New Kentucky quarterback Devin Leary has Wildcats in awe. Hes so accurate -

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Liam Coen and Scott Woodward exchanged a dumbstruck glance. Kentucky’s offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach didn’t speak, maybe couldn’t, but there was no need. They could read each other’s just-blown minds. How did he do that? Then it happened again. Coen and Woodward communicated once more through raised eyebrows. Did he really just make that throw? Then it happened again. As they stood on the practice field last week watching their new starting quarterback launch laser-guided missiles, the gist of their bug-eyed telepathy was unambiguous: Devin Leary is special.

Ten days out from the Wildcats’ season opener against Ball State on Saturday, Leary, the coveted NC State transfer, had just put on a dazzling display of his arm talent. It was the kind of dialed-in practice performance that ignites the imagination of an entire team about what they might be able to achieve. “He’s so accurate — not even on the short stuff, but down the field — that it’s truly incredible,” Woodward says.

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“Extremely accurate,” Coen says. “And not just one day, but really every day. He’s consistently making these throws. He’s hit multiple hole shots from the right hash to the field, about a yard from the sideline. He’s hit out-and-ups right on people’s heads. He’s made every throw you can ask a quarterback to make at this level.”

The “hole shot” is the holy grail for quarterbacks: attacking a Cover-2 defense with a pinpoint deep ball down the sideline, dropping it between a trailing corner and a lurking safety. Leary, who threw for 6,807 yards, 62 touchdowns and just 16 interceptions in 30 games at NC State, is a hole-shot specialist. His most memorable of such throws came in a win over Clemson two years ago, when Leary looked left, then threw right, and pinpointed a 27-yard touchdown (his fourth of the game) between defenders in the back corner of the end zone.

THE TD THAT GAVE NC STATE THE WIN OVER NO. 9 CLEMSON 🔥 pic.twitter.com/7kiAfcXicQ

— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 25, 2021

How do you replace Will Levis, the 33rd pick in this year’s NFL Draft and Kentucky’s best quarterback since Andre’ Woodson left town in 2008? You go get a guy who can make that throw. A guy who was a finalist for the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm award in 2021 and voted ACC Preseason Player of the Year in 2022. When you’re returning two freshman All-America wide receivers, Barion Brown and Dane Key, and a career 2,000-yard receiver in Tayvion Robinson, you’d better go get them an elite passer.

“It was huge,” Coen says. “That was my biggest evaluation part of the transfer quarterback options: Who can push it down the field? Who has an explosive arm? And he was the most obvious one that stood out.”

Wanting the best quarterback in the portal and getting him are two different things. So how did Kentucky land Leary, who could’ve gone anywhere that needed a QB? That was essentially a three-step process.

Step 1: Have a relationship and be first. In a twist of fate, Woodward had worked with Leary, a New Jersey native, years earlier at a satellite high school camp hosted by Florida at Wagner College in New York. Woodward was an assistant at UMass back then, and the 6-foot-1 Leary caught his eye. The Gators coaching staff largely ignored him in favor of a more prototypical-looking QB, 6-foot-5 Artur Sitkowski, who eventually signed with Rutgers, transferred to Illinois and became a student assistant after throwing more career interceptions than touchdowns. (Leary once threw 228 straight passes at NC State without a pick.)

“Florida was looking at these other guys, but Coach Woody was with me from the jump. The minute I started warming up, he came and asked where I was from and how I was doing and did I have any interest in UMass,” says Leary, who earned an offer that same day. “It was really cool, and even though I had no intention of going to UMass, the next thing you know, Coach Woody is recruiting me to Kentucky. When it all came full circle and I was in the transfer portal, he was still the same dude. He wasn’t trying to big-time me now that he’s in the SEC. We just picked right up where we left off.”

Woodward was the first college coach to contact Leary when he entered the portal Dec. 5. Woodward dropped everything and went to Raleigh, N.C., that same day.

“I was just hoping he remembered all the conversations we’d had in the past, and he did,” Woodward says. “He had a trainer in South Jersey I’m close with. I’m close with his high school coach. I’d stayed in touch with Devin over the years, maybe shot him a ‘good luck this season’ message from time to time. We had all these different connections and I kept pounding on him, and it finally paid off.”

Step 2: Testimonials. Leary and Levis already knew each other, having competed in some regional high school camps together and then reconnecting last summer at the airport on their way to the Manning Passing Academy, where they roomed together and shared their NFL dreams. Levis raved about his experience under Coen at Kentucky, which wasn’t a sales pitch at the time — but it became one. When Leary took his recruiting visit to Lexington on Dec. 13, Mark Stoops and the staff brought Levis along to a meal.

“And it was just really cool, the interactions he had with the coaches. It was very family-like,” Leary says. “It was not fake or trying to show off because I was there. It was very genuine, how they feel about Will and how he was talking to Coach Stoops and Coach Woody and Coach (Vince) Marrow. It was this really cool vibe that they loved him as a person and he respected them so much as coaches. He turned to me like, ‘This was my life every day when I was here. This is awesome. I love these coaches, man. They push us hard, but at the end of the day, I can sit down at this table and have real-life conversations with them.’ That really stood out to me.”

Levis wasn’t the only special guest for Leary’s visit. The first day he was in town, Key, who set a UK freshman record for touchdown receptions, got a frantic phone call from Woodward.

“He was freaking out,” Key remembers. “He said, ‘Are you in town? OK, I’ll see you at dinner. Your future quarterback will be there.’” The next day, Brown, who set UK freshman records for catches and receiving yards, got the same call. At separate dinners, they made the same plea to Leary: You’re the missing piece.

“Will was a playmaker, and you’re thinking, ‘Man, who’s going to get me the ball?” Key says. “But I know Devin is going to fill those shoes and make plays just like Will did. He’s special. Maybe our fourth practice, he threw me a ball — was almost sacked, stepped up in the pocket, threw it past the linebacker’s head where only I could reach it — that I didn’t think nobody could fit in there. But Devin Leary did. We saw that on his film, and that’s why we told him, ‘Listen, we need you, bro.’ ”

Step 3: Bring in the closer. Coen, who’d left Kentucky after Levis’ first season to become the Los Angeles Rams’ offensive coordinator, is back in Lexington. But his return was not announced until Jan. 12, almost a month after Leary’s recruiting visit. Coen didn’t want the news to be a distraction as he finished out the NFL season. Helpfully, however, he signed the contract with UK on Dec. 12, the day before Leary visited campus.

So at 5 a.m. in L.A., Coen logged onto a Zoom call to seal the deal.

“That’s how much it meant to us to get him, to show him what we could do with him,” Coen says. “That was one of the most important decisions we needed to make as a staff. We wanted to get one of the best quarterbacks in the country, and we feel like we did. It was a real selling point for me taking this job. I already wanted to come back to Kentucky, but I wanted to coach him.”

That feeling was mutual. Levis had been a career backup at Penn State before totaling 3,200 yards and 33 touchdowns in leading Kentucky to 10 wins in his only season under Coen. He told Leary, “There is no better coach to play for.” Leary has NFL aspirations, and Coen is a disciple of Rams coach Sean McVay, whose innovative offense has proliferated across the league.

“On that Zoom call during my visit, it was really, really cool because (Coen) was showing me clips of Matt Stafford and Jared Goff in the NFL, three or four clips of them, and then the next four clips were Will Levis running the same stuff,” Leary says. “Same concepts, same terminology, same reads, same formations and protections. What I wanted out of the portal was to find the right fit, the right coaches, to develop into the best possible quarterback I can for the next level. So being able to see it right in front of my eyes — there’s Matt Stafford running it, then there’s Will Levis running it — it kind of clicked: I want to play for this guy.”

The belief that Coen’s offense is preparing him for the NFL has only strengthened since Leary arrived on campus and started learning the system. This summer, he was watching the Netflix documentary series “Quarterback,” which follows Vikings QB Kirk Cousins and two others, and Leary realized he was watching the same plays and hearing the same terminology that Kentucky uses every day. Minnesota coach Kevin O’Connell is another branch of the McVay tree.

“I’m hearing Cousins in the huddle, and in my mind I can rattle off the exact same play, formation, motion, protection,” says Leary, whose top target at NC State, Thayer Thomas, was in camp with the Vikings this preseason. “I can literally call him and ask how he runs a certain concept or a certain route because we don’t just do the same things, we call it the same things. I can take a clip from him and send it to our receivers and say, ‘Hey, look at how (Minnesota All-Pro) Justin Jefferson set up this route in this concept that we have in our offense.’ That’s all you can ask for as a quarterback.”

Leary completed 66 percent of his passes for 3,433 yards, 35 touchdowns and just five interceptions in 2021, when he broke Philip Rivers’ single-season NC State record for TD passes. The expectation was that he’d play one more year and be off to the NFL Draft. He had the Wolfpack 5-1 with a top-15 ranking last October when a Florida State defender put a helmet in Leary’s chest and tore the pectoral muscle on his right (throwing) side. Season over. Surgery required. He wouldn’t be healed in time to throw at the combine or a pro day, so the draft was out.

A broken leg in 2020 and the pec injury in 2022, despite 46 touchdown passes in between, suddenly saddled Leary with the dreaded “injury-prone” label. Now he’s going to attempt to shed that by staying healthy and playing well for an entire season in the … SEC. Gulp.

“If you want to be the best, you gotta beat the best, and he wants to prove that he’s durable and that those two injuries don’t define his career,” says Leary’s father, Glen. “He’s not injury-prone. I would define injury-prone as tearing ligaments in your arms and your knees. His were bizarre, freak things. He was sliding and broke his leg. Kid puts his helmet in his chest right as he’s releasing the ball, so his body is going backward while his arm is going backward. Freak things. He wants to prove he’s built to last and that he still has it, can still throw it as good as he ever did.”

Devin Leary grew up using his left arm until he realized how well he could throw the ball with his right one.

Leary has been throwing it pretty darn good for a very long time. But first, he had to figure out which arm to use. His dad, a former Division III offensive lineman and pitcher, badly wanted Devin to be a lefty. So he learned to do everything left-handed — until one day, he picked up his older brother’s right-handed baseball glove and realized he could zip it throwing righty. He still does everything else as a southpaw and has confined all of his tattoos to a sleeve of ink on his left arm, but once he realized there was a cannon in that right arm, it was game on.

“When he was like 5 or 6 in baseball, he’d field a ground ball and throw it as hard as he possibly could to first base, and the first baseman would duck,” Glen Leary says. “Every time.” Devin has a tattoo of an angel on his shoulder in honor of his late grandfather who used to come to those baseball games, and “right before I would throw it to first, he would start laughing because he knew the kid was about to duck.”

By eighth grade, when Leary tossed 48 touchdown passes in 10 youth league games, high school coaches were showing up to recruit him. He left New Jersey as the state’s all-time leader in passing yards (9,672) and touchdowns (117). If he were three inches taller and had no injury concerns, he would already be in the NFL.

And yet, “he’s very confident in his abilities, but he’s the least-cocky guy there is,” his mother, Lorie, says. “He’s not show-offish. We would never let him be. It’s a quiet confidence.”

That’s one way Leary and Levis differ. They’re certainly built differently — Levis is a chiseled, 6-4, 230-pound tank — but also wired differently. Levis was all gas, no brakes, an amped-up, full-throttle presence in the huddle and on the field.

“Will is a freak of nature,” Leary says, “but I’m not trying to live up to his hype. I need to create my own journey. I’m a little bit more laid-back, and not in a bad way or a good way. That’s just how I am, very calm. I’m not a super rah-rah guy. You can see how enthusiastic Will gets or on certain runs, when he breaks the pocket, that he’s very intense, very freakish, where I’m a little more chill, finesse, let the other guys do their thing. I want to sit back there and play so well it almost looks boring.”

Running back Demie Sumo-Karngbaye followed Leary from NC State to Kentucky this offseason and knows how valuable a steadying influence like that can be.

“That keeps us level-headed, which brings confidence to the team,” Sumo-Karngbaye says. “Our quarterback is calm, so we can be calm, even while we have that mentality of keeping our foot on the gas.”

When Leary launches one of his signature beauty bombs and connects in practice, when the entire offense and everyone watching on the sideline erupts in awestruck hoots and howls, there is no screaming and flexing. That was more Levis’ style.

“It’s that cool swagger,” Key says. “If he makes a play, he’s going to look over and nod his head and smile, make sure everybody knows he just did that but not make a big deal about it. He’s not gonna scream at you. He’s gonna wink. That’s Devin Leary right there: a wink.”

(Photos: Courtesy UK Athletics)

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