How Andy Kotelnicki Brought His Minnesota Roots to Penn State

Kotelnicki once taught 3-year-olds to ice skate. Now, he's in charge of the Nittany Lions' entertaining offense.

Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki talks with reporters during football media day in Beaver Stadium. / Dan Rainville / USA TODAY NETWORK

Editor's note: This story first appeared at Ben Jones on Penn State.

It’s 4:45 in the morning, and Tom Journell’s phone is ringing. He rolls over, only half awake in a hotel bed in Eugene, Oregon, to see who is calling. Head coaches at any level are haunted by what sort of news they might receive at odd hours, let alone the calls that come while on recruiting trip far away from home. This time the news appears to be good. The call name reads: Andy Kotelnicki.

“Can you believe this slap— from Litchfield, Minnesota, is the offensive coordinator at Penn State?” Kotelnicki tells Journell.

“You’ve got to be shi–ing me,” Journell responds, equal parts surprised at the news and relieved that his day is starting this way. He eventually informs Kotelnicki of the time. Thet share a laugh and hang up.

For those who have spent time around Kotelnicki, these moments have been ongoing. Seen as one of the bright minds in college football, Kotelnicki has climbed the ladder from rural Minnesota to Penn State, helping turn Buffalo and Kansas into respectable programs along the way. The call might not always come so early in the day, but Kotelnicki moving on up is no longer a surprise.

The interesting question is how a coach like Kotelnicki came to be. Football is complex but also finite. Coaches are bound by rules, constraints and sensibilities that have resulted in everyone doing shades of the same sorts of things. At the college level in particular, it is as much about personnel as anything else. If you’ve got better players, you’ll win more games.

And yet coaches like Kotelnicki and former Penn State offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead, among others, have earned reputations as being “smarter” than the rest, somehow a step ahead of a crowd heading in a similar direction.

What makes that so?

“I think Andy growing up in a small town, going to Division III school where he had earned everything that was given to him, humbled him,” Journell said over a cup of coffee recently on a rainy day in Northfield, Minnesota, located about three hours south of Minneapolis, where No. 4 Penn State will play Minnesota on Saturday.

Andy Kotelnicki was 'always a step ahead'

Kotelnicki and his brother played for Journell at Wisconsin-River Falls in the early 2000s. Now, after a few stops, Journell is the head football coach at Carleton College, a liberal arts school tucked in central Minnesota up against the banks of the Cannon River.

“And he was an offensive lineman. It starts there," Journell said "You see the big picture. You’ve got to understand the game, and being [on] a wishbone team, you learn the roots of football.”

Kotelnicki learned those roots that eventually saw him on the opposite sideline, coaching against Journell. A moment when the master met the student. A chance to show the old man what he had learned from him, and then what he had learned on his own.

“I go back when I went against Wisconsin-Whitewater,” Journell said of the team on which Kotelnicki was the offensive coordinator. “He did a lot of things that had multiple formations and personnel groupings. But at the same time, he was able to manipulate formations based on personnel and what personnel you've got in the game. It was always a guessing game. He always had the answers.

“He was always a step ahead. I was always trying to catch up, and he always was doing something. He always kept me off balance. There was one game I had him figured out, and he came across the field [after losing] and he's like, 'Nobody's done that.’ And he goes, ‘I expected that you would be the one that would do it.’”

Journell just smiles.

Penn State quarterback Drew Allar (14) listens to offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki during the Blue-White spring game at Beaver Stadium. / Matthew O'Haren-Imagn Images

Andy Kotelnicki becomes a teacher

“When did I feel like I had a mind for football?” Kotelnicki said in an interview, pondering. “I don't know if it had as much to do with football, as it did with developing and teaching.”

And there’s a distinction to be made here. Yes, Kotelnicki has a mind for the game. You don’t just stumble into good ideas by chance, but you translate those ideas into something actionable is a different story altogether.

So what if you could just teach better than everyone else? What if half the battle isn’t coming up with the idea, but making the idea actionable? And what better Minnesotan tool to learn how to teach with than hockey?

Kotelnicki grew up an hour-and-a-half west of Minneapolis, just a stone’s throw from Lake Ripley. A lake aptly named for a former resident who froze to death. Welcome to Minnesota.

“My first exposure to teaching was being in fifth or sixth grade and teaching like 3-year-olds how to ice skate,” Kotelnicki said. “Dads were the hockey coaches, and I would just go there and show them how to skate.”

And once you can teach, you can scheme.

“I remember being young with my older brother Josh, and we had a two-on-two playbook that we created for two-man plays against our neighborhood brothers,” Kotelnicki said. “I love doing word searches that are stimulating the mind. Like every week, it's a new puzzle that we have to put together.”

But how do you solve that puzzle?

“You kind of have two schools of thought,” Kotelnicki said. “When you think about putting a game plan together, there’s the less is more model: Let's just do a few things and do them really well. And that works really well for when you have awesome talent compared to your people you play.

“And then you have that other model where you need to have an answer for everything, … and I've been in both of those camps before. There's kind of the sweet spot if you combine both of those things, but you understand at some point, if you do too much stuff, your production as an offense goes way, way down. I don't know that I'm that unique or special in that sense. I would say at this point, some of my experiences and getting to coach every level of college football [make a difference because it requires you to work with what you have.]”

An intriguing coach for Penn State

Working with what you have has been something of a Kotelnicki specialty. It’s something that makes his time at Penn State so intriguing — a chance to use more talent than he has ever had before. If he can do that at Buffalo and Kansas, what could he do at a program where talent isn’t an issue?

Case in point: During Kotelnicki’s last three seasons at Kansas, the Jayhawks made the most of what they had, ranking 12th in the country in 20+ yard plays (8.3 per game), 15th in 30+ yard plays (3.89) and 11th in 40+ yard plays (2.12). Additionally, Kansas ranked 10th in the country in 15+ yard pass plays (20.97 percent) in the last three years.

And how you do that? It’s easier said than done.

“Knowing who your players are, that is the most important thing,” Kotelnicki said. “And what their limitations are. Because if you know that, then you know what kind of things you should be doing. I know that that sounds [obvious], but to actually do that is a lot harder to do because a lot of times you want to just think about the next game, or installing or doing this.

“But really, you're trying to get people opportunities so they can showcase their skills, or [the opponents’] lack thereof. Just because you have a deficiency doesn't mean you can't be a productive football player. It just means let's not put you in those positions to do those things. And as coaches that's hard to do, that takes time to reflect on your kids. It takes intentionality with how you organize your practices and what you install and what you do.”

Then it’s a matter of what you do with that information.

“The next thing would be is, what do we do well, and then try to figure out things that are going to cause a boatload of stress for the defense. I tell our offensive guys that we want to have a very proactive mindset towards football and not reactive. One of our mantras is win with speed. And I'm not just talking about winning with speed with how fast we snap a ball or, you know, how fast we are. I'm talking about the ability to just come off the ball fast with confidence because we know what we're going to do and we're going to make them react to us, not the other way around.”

Collecting that information isn’t easy either. It will always be a meaningless, but interesting, piece of trivia that Saquon Barkley finished 89 yards short of the program’s all-time rushing record and had just one carry in the first game of his freshman season, in which he rushed for more than 1,000 yards. Sometimes half the battle is seeing the talent you have, and seeing it right away.

So yes it’s teaching, but also yes, you gotta know ball. Scheme matters too.

“My favorite quote in football,” Kotelnicki said, thinking back to nights in college spent reading about the game and watching clinic tapes. “Bill Walsh said, ‘The game of football can never be reduced to the point where you simply blame players for not physically overwhelming their opponent.’”

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Ben Jones has been covering Penn State athletics for 13 years, having been to countless home and road games for Nittany Lion sporting events spanning from the Rose Bowl to the NCAA Tournament. He's also the author of the book Happy Valley Hockey. You can read his work at https://benjonesonpennstate.substack.com and follow him on X (Twitter) at Ben_Jones88