New DC Kelly Ready To Rebuild Buffs Defense
March 02, 2023 | Football, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — Colorado defensive coordinator Charles Kelly's resume´ reads like a Who's Who of college football.
He won national titles as an assistant coach at Florida State with Jimbo Fisher (2013) and at Alabama with Nick Saban (2020). He has also coached at Georgia Tech and Tennessee, he played at Auburn, and the cumulative record of the programs he helped coach over the last 10 seasons is a sparkling 106-26.
Simply, he has witnessed first-hand how the very best in the business go about their jobs.
But while technically not a part of Kelly's resume´, one of his earliest and most important influences was former Colorado assistant coach Greg Brown, who headed up one of the nation's best secondaries in the early 1990s under head coach Bill McCartney.
"When I finished college and I first got into coaching, one of the most dominant programs in the country at that time was Colorado," Kelly said Thursday. "I was a young defensive back coach, and at that time, Colorado probably had the best defensive backs and one of the best defenses in the country. One of the first coaches that I ever went to a clinic with was Greg Brown. He was one of my early mentors as a young coach, so I've always been fascinated with the tradition at Colorado."
During his tenure at Colorado, Brown coached a pair of Thorpe Award winners, Chris Hudson and Deon Figures.
Now, Kelly's defense has what many predict could become an equally dominant duo in Travis Hunter and Cormani McClain.
Kelly, who has spent much of his career coaching defensive backs, won't be the specific cornerbacks coach at CU. That task will go to Kevin Mathis, who came to Colorado with Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders from Jackson State.
But Kelly — who will coach safeties — will no doubt be keeping a close eye on his entire secondary as he tries to rebuild a Buffaloes defense that finished dead last in the country last season in scoring defense, yielding nearly 45 points per game.
Kelly will no doubt bring with him the tricks of the trade he has learned at all his previous stops. But he stressed that CU's defense will not be a carbon copy of anyone else.
CU's identity will be its own.
"We're going to build our defense based on what Coach Prime's expectations are," Kelly said. "He says it all the time. We want to be big, we want to be physical, we want to be disciplined, we want to be fast and we want to be tough. We want to be an aggressive style defense."
At Kelly's previous stops — in particular Alabama — his teams built their strengths from the inside out, starting with a dominant group in the trenches.
But given CU's current roster, and judging from what Sanders has hinted at previously, the Buffaloes will build from the outside in, depending first on their outstanding corners to set the tone.
Mathis reiterated that philosophy on Thursday.
"We're probably the only place in America that's going to start from the outside in, because that's who he (Sanders) is," Mathis said. "That's what we want to build our brand on. I want to make sure my guys outside are lockdown guys. That's going to allow us to do what we need to do inside."
As the associate defensive coordinator at Alabama, Kelly no doubt could have stayed in place and continued working with Saban and reaping the benefits of working for a perennial national title contender.
But when the opportunity arose for him to join Sanders and help build a program, he seized the moment.
"You make decisions based on people," Kelly said. "When Coach Prime got this job, there was no hesitation for me. I knew it was something that had a chance to be very special and I wanted to be a part of it."
Over the years, Kelly has earned a reputation as one of the nation's top recruiters, landing elite prospects at every stop. But he stressed that landing top prospects isn't a one-man job.
"Recruiting is not about one person,'' he said. "It's just like raising a child. It takes a village to recruit a player … It's about building relationships and doing a lot more listening than talking. People will tell you what they want and what they're looking for. And if you have an opportunity to provide that, you have a chance to get that player."
Now, Kelly will be part of a massive rebuilding effort. He will no doubt call upon many of the lessons he has learned at previous stops, in particular the last four years under Saban.
"There's no doubt he's proven he's the greatest of all time," Kelly said. "He's very intelligent, very smart, very disciplined. And what I learned from him is to be consistent in everything you do. Don't get complacent. Try to learn, try to find new things out there that can help your program."
But in the end, Kelly doesn't want to make Colorado a mirror image of any of his previous stops.
He wants the Buffaloes to be their own brand, something that can only be accomplished through dedication, discipline and hard work.
"It's going to be our defense," he said. "That's what we want it to be, but we have to establish the criteria and we have to establish our identity. We have to do that consistently. But there is no magic dust. There's a lot of work that goes into it."
Players Mentioned
