If anyone ever wants to join Kevin Kelley on Analytics Island, he’s always open to company.
Every now and then, someone takes a short vacation and decides to go home at the end of the day. No one ever stays. People often wonder about taking up residence in theory. It never gets real, though.
In the meantime, Kelley will be parked in the same spot he’s been for almost two decades now, minding his business and coaching his team guided by numbers. Why doesn’t anyone want to do the same? Their loss, he says.
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Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt knows Kelley like a lot of people do: For what he does, not for who he is.
“There’s a high school team over in Arkansas, they always onside kick, they never punt. I’ve never seen them play. I always hear people talk about it,” Pruitt said at his press conference Monday.
Pruitt was asked his plan to deal with having just one actual inside linebacker for the first half of Saturday’s game at No. 1 Alabama. Freshman starter Henry To’o To’o is suspended for the first half after a targeting penalty in the second half of last week’s game, and Pruitt was asked about options for dealing with that. With his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Pruitt suggested the radical solution.
“We really kind of considered that as our game plan,” Pruitt said. “Just don’t give them the ball, if we can do that.”
Pruitt halfway chuckled.
By now, Kelley ought to just have “That High School Coach Who Never Punts” tattooed on his face. Whenever the time comes, it’ll probably be in the first paragraph of his obituary. He’s the head coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. If he’s not speaking at an analytics conference or spreading the gospel of his unorthodox philosophy, he’s polishing one of his seven state championship rings.
He’s a busy man. And when Pruitt referenced him — not by name, of course — his phone and social media accounts blew up. Pruitt may have been joking, but if Kelley had been in the room, he’d have asked a very serious follow-up question.
Why not?
“He knows that playing regular football, lining up and running the ball and playing good defense, unless Alabama makes a lot of mistakes, they really don’t have a good chance to win. The Vegas line (which favors Alabama by 35.5 points), which is made by some of the smartest people in the world, shows that,” Kelley said. “So if that’s the case, and you’re trying to give your team the best chance to win, it’s not by lining up and playing regular football. So I would for sure do it. But of course, I believe in this system. I do it. But I’d be doing a lot of those things and a lot of different things than I’ve done in the past just to give us a better chance to win.”
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Pruitt, though, knows Kelley a little bit better than he did at the start of the week. Pruitt mostly uses his Twitter account for recruiting purposes and follows more than 6,400 people. The vast majority are prospective players.
This week, he began following a new account on Twitter: Kevin Kelley.
The two don’t have any real relationship, but Kelley was on Rocky Top in the summer of 2018 for a 7-on-7 tournament.
“He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t put two and two together,” Kelley said. “Because every time I’m on a campus, coaches always want to talk to me, ask a few odd questions and pick my brain a little bit to see what it’s like. People are just curious. But he didn’t know. We’ve talked before but not with him knowing who I was.”
(Randy Sartin / USA Today)
Kelley is well aware Pruitt won’t suddenly embrace a dramatic shift in philosophy the week of a rivalry game. Pruitt is an odd mix of aggression and conservatism as a head coach. He attempted five onside kicks a year ago in the first three quarters of games. (Tennessee did not recover any of them, but it had legitimate opportunities to do so on all five.)
However, the Vols attempted fourth-down conversions just 11 times last season. Only four of 130 FBS teams had fewer attempts. He’s gone for it nine times in six games this year, tied for 68th most in college football.
Since 1993, Tennessee has been a bigger underdog just once, when it was a 37-point underdog to Alabama in 2017. Tennessee will attempt a mostly traditional approach when it faces Alabama on the road on Saturday.
Tennessee will say it is trying to win the game, but it will do so in direct conflict with the math that says a traditional approach is likely to be fruitless. In reality, Tennessee will be attempting to lose the game by the fewest points possible. Tilting the playing field and making unorthodox decisions to give Tennessee more possessions than Alabama is the only way Tennessee actually beats Alabama.
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Tennessee will not take this approach against Alabama on Saturday night.
“People are risk-averse. You’re thinking about your job first. These guys are getting big paychecks. If Jeremy Pruitt doesn’t say anything about this and it doesn’t become a media deal, if he just shows up and does it? Monday morning, he may not have a job,” Kelley said. “But if he goes out and plays normal football, Monday morning he’ll still have a job even if he gets beat by 50. It’s more about that. Ironically, the people that would fire him want him to win. And big picture, if they’d follow analytics, they’d win more games doing it. In this specific instance, they might not, but overall they would.”
The thinking is not as complex as it sounds. Pulaski Academy practices a variety of onside kicks to perfect that portion of the game, but the value of potentially stealing a possession is greater than the possible risk of the field position that is surrendered if the onside kick is unsuccessful.
And if you never punt, a fourth offensive play leads to additional offensive plays, extended drives and more points. The value of the positive, especially with an effective offense, outweighs the lost field position by not punting.
“It advances play-calling. I mean, you’ve got four downs. It changes third down and changes all your tendencies tremendously,” Kelley said.
There will be rough games and bad stretches. Even now, 17 seasons in and seven state titles later, Pulaski Academy has them.
“We lost a game two weeks ago and I’m battling it from my own people. And they’ve seen the proof that we have to do those things to win and be effective,” Kelley said “The first time we lose a game, people just go crazy because they’re watching football on Saturdays and Sundays and people don’t do that and they think that’s the reason you lost, because it’s so out of the ordinary.”
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Kelley gets calls and visits often from head coaches who want to pick his brain and learn more about the approach that’s made him to football coaches what Neutral Milk Hotel or The Mountain Goats are to indie rock fans: A household name to diehards who live and die within the ecosystem and a relative unknown to people who spend their lives outside it.
Plenty of big-name coaches have consulted Kelley about the math and his methods as he gained prominence and asked him not to share their names and conversations. They always want to know how to answer questions from media about the approach, how to deal with cold stretches and how to deal with skeptical, angry fans who believe they know better. Even your own coaching staff that might not be on board.
“It all comes down to this: You have to show ’em how mathematically, it’s better for you and get them to buy in,” Kelley said. “Every coach’s job is to get everyone in their program to buy into their philosophy of doing things, and that’s what I did and that’s what I tell every coach that asks.”
No one came closer to actually implementing them within major college football than Dave Christensen. The long-time offensive coordinator at Toledo and Missouri under Gary Pinkel was hired as Wyoming’s head coach after the 2008 season. That offseason, he visited Kelly in Little Rock and showed up with a few binders and took thorough notes as Kelley explained his philosophy.
“He was an offensive guy and he really liked a lot of it. He thought it through and he was asking a lot of really intelligent questions, and I really thought he was going to do it at Wyoming,” Kelley said. “I think maybe he took some of it and was a little more aggressive on fourth downs, but he didn’t do it at all. Didn’t do it at all like I thought. But I think you get in that situation and think, ‘Gosh, if I do this and I don’t make it, I might get fired on Monday.’ I think that’s always in the back of everybody’s mind.”
Christensen had two winning seasons in five years and was fired after going 5-7 in 2013
Pruitt, or any coach, can’t just start doing it out of nowhere. Making the choice to buy into analytics means preparing everyone within your program for what’s to come. It means telling players what to expect and why he’s electing to do things that might not make sense to some. It means calling a meeting with your athletic director and preparing him.
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“I’ll be honest, the real thing to do is this right here: I’ve always thought this,” Kelley said. “If some low Division I program that maybe hadn’t won in a while, and I hate to say names, but like a New Mexico State or something. If they gave me the job, what I would do before every game, I would ask for the stadium mic. And I would walk out in the middle of the field and I would say, ‘Fans, thank you for coming. We’re going to play this game a lot differently than you’ve seen. And we’re going to do things that you think aren’t smart. But they are, analytically, very smart things. And it’s going to be exciting and it’s going to be different. And here’s the deal: You want to win and I want to win. So if you boo when we do these things that look dumb, it’s not helping our players at all. It’s not helping us win, which is what you’re here to do. And if that’s the case, I’m asking you, just go with this different thing, because there’s reasons behind it, good reasons. So I’m asking you not to just not boo, I’m asking you to cheer when we try these things because they’re smart things to do.’
“So, I’d prepare the team, I’d prepare the AD, I’d prepare the fans and off we’d be going.”
It’s rarely quite that dramatic, but Kelley says he’s already given that exact speech “many times” during his time at Pulaski Academy.
On Monday, Pruitt might have just been kidding, offering up a lighthearted answer to a question about one of many disadvantages his team faces ahead of its matchup with the nation’s No. 1 team.
But if he’s looking for the answer that gives his team the best chance to beat Alabama, and not the solution to lose to Alabama by the fewest points, he’s already found it. Even if he didn’t mean it.
“My advice,” Kelly said, “is if you think maybe you should try it, look at the numbers and give it a shot. Just prepare everybody first.”
(Top photo of Kevin Kelley: Amy E. Price / Getty Images)
David Ubben is a senior writer for The Athletic covering college football. Prior to joining The Athletic, he covered college sports for ESPN, Fox Sports Southwest, The Oklahoman, Sports on Earth and Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, as well as contributing to a number of other publications. Follow David on Twitter @davidubben
