How Texas Tech OC Zach Kittley, a former college basketball player, became footballs next great o

It’s a six-hour drive from San Antonio to Lubbock. That’s a lot of time to think and to prepare. The flat, dry terrain offers little sightseeing.

Zach Kittley sat in the passenger seat of a white Nissan Murano. It was Dec. 4. His father, Wes, drove the whole way, while his mother, Linda, sat in the back. Zach, then Western Kentucky’s offensive coordinator, thought about the Conference USA championship game that got away the night before, when the Hilltoppers lost 49-41 to UTSA. He also thought about where he was going: Texas Tech, to interview for another offensive coordinator job.

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Word had gotten out that Kittley didn’t fly back with the WKU team. Head coach Tyson Helton told him to stay in Texas so he could prepare for the interview. Kittley’s parents had driven from Lubbock for the game, so they offered him a ride.

“It had been a long week, a lot of emotions after the game, my dad was like, ‘I’ll drive and you can rest,’” Zach said.

Zach bounced questions and ideas off his father, Texas Tech’s director of track and field and cross country and track and field head coach. Wes led the Red Raiders to the 2019 track and field national championship, the first men’s national title in school history. Zach knows Lubbock and Texas Tech. He grew up in town and went to school there, earning two degrees. He wanted to get this interview right.

Zach had interest from all kinds of schools for his services. Auburn wanted him, as did Nebraska and several other Power 5 programs. Fans across the country clamored for him after a record-setting year at WKU.

But none of those places was home. The Kittleys finished the drive and arrived in Lubbock on Saturday. Zach interviewed Sunday. Texas Tech named him its new offensive coordinator Monday.

Five years ago, Kittley was a graduate assistant. Now the 30-year-old former college basketball player, who stands 6-feet-7 tall, may be college football’s next big thing as a play caller. He was once a Kliff Kingsbury protege as a Texas Tech student, then took that offense and adapted it elsewhere. Under Kittley’s direction, WKU quarterback Bailey Zappe broke the NCAA single-season records for passing yards and passing touchdowns in 2021.

“He’s probably the next greatest offensive mind with his scheming,” Texas Tech assistant Emmett Jones said.

Texas Tech could soon become synonymous with high-octane offensive football again. Kittley would like nothing more than to be the one to make it happen.

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“Lubbock is the greatest place on the planet,” Kittley said. “There were great opportunities with different monetary values, but none of that matters. This is where my heart wants to be.”

Unlike Kingsbury, Kittley wasn’t a college quarterback. He didn’t even play college football. Kittley played wide receiver and safety in high school in Lubbock, along with playing basketball and competing in track and field. His mother recalled that Zach sprouted up what seemed like 9 inches one summer, much taller than anyone else in the family.

“He was the tallest safety in the state, maybe the United States,” Wes said with a laugh.

He had a natural mind for football. He could direct everyone and call the defense from the safety position. All three Kittley boys were good athletes, but Wes always thought Zach would become a coach. He just figured it would be in cross country or track like himself.

Instead, Zach walked on to the basketball team at Abilene Christian, where Wes once coached cross country. But Zach realized he didn’t have the passion to be a Division I basketball player. He’d stuck with the sport because he was tall, so it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Wes believes he pushed Zach toward it too hard. It wasn’t going to work.

Zach returned to Lubbock and walked into his dad’s office at Texas Tech and told him he didn’t want to play basketball anymore. He transferred to Tech for the spring semester and started helping his dad as a manager for the cross country team, traveling to various meets. Late in 2012, Texas Tech hired Kingsbury as head football coach, and Zach wanted to get involved. He’d loved watching Kingsbury as a player. Wes told Zach to call Sonny Cumbie, a football assistant coach and family friend.

“You could tell he was a sponge for football and had a good presence about him,” Cumbie said.

Kittley joined the staff as a student assistant, starting at the bottom.

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“Man, you name it, all the dirty work,” Kittley said. “I got coffee, sat in the corner, made installs. We had to input the down-and-distance into the program at the time. I’d go on ESPN.com and print out the play-by-play summary and use that to tag the film. I’d get lunch, take coaches to the airport, whatever it took.”

Cumbie gave Kittley some added football responsibilities, too. When Cumbie took the offensive coordinator job at TCU the next year, that was Kittley’s break. The staff shifted, and he moved into the quarterbacks room to work alongside Kingsbury. That’s where he learned how to teach the position, how to scheme an offense, how to get the ball in the hands of playmakers. He helped Kingsbury develop quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes, Davis Webb and Nic Shimonek.

“Everything I know, X’s and O’s in the passing game, is from coach Kingsbury,” Kittley said. “If you know him, he’s very tight to the vest, and it was special that he trusted me with the quarterbacks and let me coach those guys.”

Added Jones: “He was grinding every day trying to outwork Kingsbury and think like him.”

The Red Raiders had all kinds of offensive success. Mahomes and Webb, who transferred to Cal, became NFL quarterbacks. Still, after working as a graduate assistant from 2015 to 2017, Kittley needed to find a full-time coaching job to move up in his career. He could stick around as a quality control assistant, but he wasn’t sure what to do. When he got on the plane after the 2017 Birmingham Bowl, he found an email from Houston Baptist head coach Vic Shealy looking to gauge his interest in the offensive coordinator job.

Houston Baptist, an FCS team, began playing football in 2013. Its 5,000-seat stadium has stands on one side of the field and a CVS on the other. It nevertheless presented an opportunity for Kittley to not only have a position room to himself but also an entire offense. Shealy had heard good things about Kittley through coaching friends who had visited Texas Tech. He would let Kittley recruit to the scheme he wanted.

So Kittley made the rare jump from GA to offensive coordinator, the leap coming with some early bumps. The team didn’t even have enough healthy offensive linemen that first spring in 2018 to do 11-on-11 work.

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“I remember coming home disappointed at times, telling my wife I may have made a mistake,” Kittley said.

He did have one thing: a quarterback named Bailey Zappe. The strong-armed QB had a rough freshman season in which he started nine games. Zappe had been expecting to go to junior college out of high school before Shealy reached out a week before signing day. Kittley’s arrival was exactly what he needed. Taking what he learned from Kingsbury, Kittley brought in a QB-friendly offense.

“The reason why it’s so good is it gets the best players the ball in open space,” Zappe said. “That’s what football is nowadays. Get the ball in the hands of playmakers and let them do what they do best.

“We could run the same play 10 different ways and get the same guy the ball 10 straight times. The way he sets it up, schemes it and calls it is second to none.”

Zappe went from five touchdowns and 10 interceptions as a freshman to 23 TDs and 13 INTs as a sophomore under Kittley, then to 35 TDs and 15 INTs as a junior in 2019, leading the FCS in touchdown passes.

In the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, the college football world took notice.

Uncertain of what a spring season would look like, HBU opted to play four games in fall 2020, three at FBS schools. HBU scored 31 points at North Texas, 33 at Texas Tech and 38 at Louisiana Tech and averaged 515.6 yards per game. Zappe threw for 484.3 passing yards per game against the three FBS opponents, including 567 yards with four touchdowns in a tight loss at Texas Tech.

Shealy knew Kittley would be destined for big things. He points to the work Kittley did to cut down on turnovers after his first season on staff. By 2020, everything was rolling.

“Zach doesn’t make the same mistake twice,” Shealy said.

It became obvious that both Kittley and Zappe would be in demand. Kittley knew he had a chance to move up in his career, and he figured Zappe was likely to become a graduate transfer anyway. At WKU, head coach Tyson Helton wanted to overhaul the offense he ran. He came across Kittley and saw not only the Texas Tech film but also two games against teams in WKU’s conference. Helton hired Kittley, and it was only the beginning.

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Three days later, HBU receivers Jerreth and Josh Sterns announced their transfers to WKU. Zappe had offers from Tennessee and Texas Tech, but the familiarity of his offensive coordinator and top receivers led him to pick WKU, too.

“He means the world to me,” Zappe said of Kittley.

Ten days later, another receiver, Ben Ratzlaff, followed. When the one-time transfer rule passed a few months later, it meant WKU had essentially imported the HBU offense. It picked up right where things left off in 2020. Zappe threw for an NCAA-record 5,967 yards and 62 touchdowns in his lone season at WKU. Jerreth Sterns led the nation with 150 catches for 1,902 yards and 17 touchdowns. The Hilltoppers improved from 5-7 and 115th in scoring to 9-5 and No. 2 in scoring, winning the C-USA West division title.

Kittley says it’s not quite accurate to call it an Air Raid offense. He credits Helton for teaching him how to scheme a running game. If an opponent tries to take away the pass, the offense can attack in the running game. WKU rushed for 147 yards in the first matchup with UTSA. It had 215 rushing yards in the bowl win against Appalachian State.

“I don’t think the game of football is super complicated,” Kittley said. “You try to get good players the ball in space. Jerreth Sterns, I went into every game figuring out how I can get him the ball, because when he has the ball, good things happen. Get your best players the ball as many times as you can, no matter how that is. Sweeps, trick plays, reverses, whatever. Don’t be too vanilla with it.

“You’ll see different formations, but the scheme I run is pretty simple. The kids love it. It helps them play with maximum confidence. There’s no better feeling than going into Saturday knowing your guys are 100 percent confident.”

It was inevitable that Kittley would be in demand again. Several Power 5 teams reached out. The Texas Tech head coaching job opened during the season, and Kittley kept his eyes on what happened there, though new head coach Joey McGuire opted to retain Cumbie as his offensive coordinator.

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Then, during the week of the C-USA championship game, some friends started calling Kittley. Cumbie was going to get the Louisiana Tech head coaching job, the second time he opened a door for Kittley to a dream job at Texas Tech. The Red Raiders needed a new offensive coordinator, and Kittley made the six-hour drive.

“He killed the interview and we couldn’t get him back home fast enough,” McGuire said.

In the months since returning home, Kittley has seen his father around the office. In early February, there was an all-staff athletic department meeting. Wes sat in front of Zach. The son likes to say his father is “the real coach Kittley.” He’s won a national championship, after all.

“There’s big shoes to fill here, I’m not in the same sentence as him,” Zach said.

As for Texas Tech football, Kittley inherits a team that started three quarterbacks last season. Tyler Shough and Donovan Smith are expected to battle for the job, and Behren Morton could be in the mix as well.

That single-season passing yardage record that Zappe broke was previously held by former Texas Tech QB B.J. Symons. Symons said he was happy to see his record fall after 18 years, but it also meant Kittley needed to have a player break it again so Texas Tech could get the record back.

Zappe, for his part, shared a similar feeling.

“If it’s a quarterback under coach Kittley,” Zappe said, “they can go ahead and break it.”

(Top photo courtesy of Texas Tech Athletics)

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