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It’d be easy to dismiss saying Nolan Hauser was born for this.
The words admittedly feel a bit melodramatic or histrionic.
Yet, on Dec. 7, 2024, the hopes of Clemson Football’s 22nd ACC title, its 28th overall conference championship and its seventh all-time College Football Playoff berth rested on the right foot of the 19-year-old son of two former Clemson athletes. And with one kick covering 56 yards, the Clemson legacy from an often-mispronounced family created his own Clemson legacy and made an entire sport learn his name in giving the Tigers a dramatic 34-31 win against No. 8 SMU in the ACC Championship Game in Charlotte.
To those watching the television broadcast on ABC, the moment sounded like this roughly 12 minutes before midnight:
“One of the great high school kickers in the history of the United States. It’ll be a 56-yarder, the wind really not a factor. Snap and hold are good. That one is … GOOD! At the buzzer! Clemson wins the ACC!” bellowed play-by-play announcer Sean McDonough.
"GOOD. AT THE BUZZER. CLEMSON WINS THE ACC."Sean McDonough on the call for Nolan Hauser's 56-yard field goal as time expired. The Tigers won the ACC Championship and are headed to the CFP. pic.twitter.com/Sx6f0uPq0I— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 8, 2024
"GOOD. AT THE BUZZER. CLEMSON WINS THE ACC."
Sean McDonough on the call for Nolan Hauser's 56-yard field goal as time expired.
The Tigers won the ACC Championship and are headed to the CFP. pic.twitter.com/Sx6f0uPq0I
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 8, 2024
“Just an absolute ROCKET off the foot of Hauser,” added analyst Greg McElroy once the extended roar of the crowd finally began to settle about a full minute later.
Beyond just the magnitude and stakes of Hauser’s walk-off game-winner, the moment became buzzworthy for another reason. Video from the ABC broadcast showed Hauser (pronounced “HOO-zer”) winking at Clemson Head Coach Dabo Swinney just before the kick, and the wink quickly went viral on social media. The college football world then became privy to the atypical confidence of Clemson’s precocious true freshman.
To those inside the program, that level of confidence and swagger was apparent from literally the first few days of Hauser’s tenure. As a midyear enrollee, he arrived at Clemson in December 2023 in advance of his first semester in January, making him eligible to travel with the team to the 2023 TaxSlayer Gator Bowl and practice with the squad in a limited capacity during its bowl preparation.
During one practice at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ indoor facility, Swinney called on Hauser out of the blue and lined up him to test his mettle by simulating a game-winning field goal. Hauser and his fellow specialists had already changed shoes and prepared to load the bus believing their portion of practice was over, but Hauser scrambled to put his cleats back on and trotted out for his first true test in front of his new teammates.
Defensive end T.J. Parker perhaps tells the story the best.
“When I first met Nolan in Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl, we had lined up like a 55-yarder. I said, ‘Bro, you’re going to miss this. You’re from high school,’” Parker recounted after the ACC Championship Game. “He looked me dead in my eyes and said, ‘I can make this [kick] with my eyes closed.’
“He kicked it and it could have went from about 60. So the confidence in him is through the roof. That’s what you need in a kicker – to go out there and make game-winning kicks like that, man. It definitely won’t be his last.”
After the ACC Championship Game, Hauser was asked specifically about what led to his viral wink against SMU.
“Coach Swinney looked at me and he said, ‘Put the ball through,’ and I went, ‘You know it,’” Hauser said while mimicking his nod. “You’ve got to go in with that confidence.”
In September 2024, Clemson World’s Davis Potter published an article entitled “Generational Goals” that highlighted the multi-generational impact of the overlap of the Hauser Family and the Clemson Family. (Editor’s note: The full article has been re-published in full in Orange: The Experience and is linked here).
Nolan’s mother, Sheri Hauser (née Bueter), was an All-American soccer player at Clemson and Clemson Athletic Hall of Famer from 1994-97, and his father, Scott, played baseball at Clemson from 1995-97 and went 6-2 as a pitcher on Clemson’s College World Series team of 1996. Nolan’s sister, Ella, was a member of Clemson’s women’s soccer team that earned the program’s first College Cup appearance in 2023.
Just 20 miles from his hometown of Cornelius, N.C., Hauser’s family and friends were in attendance as he nailed the first walk-off field goal of 50 or more yards in a conference championship game since conference title games were created in 1992. The three-point win moved Clemson to 40-12 in one-possession games since 2011, and Clemson’s 76.9 percent winning percentage in one-score games is nearly 10 percent better than any other school nationally in that span.
“We’ve won a bunch of close games over the years,” Swinney said. “I always tell our guys we’re built for that. But that one was pretty special.”
Hauser’s walk-off field goal was Clemson’s first since Chandler Catanzaro’s 37-yarder beat LSU in the 2012 Chick-fil-A Bowl. But for as much as Catanzaro’s walk-off holds a place in Swinney’s heart as a seminal stepping-stone win of his tenure (a panoramic of that kick in fact hangs in his office directly across from his desk), Swinney had to give a nod to Hauser’s kick as one of the most impactful in Clemson history.
“[Catanzaro’s kick] was awesome, but that won a bowl game. That was a huge win for us, but this was to win the league. This was to go to the playoff,” Swinney said. “It was massive, and it was a freshman kicker in his hometown.”
Hauser’s moment came with all the spoils, among them an ACC title, a College Football Playoff berth, an interview on ESPN’s SportsCenter and the adulation of a fan base and sport. But there was one fringe benefit: the nation now knew the name of a family with deep Clemson roots.
“I’d say 99.9 percent of the time, it’s HOW-zer,” Hauser said on ACC Network’s ACC PM, recounting how most people pronounce his name. “Then someone will come up and say Nolan HOO-zer, and it’s like, ‘Oh? You got it!’”
