Built by the Coach Who Wouldn't Punt: Kevin Kelley on EliteEdge

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The full text of “Built by the Coach Who Wouldn't Punt: Kevin Kelley on EliteEdge” by AFQ Staff, from the Vol 3 — Fall 2026 issue.

Built by the Coach Who Wouldn’t Punt Kevin Kelley on the app that puts a program’s own numbers in the play caller’s hands BY AFQ STAFF Kevin Kelley built a career on a simple, uncomfortable idea: the numbers a program generates are worth more than the conventional wisdom everyone else is coaching by.

At Pulaski Academy that meant no punting, onside kicks on purpose, an offense that averaged 51.5 points and 537 yards a game, nine Arkansas state championships and a USA Today National Coach of the Year award—along with visits from ESPN, HBO’s Real Sports, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. EliteEdgeFB is that idea turned into software.

Upload a season of play-by-play—a tagged Hudl export or any spreadsheet with five columns—tap in the down, distance, field position and score, and in a few seconds the app returns a ranked short list of your own plays for that exact situation, each with its success rate, average yards and rep count. No national averages, no AI assistance, nothing new to chart. Just a program’s own history, made sideline-ready.

Kelley is the app’s head of football strategy—the one who decided which situations matter, how calls get ranked and what a coordinator actually needs on screen at 2ndand-4 with the clock running. AFQ asked him what the numbers cost him when he was doing it by hand, what he fought to keep off the screen and, in his own words, what the system does for a team. You were making decisions by the numbers on Friday nights long before there was an app to do it.

Take us back to Pulaski—what did that process actually look like during a game, and what did it cost you in time and staff to do it by hand? The in-game process cost me time during the game, but it cost me so much more during the week leading up to it. I spent hours putting together the answers to the questions that might come up in a game. As usual, most of them never happened—but plenty did, and I had to be ready. Now that time is freed up during the week to work on other important things.

During games, I had some of the answers in the notes on my phone, others memorized and some on my game sheet. Looking back, maybe the two most important things are that I won’t make mistakes trying to recall or find the information, and that it relieves that particular stress, which lets me think more clearly when I’m making decisions.

Every coach has the call he wishes he had back, and the film usually settles the argument on Monday. Why did you decide the answer needed to be a product a coach could use between plays—and why now? The answer is in the question on this one. Monday is too late to figure out you made a mistake, because sometimes those mistakes change the flow of the game and eventually the outcome. The kids and the staff deserve better if there’s a way to be better.

If there’s a chance to make fewer mistakes and give your team a better chance of winning, that’s every coach’s job. I wish we could have come up with the answers sooner, but it took two years to get this to where it was seamless and easy—where it actually helps coaches make better in-game decisions. And remember, every decision a coach makes either helps or hurts the team’s chances. You never know when that one decision will change the course of a game.

Monday is too late to figure out you made a mistake, because sometimes those mistakes change the flow of the game and eventually the outcome.

You could have built this on national data or on “what works in football.” Instead, EliteEdge ranks only a program’s own plays using its own results. Why was that the right foundation, and what does a coach usually learn about his own offense the first time he sees his plays ranked by situation? The first part of that is hugely important, because it ties into that particular coach’s and team’s identity on offense.

National numbers, or general football numbers, very rarely apply as well to every single team, because there are so many different styles and philosophies of offense and so many ways to approach play calling. If you want to call a play with a high success rate, analytically speaking, it needs to come from the plays your team has run over a certain period of time—not from what the national average of football teams has done.

The way we put it together, it gives you a choice: the highest success rate in that situation, or the best chance at an explosive play. But the beauty is that it’s based on what your team has done, not someone else’s. And to me, what may be the single best thing is that it’s laid out for you in your own terminology. I haven’t seen another program that does that, and without it there are that many more ways to make a mistake interpreting a generic play call and translating it to yours.

What a coach usually learns about his own offense is that we think we know how good we are at certain things. Then the app comes back with a different play than the one you expected, and after the game you look at your numbers to see why, and you realize our brains play tricks on us. We tend to remember a play that isn’t really that good—a play we just want to call because one time it worked in a great situation, and that shot it to the front of our minds. You decided what a play caller sees on that screen.

What did you fight to put on it, and what did you insist stay off it so it doesn’t become one more voice in the headset? Those two answers are really one and the same. We wanted coaches to have choices, and we wanted them to be comfortable in those choices. But too many choices cause arguments when more than one person is looking at them. Put me and another coach together, give us three plays to choose from, and we can agree quickly.

Put me and four coaches together with six choices, and we’ll take a delay of game arguing over which one is best. Put me and four coaches together with six choices, and we’ll take a delay of game arguing over which one is best. Plenty of coaches hear “analytics” and picture a spreadsheet second-guessing their gut. How do you want a coordinator to use the recommendation in the 25 seconds between snaps—and where does his instinct still win?

One of the choices on the screen is a play the coordinator put in himself during the week for that particular moment. That’s there for his comfort, his creativity and the way he sees something he doesn’t think others can. So I’d suggest he take his options and understand what they truly are: one, the highest likelihood of success on this play according to what his own team has run; two, the highest chance of an explosive play; and three, what he put in himself during the week.

Then he has to process what his team needs at that moment. For example, if my quarterback is struggling, or my team in general is struggling, I’m thinking during those 25 seconds that we need the highest-percentage chance of success—and based on the numbers, it’s given to me. Our team needs confidence. It needs a good play right now. An explosive would be great, but it’s not as high a percentage, and we need a high-percentage confidence play.

If my team is rolling and riding high on confidence, we can go with the explosive, because I know they’ll shake it off if it doesn’t work and be successful on the next play. Our team needs confidence. It needs a good play right now.

In your own words, for the head coach reading this who is on the fence: what does EliteEdge do for a team over the course of a season—on Friday night, in the Monday staff meeting, and in the way a staff talks about play calling? First, I’d tell that coach to give me a call. This is going to sound boastful, but it isn’t meant to be. I’m definitely weak in a lot of areas of coaching, even though I’ve won a lot of state championships over the years. The one thing I’ve done well is call offense.

I think it’s the great equalizer in a game—once the week of preparation is over, it can help or hurt more than anything. There are more than 16,000 high schools playing football in this country, and my teams have led them in total offense while playing teams from 26 different states. I have 12 of the top 100 passing seasons of all time in high school history. I think I understand how play calling affects a game, and how to do it.

The biggest part is that we have to quiet all the noise, because it’s hard to pick. I have game sheets like everyone else, but I call about 5 percent of my plays by looking at the sheet. Things are so different once a game starts. Kids change, defenses change, attitudes change, confidence changes, and emotion gets into all of our minds and fogs us a bit.

With this program, you will always have the single best plays your team runs, according to real data from your own history that you put into it, with no chance of overlooking them. A coach can always veer away from that. But wouldn’t it be awesome to have those two best plays, according to the data, staring you right in the face—so you don’t have to go back on Monday and realize you didn’t call what you should have?

I have game sheets like everyone else, but I call about 5 percent of my plays by looking at the sheet.