Quarterback Chad Kelly recently came off the bench to win the Grey Cup for the Toronto Argonauts. Whether he ends up back on the bench for 2023 remains to be seen.
Regardless, Kelly believes he wouldn’t be on the bench for half of the teams in the NFL.
Appearing on Pardon My Take, the nephew of Hall of Famer Jim Kelly said he could start over 50 percent of the NFL’s current starting quarterbacks.
“This is what I think,” Kelly said. “Obviously there’s a lot of off the field stuff, right? We all know about it. It’s all been publicized. You know, you stick a camera in a kid’s face at eight years old and give him his own day, you know, that’s predominately what’s going to happen, is that the light is going to shine a little brighter when it’s good or bad, right? But I think people mistaken my on the field capabilities of thinking clearly, right? Because they see that I do some dumb things off the field. So I think that with my saying 50 percent, I feel like I know the game a lot more than a lot of people because I started at such a young age, and that’s all I knew. In order to, you know, make it in life, I thought it was just to play in the NFL, really not even play in college. It was to play for the Buffalo Bills or someone, you know? That was the main focus my whole life.
Kelly had a chance with the Broncos. He was climbing the depth chart, but an off-field issue made it all fall apart. He couldn’t stick with the Colts, and he thereafter washed out of the NFL.
While it’s impossible to rule out a quarterback parlaying success in the CFL into a shot in the NFL, it will take plenty of work from Kelly. Starting with beating out at least one starter in the Canadian league.