BOULDER — Half a decade has passed since Brady Russell arrived on campus in Boulder.
Back in 2017 he was a two-star defensive end from Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins who decided to forego a scholarship offer from Northern Colorado to walk on at Colorado. He flipped to tight end and was named CU’s Offensive Scout Player of the Year as a true freshman. Then, before his redshirt freshman season, Colorado’s coaching staff awarded him a full-ride scholarship.
“I don’t think other guys have an understanding for how long you’ve been here and how you understand the things going on,” Russell told DNVR on Saturday. “When you’re talking to them, you’re just trying to give them advice and help them out. But they don’t understand the perspective that I have looking back because, I mean, it’s my fifth spring going into my sixth year.”
Right now, Colorado has five tight ends on its roster: Russell, a senior, and five freshmen. New tight ends coach Clay Patterson made his plans for Russell clear ahead of spring ball.
“My coach told me to treat it like being an NFL vet,” Russell said.
Russell has been Colorado’s starting tight end for the past three seasons and he started a handful of games back in 2018 too. His starting position is among the safest on the entire roster.
By the time the season rolls around, Russell will be 24. That’s ancient by college football standards. Russell and Patterson agreed that he’s seen just about everything there is to see and overworking him would be a waste of time.
“I go through all the drills and whatnot but when team periods come around, a lot of it’s just trying to get those young guys experience and stuff that they don’t have because I have so much experience under my belt,” Russell said. “I don’t need to see each different front and each different look and how a different guy will play me versus how this kind of front will play me. I don’t necessarily need the reps.”
More importantly, Russell can focus on his health.
“I just get in here and there and work in when I need to to see new things,” Russell said. “We have a new offensive staff so they still need to see what I can do, so I hop in and show them what I can do in certain areas. But really I don’t need to take a ton of reps. I just need to stay fresh and keep my body fresh and remember how to go out there once in a while remember how to block a nine tech.”
The Russell-Patterson duo is as about as close as you could get to a match made in heaven.
When Patterson came to Colorado to serve as tight ends coach and passing game coordinator, he left Minnesota. More notably, he left veteran tight end Nick Kallerup.
“I left a guy that loved country music and being violent and hitting people and had long hair and had this image and I literally—when I picked up and moved—I have another one,” Patterson said on Tuesday.
Russell and Patterson have plenty in common, even beyond their approach to football.
“We both like Red Dirt country music,” Patterson said. “He’s got something for me every day, ‘Coach, you got this song?’ He’s got the music on every day when we come in. He’s such a positive person, too. You guys have been around him. He’s just a light when you’re around him and he leads this football team in a positive way.”
With Russell spending a little extra time on the sideline—since, in Patterson’s words, “every rep he doesn’t take, one of them gets to take it”—the two have worked together to help the younger tight ends continue to move forward.
“I’m more of an effort and enthusiasm encourager,” Russell said. “If someone’s walking somewhere I’m gonna say something or if they make a big play I’m gonna celebrate with them, bring them up, lift them up. I’m not quite as much of a ‘grinding into their technique and picking apart their game.’ That’s coach Patterson.”
The fit is seamless. Maybe that’s why Erik Olsen has been the star of camp through the first week of practice, and Patterson says Austin Smith doesn’t get as much credit as he should.
“He’s grown immensely, for sure,” Russell said of Olsen. “It’s really fun watching all three of them. Really. It’s fun seeing the strides that they make, because even Day 1 to Day 3, it is unbelievable. And I think Coach Patterson, he should get a lot of credit for that. He does a great job in the meeting room and a great job teaching this whole offseason, teaching them how things work, the mentality that we’re going to carry as a group. So a lot of credit to him for the way that these guys have grown and then a lot of credit to these guys for the way they’ve implemented the coaching.”
With the new coaching staff comes a new offensive system. We don’t know exactly what it will look like, though Patterson mentioned on Tuesday that it isn’t going to be as simple as picking up Minnesota’s RPO offense and dropping it in Boulder. He say it will be multiple. He says it will have an answer for anything an opposing defense throws at it.
Regardless of what the offense looks like, it’s going to be a change. It’s no surprise that Russell thinks the change is welcome, given CU’s offensive struggles in 2021.
“There’s a lot more interesting schemes and things that are interesting things we get to do really,” Russell said. “Last year I think I only caught two balls beyond the line of scrimmage that weren’t scramble drills. But other than that, everything was just lateral at the line of scrimmage and running and after the catch.”
It’s crazy to think that only two of Russell’s on-script catches came in front of the line of scrimmage.
It’s even crazier when you consider that Russell led the team in both catches and yards.
Take a look at where Russell was targeted last season:
Credit: PFF
Of Russell’s 30 targets in 2021, 25 were between the numbers and only one was 10 or more yards down field. While Russell’s pure speed isn’t his calling card, it’s easy to see that he was put into a box in the last system.
Still, Russell was able to build chemistry with Lewis last year given the way he was used. As mentioned above, the duo ran quite a few scramble drills. Here’s an example of an off-script first-down conversion against Oregon.
“It’s just playing backyard football really,” Russell said. “I blocked him for a second, B-Lew’s right there. So I just drift over here, he pitches it to me and go run and see what can happen. It’s kind of fun when things like that happen. It’s fun working with B-Lew with me on the same page and he’s really good on the run.”
The two continued to work together throughout the offseason, meeting up at CU’s indoor practice facility. Montana Lemonious-Craig was almost always there, as were RJ Sneed and Chase Penry. According to Russell, just about anybody who could make it on any given day threw the ball around. And that included JT Shrout, Lewis’ competitor for the starting job.
Russell says that work has carried over into camp. The Buffs’ held their first full-pad practice on Tuesday, with football pants being the final piece of the equation. Russell didn’t hype up the first fully-padded practice.
“You don’t need pants to hit,” he said.
Still, Russell is excited for the physicality of practices to continue to ramp up over the next few weeks, with the first open scrimmage of camp on Saturday and the Spring Game on the way on April 23.
“I’m excited to get hittin,'” Russell said. “I want to get some more reps run blocking and stuff just because sometimes you feel a little buster after having a few months off. It’s kind of like driving a stick shift; it comes back to you quickly.”
