Tight end wasn’t Kelce’s first calling on football field
PHOENIX — If Travis Kelce had gotten his way, he would be the one throwing passes in the Super Bowl on Sunday, not catching them.
Kelce was a quarterback at Cleveland Heights High School, and when colleges who were recruiting him started asking the 6-foot-6, 235-pounder about changing positions, he did not want to hear about it. So, when University of Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly said he could play quarterback for the Bearcats, Kelce jumped at it.
“I knew that a lot of teams wanted me to be a tight end, D-end, outside linebacker type of mix,” Kelce said this week. “They really didn’t see me playing quarterback. I at least wanted to go somewhere that I was given a chance. Cincinnati gave me that chance for sure. I knew [tight end] was Plan B for sure, though.”
Kelce made the switch to tight end in college and has become one of the greatest ever at the position. The Chiefs are in their third Super Bowl in four years with Kelce as Patrick Mahomes’ favorite target.
NFL history would have been different if Kelce never made the switch. In his senior year of high school, Kelce had 1,523 passing yards, 15 touchdowns and eight interceptions while also rushing for 1,016 yards and 10 touchdowns. He had scholarship offers from Michigan, Michigan State and West Virginia, but he decided to follow his brother, Jason, to Cincinnati because Kelly would allow him to play quarterback.
After a redshirt season in 2008, Kelly and the coaches devised a Wildcat package in 2009 for Kelce. The package had a lot of zone reads and option plays for Kelce to run. He had three carries for 18 yards in their season-opening game against Rutgers.
Kelce was suspended for the 2010 season after violating team rules. When he returned in 2011, the Bearcats had a new coach, Butch Jones. He decided to move Kelce to tight end. Kelce had never run routes or blocked before.
“Initially going into the tight end position, man it was a pretty big struggle,” Kelce said. “I’m not going to lie. I didn’t feel comfortable running routes. I didn’t feel comfortable blocking. It took really a full year to two years, until my senior year in college to really hone my own craft and then it re
ally changed as soon as I got to the league. I went from being really a Y tight end, an inline tight end to this new creation coach [Andy] Reid and the offensive coordinator really creating for me and this offense.”
As a senior at Cincinnati, Kelce caught 45 passes for 722 yards and eight touchdowns. The Chiefs drafted him in the third round in 2013 and he has been All-Pro four times, including this season.
Kelce said his background as a quarterback helps him understand what Mahomes or another quarterback sees and how he can help them.
“Making that transition, I think yeah, you have an understanding of what that quarterback is going through back there,” Kelce said. “You have an understanding of the progression on this play. You have the understanding of, ‘All right, versus this defense, this is where I need to go with the ball.’ If you have that kind of mindset, if you’re in the quarterback’s mind and you’re thinking with him and the chemistry is there, there’s certain things you can do when you run routes to get open or to just make that guy’s life that much easier. That’s my job. My job is to go out there and paint a picture for the quarterback to make his job that much easier.”