The 2025 Rookie of the Year
- bartleby
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
Rookie of the Year
Past Rookie of the Year Winners: Oilers Flasher Girl (Kait Flynn) (2024); Tiffany Gomas (TMFINR) (2023)
Rookie of the Year honors those moments when someone steps into public view and the air changes. Not because she asked for permission, but because she kicked in the door to our public consciousness, and her Newbie Nubile Nodes announced their presence with authority.
Sharp, bold, and too fully realized to be accidental.
The kind of emergence that clicks instantly, sticks immediately, and leaves a permanent imprint on the year it touched. This award exists for Gorgeous Greenhorns that refused to be denied, cut across the field, tracked mud everywhere, and demanded your attention, if not your respect.
Winner: Natalie Winters
Natalie Winters didn't tiptoe into 2025; she strutted up to the doors of the White House press briefing room and kicked the door off its hinges. On her very first day as a correspondent, Winters shared a photo of herself in a white skirt, black top, and sneakers. She became the focal point of attacks on “etiquette” and “MAGA journalism” from the same people who tongue-lapped Joe Biden's wrinkly, dementia-riddled, ball sack for four-years. Yes, the “real journalists” who ignored Biden's clear diminishing mental state did find time to cover Winter's wardrobe.
The rise of this 24-year-old, Camisole-Filling-Californian, hasn’t just been about breaking stories; it’s been about breaking molds, redefining what a White House correspondent can look like, and laughing at the outrage along the way. When the National Press Club, the century-old group of D.C. journos who have overseen their own demise, declined her membership application, Winters wore it as a badge of honor. When asked how it felt to have “colleagues” suggest that she doesn't belong because she's “not a real journalist”, Winters replied, “[t]o all those people who are apoplectic over having new media voices, you guys failed, and that’s why we’re here.”
Yowza.
We hope that Winters continues to wear outfits that she enjoys and that highlight her Jaunty Journalistic Jaw-Droppers. She has been a breath of fresh air and could be the face of a new generation of young, unapologetic, confident, and brash reporters that sit defiantly outside the legacy media’s bubble of bias . . . you know, how journalism is supposed to work.
ROTY Honorable Mentions: Marissa Ayers, Harley Fowler
Marissa Ayers
Following in Sydney Thomas’ milkprints, Marissa Ayers burst upon the scene as the breakout ring girl of the season during Anthony Joshua's pummeling of Jake Paul on Netflix. Bleached blonde locks, sparkling blue eyes, and Ravishing Ringside Ribcushions made Ayers an overnight sensation. Yet it is her new relationship with Giants quarterback Jaxon Dart that gives us hope that she will cement her place in the culture as an elite NFL WAG.
Given Ayers' social-media savvy and her Breathtaking Bolt-ons, she seems destined to become a household name in 2026.
Harley Fowler
On the field, Georgia was blowing out Texas 35-10, but in the stands, a Buxom-Bulldog-Loving-Brunette was blowing minds with her Bewitching Bazookas Bursting out of her low-cut black jumper. ESPN's cameras caught Fowler cheering on the Dawgs with a red pom-pom, and within minutes, clips began circulating across X, igniting a worldwide search to identify her. Social-media sleuths quickly located her TikTok, and a new viral "it-girl" was born.
Fowler has gained nearly 40,000 followers on TikTok since the clip went viral, and those three seconds on national TV have since become a celebration of college football and milker culture alike.