterback, Chad Rupp.
Bragdon said the unusual play had been devised and practiced the week leading up to the game. On second-and-3 from the Grizzlies’ own 22-yard line, Bragdon lined up as a receiver and got the ball on a pitch from Rupp on a jet sweep. Just as Bragdon reached the tackle spot on his run, he stopped, saw Rupp open and threw to the quarterback, who caught the pass.
“It almost worked to perfection,” Bragdon said with a chuckle. “I thought he was going to break it, but (he) ended up being tripped up” by a Rose-Hulman defender. Nevertheless, the play did pick up a lot of yardage, taking Franklin to the Rose-Human 42-yard line. Alas, the drive would end fruitless several plays later when the Grizzlies gambled and kept the offense on the field for a fourth-and-10 play, and Rupp’s pass was intercepted. But that proved to be just a momentary setback; the Grizzlies won the game, 42-7.
Ray said that throughout 2008, coach Leonard would try to assess whether Ray or Purichia might stand out as the preferred No. 2 quarterback (or the primary backup).
In practices, he said, “Coach Leonard would say, ‘OK, let’s see who’s going to be the backup’.” Leonard would then challenge Ray and Purichia to lead five plays each to see how each would fare.
“I completed five passes,” Ray said, “and when it was Nick’s turn, he had one pass knocked down, and threw another one incomplete. So I won that. Nick was quicker than me, and he could change direction better than me. But I think I was more accurate and made better decisions.”
Bragdon noted that even though he and Kyle didn’t really know each other before meeting at Franklin, they had crossed paths. For years, Eastern Hancock and Indian Creek had each other on their annual high school football schedules as non-conference opponents. That included 2004, when Bragdon was a senior and Kyle Ray a sophomore, the only season both played on their varsity teams at the same time.
If that one game in 2004 (which Indian Creek won, 21-7) wasn’t enough for Bragdon to remember the Ray surname at Franklin College, two other things should have helped.
Kyle’s older brother, Justin, was in the same high school graduating class year (2005) as Bragdon, so Justin and Coty would have been on the field opposite each other in the annual Eastern Hancock-Indian Creek meetings as much as three times in their high school careers.
More likely, however, was that after he had graduated Eastern Hancock and began attending Franklin College, Coty would attend some of his younger brother Brett’s high school games. And in the Royals’ 2005 game at Trafalgar, Bragdon said, he distinctly remembers the Indian Creek public address announcer on several occasions touting “another big play by Kyle Ray,” who then was playing on defense for the Braves.
Bragdon said that announcer’s phrase returned to mind a few years later at Franklin College, when he eventually went to add Kyle’s phone number to his list of cell phone contacts. He used the moniker “Big Play Kyle Ray” for his teammate’s ID on his phone.
Purichia or Ray got into games when the Grizzlies had sizable leads and coach Leonard elected to bring Rupp to the sidelines. But it wasn’t enough to give either player any sustained experience.
It also didn’t give any of the coaches enough information to feel confident about one or the other as a starter after Rupp graduated and left campus. Purichia is No. 13 in Ralph Greenslade’s 2008 photo, celebrating with Bragdon (14) after the final score on a two-yard run in the aforementioned Rose-Hulman game.
So in 2009, the question of who would fill Rupp’s shoes loomed large when the football team assembled for preseason training camp. Sportswriters today might hype the situation as a “quarterback controversy” to generate interest and attention, but neither Ray nor Purichia – and certainly not coach Leonard – used such a term when discussing the situation.
But 2009 summer camp might have come too soon for Ray, who with his mother and siblings had suffered a huge personal loss at home just two months earlier: the death of Kyle’s father, Rob Ray. College roommate Bragdon felt that Kyle’s grief was partly responsible for what he said he observed of his friend’s play, not just at summer camp but through most of the 2009 season.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In late 2004, according to Karen Ray, her husband, Rob, started experiencing some discomfort. Early the following year, he caught and struggled with a cold, and soon after that, he came down with what appeared to be a case of bronchitis, which she said he had caught from oldest son Justin. Soon after that, Rob battled other health issues such as shoulder discomfort and inexplicable weight loss.
Rob finally visited his doctor in February 2005, and in March he consulted a gastroenterologist. Tests were done, including a colonoscopy, and initial results showed nothing of significance, Karen said. So doctors did a CAT scan and ultrasound, and the latter detected a mass on Rob’s liver.
The Ray
family and some friends – including Kolby Harrell – went to Destin, Fla., to
enjoy some R&R that same month. In the few days that Rob and Karen stayed in Florida on
that trip, Kolby recalled, Rob mentioned more than once that he was
experiencing some unusual pain.
Rob and Karen flew back to Indiana early so Rob could undergo a biopsy, a procedure that was supposed to be handled on an outpatient basis. But complications required that he be admitted, a stay that lasted several days, Karen said.
The results of the biopsy were not available when Rob finally was released, but he hadn’t been home very long when, while driving to have breakfast at a restaurant one morning, he got a call with the biopsy results. It turned out that the mass was verified as a rare form of neuroendocrine cancer, Karen said.
“Rob was very active. He didn’t drink alcohol,” Karen said. “There was a tiny spot on his pancreas that had moved to the liver.” It was a type of cancer that was “so random.”
The Rays
consulted an oncologist, who had Rob try chemotherapy and different treatments,
including a drug therapy trial.
After a difficult first few months of 2005, Rob had lost a noticeable amount of weight, but he was feeling better by the time son Justin graduated high school that spring. He was able to work the next couple of tax seasons, Karen said. Their oncologist told them that he’d had a patient with a situation similar to Rob’s, “and he got six (more) years,” she said. “We got four.”
During those four years, Rob never quibbled or complained, Karen said. He continued to work and join Karen in attending Justin and Kyle’s games at Indian Creek High School the rest of 2005 and ’06, and then Kyle’s games at Franklin College in 2007 and ’08.
Leslie Ray said her parents would consult her periodically during that difficult period because Leslie had obtained a doctorate in pharmacy from Purdue University in 2007, after which she went through additional pharmacist training and medical residencies in Florida and Chicago. Her knowledge of pharmaceuticals gave the Rays a resource for information and topics to raise in conversations with Rob’s doctors and specialists.
In early 2009, the cancer took firm control, and treatments were no longer working. Rob battled it to the end, which came the morning of June 8, 2009 – 2½ months before Kyle’s junior year began at Franklin College. Rob died at Community Hospital South in Indianapolis.
The death affected the whole Ray family, of course, but Kyle took it particularly hard; Rob had been Kyle’s idol and emotional rock.
“Rob had always been there for Kyle,” Karen said. “Kyle loved the quarterback position, and wanted to be like his dad.”
“My dad was a man of faith,” Kyle said, and in his father’s last days, “he had every reason to play victim, and never did. He died taking everything in spirit. He never was defeated. The day before he died, we were all in his (hospital) room praying for a miracle. But he was ready to accept what was ahead of him.”
Claire Freeman, whom Kyle was dating at this time, remembers Rob Ray like so many others did – a kind, loving and caring family man who had a hardy, infectious laugh.
“I absolutely loved him,” she said. “He and I had a wonderful relationship. I often joked that he loved me more than he loved Kyle. He was full of life, a man of God and a family guy. He loved his nieces and nephews so much. I often wonder how he would have been so in love with his grandkids. He was just an awesome, awesome guy.”
In the weeks after Rob’s death, Kyle told himself he’d use his father’s inspirational journey to help carry him past any troubles and challenges that lie ahead.
Unfortunately, Kyle’s ride for the next nine months or so would be bumpy, dispiriting and weighted with adversity.
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Footnotes:
1 - As of 2022, the Seagulls have won at least 17 championships since the team was founded in 1983. Today, the Seagulls are based in the city of Narashino, just across Tokyo Bay from the city of Tokyo. The X-League was founded in 1971 as the Japan American Football League and changed its name to the X-League in 1997, the year before Leonard’s last stint (for one season) with the Seagulls.
Tomorrow in Chapter 11: No Easy Decision
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread
Chapter 3: The Kicker With the Ever-Present Smile
Chapter 4: Like Father, Like Son
Chapter 5: Where Legends Played
Chapter 6: A Moonlight Graham Moment
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