When Zak Kuhr was hired by the New England Patriots as their inside linebackers coach, he didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. While that is obviously not a reflection of one’s professional abilities, it shows that Kuhr was anything but a household name when he reunited with Mike Vrabel last January.
And while he is still not among the superstar coaches in the NFL a year later, he will have millions of eyeballs watching his every decision come Sunday. As the Patriots’ quasi-defensive coordinator since Terrell Williams’ cancer diagnosis in September, he will be calling the shots on that side of the ball in Super Bowl LX and be tasked with stopping one of the better offenses in football.
Kuhr has proven himself capable of being up to the task despite a relative lack of experience. Not only has he shown his skills as a play-caller over the course of the season and especially in the playoffs, he also provides a varied personal history to pull from.
Most of that has seen him work on the other side of the ball, though. Before making the jump to the NFL with Mike Vrabel’s Titans in 2020, Kuhr had coached exclusively on offense or special teams at the high school and collegiate levels. And yet, upon arriving in Tennessee, he moved to defense and began climbing up the ranks.
“He quickly grew as a coach,” Vrabel recently said. “I wanted to continue to work with him and keep him a part of what we were doing.”
Kuhr showing that his head coach’s trust was well-placed stems from his background, and his ability to use it to his advantage.
“He’s talented, being able to do what he did offensively,” added Vrabel, “and then learn what we were doing defensively and kind of learn the game, but also be able to provide assistance with the coaches as maybe why offenses were doing what they were doing or whether some of the zone read elements from college were starting to creep in or we would see more things, more spread formations and RPOs.”
“Anybody in the league as far as being a player or coach, if you’ve played either side I think it definitely can help you to work on the other side,” added cornerback Christian Gonzalez. “Not necessarily to think how an offensive player thinks, but you kind of have it in the back of your mind, ‘OK, on this field or play, they’ll do something like this.’”
Kuhr started out as a quality control coach with the Titans defense, and a year later was promoted to inside linebackers assistant. After three years and with Vrabel fired, he followed defensive coordinator Shane Bowen to the New York Giants.
In New York, Kuhr served as a defensive assistant — doing a little bit of everything but only being a minor cog in the machine. A year later, Vrabel came calling again: the Patriots’ new head coach wanted to bring him to Foxborough, and offered him a promotion from his previous roles; he offered increasing the size of the cog. For the first time since moving from college to the pros, he was given full responsibility over a position group.
Just two months later, Terrell Williams experienced a “medical scare” that forced him to spend almost four months working remotely from his home in Detroit. In his place, Vrabel turned to his first-time inside linebackers coach to take over as an on-the-ground DC: he ran meetings, relayed Williams’ plan for the defense, and was involved in building the foundation for what has since become one of the top units in football.
For linebacker Robert Spillane, that progression happened in large part because of Kuhr.
“He’s just continued to be very consistent for us all year long,” the team captain said. “An amazing communicator, really a unique mind when it comes to formulating defensive schematics and the ability to relay that to his players at a high level. I can’t say enough good things about Zak. I think he’s been a hidden gem for us this year, and he will continue to lead us on Sunday.”
Kuhr has been leading the Patriots defense in earnest since Week 2, when Williams stepped away from the team to focus on his treatment for pancreatic cancer. Five months into his tenure as play-caller, his unit is a big reason why New England is in the Super Bowl in the first place.
In several key metrics, the group is right up there with the Seattle Seahawks’ vaunted defense it will meet on Sunday. Whether it is points per drive (1.7 to 1.6), scoring rate (29.5% to 29.2%) or turnover rate (12.6% to 12.9%), it has more than just held its own.
That has been particularly visible in the playoffs so far. Morphing into a hyper-aggressive unit whose high blitz rate is meant to add an element of chaos the fundamentally sound Patriots can capitalize on, it has surrendered only 26 combined points in three games.
The players deserve plenty of credit for this, but so does Kuhr. He is the one pulling the strings, and the team knows about his importance to the operation, too.
That importance goes beyond wearing a headset on Sundays, though, as edge linebacker Harold Landry explained.
“I’m super happy for Zak,” Landry said. “He thinks I’m joking or I’m being sarcastic when I tell him I’m proud of him or he’s doing some good s—t. He’s a natural leader. When he stands in front of the room, and he talks, it just seems natural to him. Which is hard to do, to stand in front of a group of men and to get them to believe that, ‘Hey, this is what we have to do to have success.’ But he does it. I think it’s natural for him, and I’m happy that he’s having all this success.”
That success has led to Kuhr being only days away from calling a Super Bowl defense. Not bad for somebody who only started working on the defensive side of the ball six years ago, and who didn’t have a Wikipedia page when he joined the Patriots.
That, he has since added to his résumé. On Sunday, he could add something far more valuable.
