Tim Kelly is Titans’ hope for a better 2023, but it’s Katie Kelly who is ‘tough as hell’
Daniel Foster NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tim Kelly’s office at Tennessee Titans headquarters is one big dry-erase board, a multi-wall collection of scribbled plays in various colors of marker, as expected as telescopes in the office of an astronomer.
Most of those doodles will come and go, but one will remain untouched. It’s to the far left, by the window that looks onto the practice fields at St. Thomas Sports Park. “One In Take A Win” is the name of this play, and the squiggly lines indicate an inside run. The key to success, though, is rooted in something any offensive coordinator will tell you: This is a numbers game.
Advertisement
Aspiring OC Norah Kelly, age 8, made a salient point to her father as she was putting it on the board. If you can smuggle one extra player onto the field than your opponent has, how can you be stopped? When Norah watches the sport, as she does voraciously, and a team gets a penalty for too many men on the field …
“She says, ‘They’re trying my play but they aren’t sneaky enough,’” said Kelly, whose family includes wife Katie and 6-year-old daughter Quinn.
Quinn is the art enthusiast, an intricate Titans helmet among her contributions to Dad’s dry-erase board. The Kelly girls are all over this workspace. And a big part of why it’s in Nashville.
The Titans are counting on the 37-year-old Kelly to revive what was one of the worst offenses in the NFL in 2022. If he does, this could be a surprise team in 2023. He might have taken the controls much earlier, but the Houston Texans blocked Mike Vrabel’s attempt to interview Kelly for the OC job in January of 2021 after Arthur Smith left Tennessee to become head coach of the Atlanta Falcons.
Read: Jalen Hurts, Bijan Robinson and creamsicles highlight our NFL staff poll
The Texans wanted to keep Kelly even though they were between head coaches. They fired the next head coach, David Culley, Kelly and the rest of the staff after the 4-13 season of 2021. Kelly soon had job offers, including one to be the Titans’ pass game coordinator under OC Todd Downing. And this is where family dictated a football decision.
“Two other teams were on the table and I was like, ‘No, I want to go be with Vrabel,’” Katie said. “This was very intentional, to be around people you trust and care about year-round. This is a bottom-line business, but at the end of the day, it’s about who you’re battling with. And these people, they know our story. They know my issues.”
Advertisement
The Vrabels were right there with the Kellys in 2017 in Houston.
“The year I almost died,” Katie said.
‘This offense gives you the answers’
Shane McGregor had seen Bill O’Brien once, on TV, engaged in a screaming match with Tom Brady. That was a few weeks before Penn State announced O’Brien as its head football coach in January of 2012, replacing Joe Paterno, who was fired amid the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. McGregor and his Penn State teammates who remained with the program were about to transition from months of unrest to an immersive football education.
The Patriots offense, even the scaled-down version O’Brien was installing, was a revelation.
“I mean, that spring we learned an offense by watching Tom Brady and the Pats,” said McGregor, a senior walk-on and third-string quarterback for those Nittany Lions. “Football had been a game I played, but that made it more like an art or science to study. It was almost, like, liberating. It was fascinating, especially for a quarterback. Realizing how you can use your mind to control a game.”
GO DEEPER
Dusty Baker's leaving Chas McCormick on bench frustrates some within Astros organization
O’Brien liked to tell his players that he was “addicted to football” — that while they were home playing video games or out with their friends or girlfriends, he was home thinking about what to dial up on a third-and-8.
“That happened for me,” said McGregor, to the point that he was hired as head football coach of his high school alma mater, Central Cambria High in Ebensburg, Pa., at age 27.
It happened for Charles London, who had worked with O’Brien at Duke, coached running backs for him at Penn State and with the Houston Texans, and is now Titans pass game coordinator/quarterbacks coach.
“This offense gives you the answers,” London said.
It happened for Kelly, too. His arrival in State College in 2012 as a 25-year-old grad assistant for the defensive line transformed his career.
Advertisement
“A football addict? Yeah,” Kelly said. “That would be accurate. It’s a gift and a curse.”
He grew up in Chicago Heights, Ill., about 30 miles south of Chicago. Younger brother Dennis, an 11-year NFL offensive tackle — including a stint with the Titans from 2016 to 2020 — recalled Tim’s initiative (cold-calling a travel baseball coach to get a tryout at age 10) and extreme competitiveness (turning off video games and running upstairs if he was losing).
Mike and Geri Kelly had four kids, one girl and three boys, with Tim and Dennis in the middle. This was a football family with big gatherings on Sundays for Bears games. Mike painted the field — he once tried the Vols checkerboard look in the end zones — and worked the chains for the boys’ little league games. All excelled in high school.
Tim Kelly did not have NFL talent, but he was a four-year starter at defensive tackle, two-time academic all-district honoree and senior captain for the Eastern Illinois Panthers. He volunteered as a coach during the spring of his senior year, loved it and went from there to a GA post at Illinois Wesleyan. Then he got a paying gig, in 2010 as defensive coordinator at Division II Minnesota State Moorhead.
It did not go well.
“We were awful,” Kelly said, but that’s where he met Katie Anderson.
A nursing student at the University of North Dakota, Katie had played volleyball at Minnesota State Moorhead. Her brother was the football team’s strength coach and her mother was an assistant athletic director. Katie had also worked as a nanny for one of the coaches and wondered how his wife tolerated the hours of a football coach.
She would soon know that life. She dated Kelly long distance after the staff was let go — he still likes to joke that his mother-in-law fired him — and he moved on to be a GA at Ball State. Ball State’s offensive line coach was John Strollo. He had worked with O’Brien years earlier at Duke, was hired by O’Brien to be Penn State’s tight ends coach after the 2011 season, and recommended Kelly to O’Brien as a GA candidate.
Advertisement
Ball State offensive coordinator Joey Lynch, now Vanderbilt’s offensive coordinator, did an all-night cram session with Kelly on offensive line and tight end techniques before his interview at Penn State, because Kelly thought he was going to be on the offensive side of the ball. When he found out he’d be a GA for defensive line coach Larry Johnson, he sighed in relief.
But after two seasons of those crazy GA hours and a small stipend in return — living with Katie, who was supporting the couple with her nursing job — Kelly got his break, on the other side of the ball. He had become fascinated with an offense that was dictated by the skills of the players running it and gave those players more control on the field than any other he had seen.
O’Brien was leaving for the Houston Texans. He was putting together a staff that would include Vrabel as linebackers coach. He wanted Kelly to come along as an offensive quality control coach. O’Brien told Kelly that, the way he saw the game, he had a future on offense. This meant a salary of six figures. And crazier hours.
“I walked in and there was a playbook and it was about this big,” Kelly said, holding his hands apart to suggest a publication right around a foot thick. “And it was like, ‘Good luck.’ It sucked. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it kind of Mr. Miyagi’d you. You’re sitting there and have to go back and see what that run concept is, see what that run is, that protection. By the end of the season, you’re like, ‘Oh. I know this entire offense.’”
He and Katie also were married in 2014, though the new gig did not leave him much time to help with that.
As Kelly sat in his office Friday afternoon, reflecting on those times, Vrabel walked in and said: “Let’s wrap it up.”
He was talking about the workday for Titans coaches, and in Vrabel’s terms, Kelly is the head coach of the offense. Kelly sent texts to the offensive coaches telling them to head home to their families.
Advertisement
Football coaching is an enemy of work/life balance — McGregor resigned after last season, he said, because he still wants to travel and have time for other things in his life — but Vrabel tries to find some. His offensive coordinator’s family helps illustrate why.
A turn for the worse
The inherent absence of balance in this world explains why so many people were downplaying the way Katie was feeling in 2017. Of course, she was exhausted. She had baby Quinn and 2-year-old Norah at home.
Quinn had been born prematurely and had underdeveloped lungs, so she was in intensive care for a week after birth. O’Brien sent Kelly — who had moved up to Texans tight ends coach by then — away from work and to the hospital until she was able to come home. Mike and Jen Vrabel watched Norah. That meant a lot to the family.
Quinn got stronger quickly. Katie kept feeling worse. This was a college athlete, a runner — London recalled running a half-marathon with Katie and Tim in Beaumont, Texas, and Katie “kicking our butts” — who had no energy.
But that can be the life of a coach’s spouse with young kids. Even the bloody stools could be explained away by post-partum hemorrhoids.
“Everyone had an answer of why this was normal,” she said. “So I just kept going. You tell yourself, ‘This is just what we do, keep going, keep going.’”
The exhaustion, headaches and weight loss were concerning. The bloody stools got thicker while the family was in Fargo, N.D., visiting her parents. Tim insisted they go to an urgent care facility. She was told she had “something major going on,” and colon cancer was feared initially.
Weeks later, in August back in Houston, she finally got a diagnosis of severe ulcerative colitis, a bowel disease that causes inflammation and ulcers in the digestive tract. There was no telling if it was newly developed or had just been dormant in Katie. There’s no cure, but it can be managed with treatment.
Advertisement
That got started in tandem with the 2017 football season. Katie would need to remove gluten and alcohol from her diet. She would need a regular concoction of medicine. There was comfort in a diagnosis and plan as the grind of fall got going.
But Katie wasn’t feeling better. She was so visibly miserable one day that two of her friends insisted on taking her to an urgent care in Houston. She resisted at first, then relented. Moments after arriving, she was being rushed by ambulance to the hospital. Tim raced from the Texans facility to join her.
“They couldn’t break her fever,” he said.
“I had no blood pressure,” Katie said. “I was given epinephrine in the ambulance to keep me alive.”
She had experienced a “cytokine storm,” doctors would tell her later, the result of her immune system responding too aggressively to her condition. Weeks in the hospital and a stool transplant would follow. One medication gave her drug-induced Lupus and had to be discontinued. The trial and error perpetuated the exhaustion.
“She’s tough as hell,” Kelly said of his wife.
“It was all very scary,” Geri Kelly said. “But Katie, she dealt with it like a champ.”
Infusions of Entyvio, an antibody medication, started to restore Katie’s health. That’s a permanent solution, every six weeks, with a couple of days of fatigue after each infusion as the primary drawback. The Kellys got through the crisis OK, with help from their football family. Then came another.
In August of 2018, Mike Kelly went in for a knee replacement and was given a clean bill of health otherwise. In October, he wasn’t feeling well and went in. A scan showed cancer spreading aggressively in his bones, liver and lungs. He had weeks to live. He was 68.
Those were the years of the boys opposing each other as AFC South rivals. Mike and Gerry just rooted for each team’s offense when the Texans and Titans played. Tim had his usual postgame FaceTime call with his dad after a Dec. 9 loss to the Colts, knowing his father wasn’t doing well.
Advertisement
He got a call around 11 p.m. that an ambulance had taken Mike to the hospital. He got a call around 3 a.m. that he had passed away. He walked into the Texans facility at 5 a.m., as usual on a Monday.
“If you’re here this afternoon,” O’Brien said to Kelly, “I’m going to fire you.”
Vrabel dispatched Dennis to Chicago as well, and the brothers and their families were on hand for Mike’s wake and funeral. Then it was back to Houston and Nashville to prepare for the Jets and Giants, respectively. Both teams played in New Jersey that weekend. Both won.
“Right back to work for both of them,” Geri said. “That’s exactly what Mike would have wanted.”
A few weeks later, O’Brien promoted Kelly to offensive coordinator, making him one of the youngest in the league at 33. O’Brien told reporters of the move: “Timmy’s had a lot of input into what we do. He’s had a big part of the process and he’s ready for the challenge.”
Family time
Grandpa Mike’s spaghetti is the favorite dish in the Kelly household these days, and it has undergone changes since Mike Kelly used to make it for his kids — amid jokes about an Irish family going with spaghetti as a staple. Tim weaved in mushrooms to the recipe at some point, despite complaints from his father about “adding a fungus.” And it is, of course, gluten-free now.
“Take some yellow onions and dice them, chop the mushrooms, add butter, olive oil, tomato paste, tomato puree,’” Kelly said. “Salt, pepper, fresh green peppers. Simmer that. Then the meatballs. Then the Italian sausage. And then we’re rolling.”
It’s a tribute to a man Norah has some very early memories of, and it’s far from the only play in Kelly’s playbook. Cooking is something he loves and has embraced as a family duty, especially because he likes to find new things that Katie can eat and actually likes. He won’t be making any of Norah’s softball games this fall. But it’s about being “totally present” when he is home, a common refrain among coaches.
Advertisement
“I know coaches work,” he said, “but … what about how much she works? When does she get to turn it off?”
Starting Sunday at New Orleans, Kelly will try to fry up some offense for a team that finished 28th in scoring and 30th in total offense last season, firing Downing when it was over. That led to the promotion of Kelly, with Vrabel calling him “the perfect fit” and saying of an offense that was fourth in scoring and second in total offense in 2020 under Smith: “I don’t think everything is broken.”
It’s different now, though. This is the Erhardt-Perkins offense, named after Ron Erhardt and Ray Perkins from when they were offensive assistants with the Patriots in the 1970s. But the only thing that’s passed down from that time is the nomenclature. Kelly pointed to the Bill Belichick era, transitioning to a three-wide offense with Air Raid concepts and Randy Moss at receiver, then to a two-tight end base when Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez were added. That’s the point.
One of the most impactful football meetings of Kelly’s career was early in his time at Penn State when O’Brien said it’s not about plugging players into specific plays, it’s about figuring out what your specific guys do well and designing to that.
“That was the first time it was like, ‘Oh,’” Kelly said.
More than the modern West Coast offense that was in place in Vrabel’s first five seasons, this offense is “totally quarterback-driven,” London said. The quarterback, not the center, calls protections. The quarterback doesn’t just have one alternative play he can check into, he has a large menu.
“Some new concepts, new protections, new ideas we haven’t had in the past,” Tannehill said Wednesday.
“It’s more players’ decisions, we’re getting to react to defenses and make high-speed decisions on the field,” said receiver Chris Moore, who was with Kelly in Houston in 2021. “Whereas some offenses I’ve been in, like, you just run the route, run it the way it is on paper. This is much more reacting to what you see.”
Advertisement
Kelly said he has changed, too. His largely successful tenure in Houston saw O’Brien give him play-calling duties in 2020, and he said a 42-36 overtime loss at Tennessee — with Jeff Simmons batting away a two-point pass that would have sealed the game — gave him confidence. He’s better at not letting bad plays fester, he said. And at delegating.
“Hands down the biggest change I’ve made over the past couple years is, like, it’s OK to let guys do their jobs,” Kelly said. “They don’t need me in front of the room every single day, talking about every single subject. I presented everything in ’21, and I’m not doing that this year.”
London has third downs. Tight ends coach Tony Dews has the red zone. Run game coordinator/running backs coach Justin Outten — Denver’s OC last season — has added run concepts to Kelly’s scheme. Between that and last season working in the previous offense, Kelly said it’s fair to call this a “hybrid offense.” He wanted to retain the physical, Derrick Henry-led identity that he saw beat the Texans so many times.
Titans center Aaron Brewer said Kelly is “like a guru back there” calling plays. Right guard Daniel Brunskill called him “Kyle-esque” — as in, Kyle Shanahan, play-calling whiz and coach of the 49ers teams that included Brunskill from 2019-22. By that, he meant Kelly’s ability to explain plays to the Titans from a global perspective. And his work ethic.
“That’s what makes Kyle a genius,” Brunskill said. “The hard work.”
That eats at the time in a day. But Kelly finds it when he can. The whole family attended the preseason game at Minnesota, and Vrabel came to the sideline and found Norah and Quinn.
“He made Norah feel like she’s seen, like she’s a part of it,” Katie said. “I can’t tell you how much of a difference that makes.”
It doesn’t mean Vrabel will be approving “One In Take A Win” anytime soon. But there’s a comfort, a history, that made Nashville the right choice for the Kellys. That matters. As does the first thing Norah told Grandma Geri about Vrabel when she found out she’d be rejoining him: “Coach Mike, he gives out the big candy bars on Halloween.”
(Top photo: Denny Simmons / The Tennessean / USA Today)
