With his college career quickly drawing to a close, Ole Miss quarterback Chad Kelly will soon start having to sell himself to NFL executives.
The gunslinging quarterback with a checkered past made his pitch to Emily Kaplan in a Wednesday piece for Sports Illustrated’s Monday Morning Quarterback blog.
“I have it all. I might not have the same mojo as your basic quarterback, but I feel like I bring a different type of swag to the team and the players around me. I have friends all across that field. When I go out there on the field, I play with a different attitude that you usually don’t see in a quarterback. I play with a swag they’ve never seen before.”
And you know what the GM is going to ask next…
“Off the field,” Kelly says, not missing a beat. “Can we trust you?”
Kelly recently made headlines for running onto the field after his younger brother suffered a late hit in a high school football game. The incident happened in Buffalo, New York, during the Rebels’ bye week but did not go unnoticed by the national media.
He had previously been kicked off Clemson’s football team in April 2014 for “a pattern of behavior that is not consistent with the values of our program,” according to the university news release announcing his dismissal.
NFL Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, who’s also Chad’s uncle, weighed on in the situation in Kaplan’s story.
“Sometimes I look at what he has to deal with and it’s crazy,” says Jim Kelly. “Apologize for a brawl? He wasn’t involved in no freakin’ brawl! Nobody’s talking about what they did to his little brother, who was down on the ground with the other guys kicking him, hitting him, ripping his helmet off. Chad just ran down there to help. The thing about the Kelly’s is we stick together. If that was one of my younger brothers, damn straight I’d do the same thing.
“But if you’re Chad, you have to understand from the outside, a little thing can turn into a big thing because of your past. From here on, every little thing he does is going to blow up.”
Marcus covers SEC football for Saturday Down South.
