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With DC Terrell Williams out, who will be calling defensive plays for Patriots vs. Dolphins?
Inside linebackers coach Zak Kuhr will call defensive plays for Sunday's game.
With defensive coordinator Terrell Williams still away from the Patriots due to an undisclosed health matter, a different assistant will be calling defensive plays in Sunday’s game against the Dolphins.
Inside linebackers coach Zak Kuhr will call defensive plays for New England in the Week 2 matchup against Miami, Patriots coach Mike Vrabel told reporters on Friday.
“I’ll help him like I always do, but I’m excited for that,” Vrabel said of Kuhr. “I think we’ve been prepared all week for that, for the preparation, for the game planning. All the phases of first and second down, what this team wants to try to do and how we want to try to defend them, and the keys and the plan on third down or short yardage in the red zone.
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“So, it was a good week of preparation.”
Vrabel didn’t offer an update on Williams’s condition on Friday, saying he would wait until next week to do so. Williams departed the team earlier this week, but the current health issue he’s dealing with is unrelated to the health scare that caused him to be away from the team during the offseason.
When Williams was away from the team before the start of training camp, Kuhr filled in as the defensive playcaller during practices in the spring.
That might have been Kuhr’s first time ever calling plays in any capacity at the college or pro level. He’s served as an assistant or positional coach at the college game or pro level since 2011.
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Kuhr actually began his college coaching career alongside Vrabel on Ohio State’s staff. He was an intern for Ohio State in 2011 and 2012, getting credit for helping to develop All-American running back Carlos Hyde.
That time with Vrabel in Columbus helped Kuhr land a role on the Titans’ coaching staff, working as a quality control coach and inside linebackers coach from 2020-23. Kuhr’s ability to coach both sides of the ball stood out to Vrabel.
“I watched him work at Ohio State,” Vrabel said of what he saw in Kur. “When we were able to get him to Tennessee, how quickly he translated that knowledge to defense, how quickly he learned defense and what an asset he was defensively for us, especially coming from some of the college game and as some of those trends started to make their way to the National Football League, some of the spread, the RPO or things like that, he really became an asset for us defensively.”
In between his time at Ohio State and with the Titans, Kuhr served as a running backs coach at James Madison and Rutgers before becoming the offensive coordinator at Texas State. He also worked as an offensive assistant at Texas in 2019. Last season, Kuhr worked on the Giants’ staff as a defensive assistant.
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As Kuhr has continued to rise up the coaching ranks, Vrabel seems more than comfortable giving him the responsibility of calling defensive plays for a regular-season game.
“He did our red zone stuff for us in Tennessee, and then continued to grow, continued to understand what we were doing,” Vrabel said. “Watching him work in the spring, work in front of the guys and prepare them in the spring, and through training camp until Terrell was back, that’s what I saw. I saw a lot of maturity, a lot of growth, but also a lot of knowledge.”
Kuhr actually got his start in coaching at a pretty young age. Before his internship with Ohio State, Kuhr worked as an offensive coordinator at Westside High School in Florida. He graduated from the University of Florida in 2013.
Now that Kuhr is set to get the biggest opportunity of his coaching career on Sunday, the players he’s calling plays for have trust in him to succeed.
“We’re really familiar with him and how he does things,” defensive tackle Milton Williams told reporters (via MassLive’s Mark Daniels). “In OTAs, he was calling our defense. When we were in meetings, he was heading our meetings and all that stuff. Yeah, we’re real familiar with what he’s trying to get accomplished. We just have to go out there and execute what he calls, and shoot, try to get the win.”
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