Chad Kelly is on double-secret probation, and his last NFL chance is off to a tough start.
Just after the Colts gave Kelly a shot at OTAs as their fourth-string quarterback, the NFL suspended him without pay for the first two games of the season.
The discipline makes sense. Kelly, you will recall, was arrested for trespassing last October after he allegedly entered a suburban home in Englewood, Colorado at 1 a.m. without an invitation and was chased off with a vacuum cleaner tube. The suspension is related to the incident, which led the Broncos to release Kelly, per NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport
Kelly reportedly wasn’t sure he’d get another chance and this would probably be the reason why.
“I was living in Buffalo, living in my parents’ basement,” Kelly told the Buffalo News. “Just reflecting, reading the Bible, reading testimonies, just reading different things to kind of clear my brain, to kind of refocus. To understand that you are lucky to play this great game — 20 years of hard work can be gone just like that.”
Frank Reich, the Colts coach, played with Kelly’s uncle, Jim, in Buffalo, and reportedly spoke with him prior to signing Kelly.
“Whenever you take a person in Chad’s situation, it’s a case by case basis,” Reich said. “I felt like, from the tape that we saw, what the scouts thought (and) what we saw looking at the tape, the vetting that we did, the people we talked to, it just felt like we would give Chad a chance here to come in and compete as the fourth guy coming in and felt comfortable at that point with it.”