Steven Ruiz announced Friday that he’s leaving The Ringer, closing out five years as one of the site’s lead NFL analysts and the writer behind its widely read QB rankings.
“Sad day for me. It’s my last at the Ringer,” Ruiz wrote on X. “Can’t say enough about this place and all of the great people I worked with, from the editors to the copy desk to all the talented writers on staff, they all made me better. Excited for my next stop but it doesn’t make this any easier.”
Sad day for me. It’s my last at the Ringer. Can’t say enough about this place and all of the great people I worked with, from the editors to the copy desk to all the talented writers on staff, they all made me better. Excited for my next stop but it doesn’t make this any easier.
— Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz) August 21, 2026
According to Front Office Sports, Ruiz will be joining Fox Sports’ digital operation.
Ruiz joined The Ringer in 2021 by way of USA Today’s For the Win, and the thing most readers came to know him for was his QB rankings, a weekly column opinionated enough to routinely collide with the league’s prevailing consensus. The definitive example remains Brock Purdy in 2023. While the rest of the football world was busy floating him as an MVP candidate amid San Francisco’s hot start, Ruiz kept him marooned in the bottom third of his rankings, and the disconnect grated on people in sports media. But that stubbornness was also the appeal. Even if you didn’t always agree with him, you still checked out his quarterback rankings regularly for the past two or three years.
Beyond the rankings, Ruiz was a regular presence on The Ringer’s podcast side, co-hosting Dual Threat alongside Nora Princiotti through the 2023 season before the show wound down in the spring of 2024, and making frequent appearances on the flagship Ringer NFL Show since.
Ruiz’s byline had gone largely dormant over the summer, interrupted by an Aug. 13 preseason preview surveying storylines such as J.J. McCarthy’s demotion in Minnesota’s quarterback competition and Shedeur Sanders’s precarious grip on the Browns’ starting job. His last substantive piece of NFL analysis predates it by more than two months, dating back to June 1. To be fair, he also penned a 15-coach ranking of football movie coaches in between, running from The Little Giants to Remember the Titans, which is exactly the deadline-defying piece that’s become one of The Ringer’s specialties in the slower stretches of the football calendar.
Just days earlier, Tom Pelissero, cut loose by ESPN last month despite a year still remaining on his NFL Network contract, signed on with Netflix as a sideline reporter and insider, a role that also puts him behind the mic on The Ringer NFL Show, the very program Ruiz had spent years dropping into as a semi-regular guest.
Front Office Sports’s report didn’t specify a title or a beat, and a Fox Sports spokesperson declined to comment on the hire, so there’s no word yet on what Ruiz will be covering or how often. He joins a Fox digital NFL team that’s built its recent coverage around reporting and team-by-team breakdowns, a different lane than the rankings and opinion writing he made his name on at The Ringer. Whatever form his work takes there, five years of readers arguing with his QB rankings suggests people will keep paying attention either way.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.