Just days before Ohio’s victory in the Cure Bowl, Kyle Obly sat in his Orlando hotel room with a big smile. “You ready to do this, Ob?” Ohio coach Brian Smith asked him via phone call. The simple question was met with a simple answer from Obly: “Absolutely.”
That day in Orlando, Obly was named Ohio’s tight ends coach, making him one of the youngest position coaches in the FBS.
A native of Cleveland, Obly has served in many different roles for Ohio despite being the youngest coach on the staff. His journey started his freshman year of college at Ohio University, where he was enrolled as a journalism student.
For the first two weeks of his college career, Obly took a job right here at The Post, writing about the Athens High School football team. He soon realized that journalism wasn’t for him despite his overwhelming passion for sports.
“To this day, I can't tell exactly why, but all I could think about was the impact that my coaches at (Aurora High School) had on me,” Obly said. “I thought, what better way to stay involved than to try and find a way with the football team?”
Soon thereafter, Obly reached out to former graduate assistant Jordan Reid to see if there was a way for him to get involved. After a short phone call with director of football operations Chris Rodgers, Obly was told to show up to Peden Stadium at 8 a.m. the next day for practice.
He got up the next morning, put on the best clothes he had with him and went to his first practice. But he was admittedly scared to death.
“I didn't know what I was walking into, but I knew that I was willing to do anything to contribute to the program,” Obly said. “I arrived that morning, they brought me upstairs, handed me the practice script for that day, had me read three plays off of it, and they said ‘All right, you can read – you’re hired,’ and that's how everything started.”
In his first couple weeks with the team, Obly was tasked with reading the plays to the signal callers so they could relay them to the players in practice. Keeping the mindset of doing whatever the program needed to succeed, then offensive coordinator Tim Albin noticed Obly’s hard work. Albin offered Obly a job in the box, being a scribe for the offense on game days.
“After that, I just continued to show up every single day, willing to do whatever was necessary to provide an impact, to play a role,” Obly said. “Quickly, I realized that with the players, it was nothing about how much you know. They need to know how much you care.”
As Obly continued as a student assistant, he began to turn even more heads within the program. His hard work began to pay off in 2021 when Tyler Tettleton came into the program as the passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
Tettleton, alongside offensive coordinator Scott Isphording, asked Obly if he wanted to play a bigger role in the program. Once again, Obly answered simply: “Absolutely.”
Tettleton then went out of his way to find an open chair and table inside Peden Stadium so Obly had a place to work in the offensive staff room. At this point, while still working on his undergraduate degree, Obly got his foot in the door of Ohio’s coaching staff.
“I was at the stadium 24/7, I got really good at doing the jobs that no one else wanted to do,” Obly said. “From making airport runs to fixing the copier machine to putting binders together to creating the call sheets for the coordinators … The responsibilities and tasks that no one wants to do, that's what I got really good at.”
After building relationships with players and coaches in the program, Obly graduated from OU with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 2022. The following year, Obly entered grad school so that he could stay with the staff.
That same year was the first year current head coach Brian Smith entered the program as the running backs coach. Having already established himself in the program and now serving in the role of offensive graduate assistant, Obly began to look to Smith as a role model.
“I was fortunate enough to sit next to Coach Smith in the staff room every single day,” Obly said. “He was always looking over my shoulder, seeing what I was doing, and I was looking over his probably more than he wanted me to. I constantly had questions and wanted to pick his brain on different things, and he just poured into me every single day. If he thought that there were things I could do better, he let me know. If I had questions about stuff that he did, I asked him, and he gave me a full, thought-out answer.”
In the 2024 season, which will go down as a historic year in the program’s history, Obly served as assistant quarterbacks coach, where he was responsible for coaching quarterbacks on game day.
Obly’s work in 2024 is a big reason why senior quarterback Parker Navarro went on to win five Mid-American Conference Player of the Week awards and be named All-MAC Second Team at season's end.
Moments following the 2024 MAC Championship victory, it was announced that Albin would leave the program to take the head coaching job at Charlotte. At that moment, uncertainty rained down on the entire staff, including Obly.
“There was a lot of unknown,” Obly said. “We showed up the next morning, and it was made clear that Coach Hauser and Coach Smith were both going to be candidates for the job. Coach Albin told us, ‘You guys go finish this thing out.’ He allowed the entire staff to do that. We were here to secure win number 11 and create history.”
As the team worked diligently to secure that record-breaking eleventh win against Jacksonville State, athletic director Julie Cromer began her search for the team’s next head coach. Shortly before the bowl game, Smith was awarded the job. At that moment, Obly was grateful for all those days in the offensive meeting room, building a deep relationship with Smith.
In 2024, after collecting a MAC Championship, Cure Bowl victory and another new position on staff, Obly became a two-time Bobcat by graduating with a masters of science in recreation and sports sciences. Now, after two degrees and rising through the ranks of the football program, Obly will stay in Athens and continue to be a commanding presence on the team’s staff.
