His arrival in May put Presbyterian College football on the map. Suddenly, the eyes of the sport curiously were focused on the Blue Hose for the first time.

Kevin Kelley, perhaps best known as “The Coach Who Never Punts,” was coming to college football.

In nearly two decades coaching Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark., he won nine state titles but cemented himself as mostly a lone wolf in an often risk-averse profession of coaching football, using four downs to move the chains instead of three and onside kicking after his teams scored to try and steal another possession.

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The analytic-heavy strategy that led New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to call Kelley “probably the top high school coach in the country” was coming to college football. In 18 seasons as a high school head coach, he had lost just 29 games.

“I wanted to get into college football. I’ve been in charge for a long, long time, so if I could get a head coaching job, I was willing to take it at almost any place,” Kelley said.

But in December, Kelley resigned and left the program less than a year into a multi-year contract. His team went 2-9 and 0-8 in conference play, with half of those Pioneer Football League losses coming by at least 25 points.

He’s back in Little Rock now, and while his family is in familiar territory again, he’s doing something he hasn’t done for decades: not coaching football.

So what happened?

Regret is not the word Kelley would use as he looks back on his brief maiden voyage into college football. Naivete may be more accurate. It’s not that he didn’t ask questions that needed to be asked. He just didn’t know the questions he should have asked.

Like most FCS schools, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Presbyterian to move its 2020 football season from the fall to the spring, when head coach Tommy Spangler led the Blue Hose to a 4-3 record. But at just 12-28 in four seasons of his second tenure as the program’s head coach, Presbyterian elected to make a change.

The program was cutting scholarships and entering a new era, and it turned to Kelley to lead it. He knew he would be taking a job at a program operating without scholarships. He just didn’t know the ripple effect that decision would have. Kelley arrived in June and found a mostly empty facility.

Star linebacker Colby Campbell earned a scholarship to Duke and left the program. Most other scholarship upperclassmen, aware their scholarships were now disappearing, left the program.

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Kelley brought around half of his staff from Pulaski Academy and retained around half of Presbyterian’s staff, but instead of the usual coaching turnover in December or January, his happened after the spring semester.

With no scholarships, summer school would mean a bill for the players and their families to pay. Tuition alone at Presbyterian for the 2020-21 academic year was just below $40,000, so most players elected to stay home for the summer, something Kelley said he also would have done in their situation. A tuition bill well into the five digits for six credit hours is a tough sell.

“Everywhere else, if you have scholarships you can require kids to be there so they can work out, have a certain number of meetings and kids can get together and run through the playbook,” Kelley said. “That way, when you start camp in August, you have a base.”

Instead, Kelley hosted two voluntary days for players to return to campus and work. Around 40 players attended the first one in June. That number dropped to 18 for the second voluntary day at the team facility the following month. For a roster that Kelley planned to grow to around 140, that presented major issues, especially since most of the 18 who did attend were freshmen who lived within an hour of campus in Clinton, S.C.

The team’s first day of practice was Aug. 7. The day before, Kelley met around two-thirds of his players in person for the first time as they reported to campus.

“Our first game was Sept. 4,” Kelley said. “We had 27, 28 days to learn the words we were going to use for formations and blitzes and coverages and plays and blocking schemes. Learn terminology, put it in and come together as a team. That’s when it really hit me that it was going to be tough.”

Then school started. And Kelley learned another question he didn’t know to ask: “Do athletes get to sign up for classes before the rest of the student body?”

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At most universities, the answer is yes, so the players can juggle demanding practice and workout schedules as the university’s most public-facing students. At Presbyterian, Kelley learned the answer was no.

“I guess I can pin that on myself, but I’d never heard of a place that didn’t do that,” Kelley said. “Well, that created a lot of problems.”

Players had to secure whatever necessary classes they could get, which was even more difficult because most of his team was made up of underclassmen. No matter how he tried to make the pieces fit, some players would have to arrive at practice late. Others would have to leave early.

By the time the dust settled and Kelley tried to sort out the plan for the season, he only had access to his full team for an hour to 90 minutes per day. He pushed practices deep into the evening, but three nights per week, around 75 percent of his team had classes in the afternoon or evening.

“We couldn’t learn what we needed to learn and get in what we needed to get in. I believe in doing a lot of things. Some programs do a few things and are really, really good at those few things. I believe you do a lot of things slightly above average you have an answer for everything,” Kelley said. “That takes time.”

And Kelley didn’t have it with his team. He didn’t have it on a given day, and the calendar was even less forgiving. Without a summer spent informally around his team and allowing both sides to learn one another, the players and coaches jumped into preseason camp together at warp speed.

“When you don’t get those kids and haven’t taught them the way you do things and the way you want them done, how to carry themselves, the speed you want things done, you’re doing that at the same time you’re teaching,” Kelley said. “I didn’t understand how important that was until I didn’t have it. Just having them walking around or doing walkthroughs or in meetings or in the weight room we would have gotten to know each other. They didn’t know what I expected, and I didn’t know what they had been doing or done in the past and that created a bit of a culture problem.”

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Some players were still loyal to Nichols and naturally bucked at Kelley’s new way of operating his program. But he was trying to clear those hurdles in August instead of January or February or even early in spring practice.

And he knew without scholarships, he needed a large roster, but wrangling 140 players who aren’t on scholarship is a task he had never tried to complete.

“I wanted to give them a lot of rope. It was hard to hold anybody accountable because they weren’t on scholarships. They didn’t have anything to hold over their head if they got out of line on or off the field,” Kelley said. “You have to get to know them and give them a chance to express themselves a little bit. There was some lack of discipline there. The school needed the guys, and I wanted to give guys some rope, but that’s the time you can’t have any of that. That’s when you need everybody to show up, pay attention and all that.”

And as for recruiting? That posed an entirely separate set of problems.

There are six FCS football programs in South Carolina, and Kelley quickly learned trying to recruit with no scholarship money was a fruitless task.

“That’s when I realized it was going to be an uphill battle,” Kelley said. “If we offer an FCS kid, and any FCS school offers them something, and we offer him nothing, he’s going to go there, not here. So we found out we really can’t recruit FCS kids.”

Kelley and his staff turned their focus to recruiting Division II-level talent, but the same problems often surfaced when trying to reel in talent at the lower levels.

“We found out when we were competing for those kids, they’re still offering a third, half, three-quarter scholarships, and we had nothing to offer. So we couldn’t really compete with even D-II schools,” Kelley said.

The coaches then focused on Division III-level talent with a rare offer to play Divison I. That earned them interest from eager future talents but could be problematic on the field. Either way, it gave Kelley pause when he eyed the possibility of trying to build a program.

Presbyterian won its first two games against non-Division I opponents, and Michigan transfer quarterback Ron Hefley set an FCS record with 10 touchdown passes in the Blue Hose’s debut against St. Andrews in an 84-43 win. Presbyterian followed it up with a 68-3 win over Fort Lauderdale before facing a Campbell team that offered scholarships and had 11 players who had been on FBS rosters before transferring down a level.

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“We played them, and it was like, ‘Oh my Gosh.’ It looked like a high school team playing a junior high team,” Kelley said. “We got a taste of what was to come, but we didn’t know it.”

The Camels rolled over Presbyterian, 72-0.

It was a difficult day, but Kelley figured the talent gap might be closer in conference play. He quickly learned that was not the case. In their inaugural, scholarship-free season the Blue Hose rarely were competitive.

“It’s a little easier to get by on offense with a talent or size disparity because you dictate the point of attack. When they have the ball, and they can do whatever they want, and they dictate the point of attack? We had young guys, we had guys who didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t have much time together, and we had small guys. On our defensive line, we had some small dudes. If a team wanted to line up and run us over, they were going to run us over,” Kelley said. “There’s nothing we could do about it.”

Only one of Presbyterian’s defensive linemen on the depth chart weighed more than 225 pounds, and the defense gave up nearly 10 yards per play.

And by the staff’s estimation, during the season 91 players on the roster played their first career college football game — all non-scholarship players.

“We’d try this guy or that guy because we didn’t get a chance to know or evaluate them. We had two weeks of camp,” Kelley said. “We were just trying to teach them everything so we could evaluate them.”

Kelley’s innovative style and strategy barely mattered. About half the team was on board with his style. The other half preferred a more traditional style with kickoffs and prioritizing field position.

By midseason, Kelley faced a difficult choice. Some players on the roster came to him and asked if they could start kicking off, punting more and trying to play more defense.

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“I was just trying to get through the year. I wanted the student-athletes to have a good experience at that point,” Kelley said. “I decided we’ll punt some, we’ll kick some. And that was just so we wouldn’t have a give-up attitude when we went for it and it went wrong.”

It didn’t affect much, but every time his team scored or faced a fourth down, Kelley found himself stuck in an existential crisis. His decision didn’t reflect his own faith in his own strategy that earned him his high profile, but he felt he had to do it to keep his roster committed.

“When I didn’t really believe in the situations we were doing it and I did it anyway, that was tough for me,” Kelley said. “I was trying to decide if that was good leadership. Is that good leadership, doing what you believe in all the time? Or is it trying to get everybody from point A to point B?”

He’s still not sure of the right answer. But after a winless conference season, Kelley looked to the future and didn’t see a path to success.

He approached his boss, athletic director Rob Acunto, to see if any of the hurdles to success could be eliminated. When the answer was no, Kelley’s own future crystallized in his mind.

Acunto did not respond to an interview request from The Athletic.

Scholarships weren’t coming back to Presbyterian. That meant Kelley would never have his roster during the summer, at least not for any meaningful time. And Kelley didn’t blame the school, but the lack of scholarships would make life difficult on the recruiting trail. Athletes wouldn’t get to pick classes first, so he always would be organizing his program around scheduling issues within his roster as it pursued individual degrees.

“There’s no way we’re going to be able to build anything here,” Kelley said. “There wasn’t a path to success until some things were changed.”

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He wanted to coach in college football, sure. But not under those conditions. And he knew now what he didn’t know in May: He didn’t see a future at Presbyterian.

So he got out of his contract, sold his home in South Carolina and returned home to Little Rock.

Since then, he has considered some options but may spend time outside of football as he pursues some business interests back in the city where he grew his legend. And his family is more comfortable, too. He’s happy watching his daughter return for her senior year at Pulaski Academy, where she had attended school since she was 3.

What’s next? Kelley isn’t sure. But he’s sure of what he doesn’t want.

“I love football, whether it’s coaching or being an analyst or doing analytics, under the right person in the right situation, absolutely I would be interested in doing that. But I’m not going to get into a situation where me and my family will be unhappy and two, if I don’t think there’s an adequate chance to be successful,” Kelley said. “I want to be part of something that’s successful. Either building toward success or maintaining success, which I actually think is harder. I’m only going to be in a good situation.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Sheldon Smith)