Andy Kotelnicki, Crosswords and the Art of Teaching
From teaching hockey to RPOs, Andy Kotelnicki reflects on the game of football.
NORTHFIELD, Minn. -
It’s 4:45 in the morning and Tom Journell’s phone is ringing. He rolls over, only half awake in a hotel bed in Eugene, Oregon to see who is calling. Head coaches at any level are haunted by what sorts of news they might receive at odd hours, let alone the calls that come while on recruiting trip far away from home. This time the news appears to be good. The name reads: Andy Kotelnicki.
“Can you believe this slapdick from Litchfield, Minnesota is the offensive coordinator at Penn State?” Kotelnicki tells Journell.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Journell responds, equal parts surprised to hear the news and relieved that his day is starting this way. He eventually informs Kotelnicki of the time. The two share a laugh and hang up.
For those who have spent time around Kotelnicki these sorts of moments have been ongoing. Seen as one of the bright minds in the sport, Kotelnicki has climbed the ladder from rural Minnesota to Penn State, helping turn Buffalo and Kansas into respectable programs along the way. The call might not always come so early in the day, but Kotelnicki moving on up is no longer a surprise.
The interesting question is how a coach like Kotelnicki comes to be. Football is complex but it is also a finite thing. You are bound by rules, constraints and sensibilities that have resulted in everyone doing shades of the same sorts of things. At the college level in particular it is as much about personnel as it is anything else. If you’ve got better players, you’ll win more games.
And yet coaches like Kotelnicki and former offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead - among others - have earned reputations as coaches who are ‘smarter’ than the rest, somehow a step ahead of a crowd all heading in a similar direction.
What makes that so?
“I think Andy growing up in a small town, going to division three school where he had earned everything that was given to him, humbled him,” Journell said over a cup of coffee on a rainy day in Northfield, Minnesota. Kotelnicki and his brother played for Journell while at Wisconsin-River Falls in the early 2000s. Now, after a few stops, Journell finds himself the head football coach at Carleton College, a liberal arts school tucked in central Minnesota up against the banks of the Cannon River.
“And he was an offensive lineman. It starts there, you see the big picture. You’ve got to understand the game and being a wishbone team you learn the roots of football.”
Kotelnicki learned those roots, a skillset that eventually saw him on the opposite sideline, coaching against Journell. A moment when the master and the student meet. A chance to show the old man what he had learned from him, and then what he had learned on his own.
“I go back when I went against Wisconsin-Whitewater,” Journell said of the team where Kotelnicki was the offensive coordinator. “He did a lot of things that had multiple formations and personnel groupings. But at the same time he was able to manipulate formations based on personnel and what personnel you've got in the game. It was always a guessing game. He always had the answers.”
“He was always a step ahead. I was always trying to catch up and he always was doing something. He always kept me off balance. There was one game I had him figured out and he came across the field [after losing] and he's like, 'nobody's done that. And he goes, I expected that you would be the one that would do it.”
Journell just smiles.
“When did I feel like I had a mind for football?” Kotelnicki says, pondering. “I don't know if it had as much to do with football, as it did with developing and teaching.”
And there’s a distinction to be made here. Yes, Kotelnicki has a mind for the game. You don’t just stumble into good ideas by chance, but how you translate those ideas into something actionable is a different story all together.
So what if you could just teach better than everyone else? What if half the battle isn’t coming up with the idea, but making the idea actionable. And what better Minnesotan tool to learn how to teach with than hockey, Kotelnicki growing up hour and a half west of Minneapolis just a stone’s throw from Lake Ripley. A lake aptly named for a former resident who froze to death. Welcome to Minnesota.
“My first exposure to teaching was being in fifth or sixth grade and teaching like three year olds how to ice skate,” Kotelnicki said. “Dads were the hockey coaches and I would just go there and show them how to skate.”
And once you can teach, you can scheme.
“I remember being young with my older brother Josh and we had a two-on-two playbook that we created for two man plays against our neighborhood brothers,” Kotelnicki says, as he reflects. “I love doing word searches that are stimulating the mind. Like every week, it's a new puzzle that we have to put together.”
But how do you solve that puzzle?
“You kind of have two schools of thought,” Kotelnicki said. “When you think about putting a game plan together. There’s the less is more model - let's just do a few things and do them really well. And that works really well for when you have awesome talent compared to your people you play.”
“And then you have that other model where you need to have an answer for everything … and I've been in both of those camps before. There's kind of the sweet spot if you combine both of those things, but you understand at some point, if you do too much stuff, your production as an offense goes way, way down. I don't know that if I'm that unique or special in that sense. I would say at this point some of my experiences and getting the coach every level of college football [make a differences because it requires you to work with what you have.]
Working with what you have has been something of Kotelnicki’s speciality. It’s something that makes his time at Penn State so intriguing - a chance to use more than he has ever had before. If he can do that at Buffalo and Kansas, what might he do at a program where talent isn’t an issue?
Case in point, during Kotelnicki’s last three seasons at Kansas the Jayhawks made the most of what they had, ranking 12th in the country in 20+ yard plays (8.3 per game), 15th in 30+ yard plays (3.89) and 11th in 40+ yard plays (2.12) during that span. Additionally, Kansas ranked 10th in the country in 15+ yard pass plays (20.97%) in the last three years.
And how you do that? It’s easier said than done.
“Knowing who your players are, that is the most important thing,” Kotelnicki said. “And what their limitations are. Because if you know that, then you know what kind of things you should be doing. I know that that sounds [obvious] but to actually do that is a lot harder to do because a lot of times you want to just think about the next game, or installing or doing this.”
“But really, you're trying to get people opportunities so they can showcase their skills, or [the opponents’] lack thereof. Just because you have a deficiency doesn't mean you can't be a productive football player. It just means let's not put you in those positions to do those things. And as coaches that's hard to do, that takes time to reflect on your kids. It takes intentionality with how you organize your practices and what you install what you do.”
Then it’s a matter of what you do with that information.
“The next thing would be, is what do we do well, and then try to figure out things that are going to cause a boatload of stress for the defense. I tell our offensive guys that we want to have a very proactive mindset towards football and not reactive. One of our mantras is win with speed. And I'm not just talking about winning with speed with how fast we snap a ball or you know, how fast we are. I'm talking about the ability to just come off the ball fast with confidence because we know what we're going to do and we're going to make them react to us, not the other way around.”
Collecting that information isn’t easy either. It will always be a meaningless, but interesting, piece of trivia that as Saquon Barkley finished 89-yards short of the program’s all-time rushing record that he had just one carry his very first game on campus during a season he rushed for over 1,000 yards. Sometimes half the battle is seeing the talent you have, and seeing it right away.
Then again, it’s always a good reminder the reps fans see on Saturdays are only a few of the ones coaches see all week long.
“The reps that you have at practice are the best way to indicate what you're good at,” Kotelnicki said. “You have to be very careful that you don't start making educated guesses. One of the best things about being at Penn State is that the defense we go against every day is really good … I had this experience as a coordinator, where we were doing some really good things in spring football and fall camp and then we started playing other teams and they weren't working the way they were in fall camp … I call it the camouflage of mediocrity. You had a mediocre team going against each other and next thing you know, you play better people and you don't look as good anymore, right? So we're going against I know what's a good defense every day, so when you have success with it, you know that it's going to be productive, and it's going to be good.”
“When you’ve got a really good receiver going against a poor defensive back, and you throw it up to him and down the field, and he runs right behind, and he catches it, that's good coaching. But doing it over and over again, against somebody who's as good, and it's not working, that's bad coaching. You can never just assume that you'll be able to do that. So what you do schematically, how you try to get players open how you try to get creative in the run game, you have to kind of operate on the assumption that your chess pieces aren't as good as other teams chess pieces. And I think that's where the strategy comes into play. Don't blame the guy just because they could win a one on one over and over again.”
So yes it’s teaching, but also yes, you gotta know ball. Scheme matters too.
“My favorite quote in football,” Kotelnicki says, thinking back to nights in college spent reading about the game and watching clinic tapes. “Bill Walsh said ‘The game of football can never be reduced to the point where you simply blame players for not physically overwhelming their opponent.’”
Of course Penn State fans won’t mind if the Nittany Lions overwhelm opponents physically and strategically from time to time. Neither will Kotelnicki.