Chip Kelly's fearless coaching mind driving Eagles' roster overhaul ~ as fucking much as "our" gov./ schools/society try's 2 keep EVERYBODY inside the "box" & poop somebody cums OUT ??? & what a fucking breath of fresh air it IS ....Huh !!! ( & come on, isn't it just a lil fun watch~in the square heads scream ? ) ya know, the earth is flat & on & on &on Oops :o
Bill O’Brien can’t pinpoint the exact moment, but it was sometime in the early spring of 1994, when New Hampshire’s football coaches visited their Brown equivalents on the Providence campus. It could have come, huffing and puffing, between possessions of pickup hoops at the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center. Maybe it was over greasy slices of pizza and pitchers of cheap beer. Or perhaps it was when the two teams’ grunt-level coaches took turns watching film and dissecting plays on a chalkboard. Whenever it was, Chip Kelly made a distinct impression on O’Brien way back then, when both men—O’Brien was the inside linebackers coach at Brown, Kelly oversaw the running backs at UNH—were so far away from the NFL lights that they couldn’t even dream of them yet.
“The first time you meet him, you know he’s smart,” says O’Brien, now entering his second year as the Texans’ coach. “He’s a quick thinker. He changes gears so fast: He can be talking about one thing and then change to something else in a beat. But he’s also a real good listener. And it doesn’t take long to realize he thinks differently. You’re like, Who is this guy?”
Many people are asking the same question about the Eagles’ third-year coach right about now. Either Kelly is a forward-thinking genius, in the mold of Bill Walsh, Jimmy Johnson and Bill Belichick—or he’s just another coach who never should have left the college ranks. Whichever it is, the word bold doesn’t begin to define the transformation that Kelly has put his team through this off-season, his second since jumping from Oregon to the NFL.
It was a staggeringly free-wheeling display for a guy with just two years of NFL experience and who has yet to win a postseason game. Even owner Jeffrey Lurie admits that there have been times when he’s wanted to make sure that Kelly knew what he was doing. “We had long talks about it,” he says. “These are usually decisions with weeks and weeks leading up to [them]. He’s bright. He’s hardworking. He’s obsessed with football. It doesn’t matter to him, the public perception of a trade. He’s all about making us better—and that’s what you want in a coach.”
Reaction around the league has been more of the wait-and-see variety. “Certainly he has his strategy and the way he wants to build his team,” says Stephen Jones, executive vice president of the Cowboys. “You’ve got to respect him for that. He seems very convicted in how he wants to do his roster.”
At the very least there is universal praise for the courage of those convictions. “I know that Chip’s doing it his way,” O’Brien says. “He knows what type of team he wants, and he knows in his mind how he’s going to get to that point. That’s what I respect.”
The move from Foles to Bradford was a bit puzzling because of Bradford’s injury history, but there’s little doubt that Kelly’s scheme works best with an athletic quarterback who can threaten a defense with his running ability. Compared even with a guy coming off two ACL surgeries, Foles is extremely slow. (He ran an unimpressive 5.14 40 entering the NFL.) Bradford, on the other hand, is known for his athleticism and quick release, and he operated a college offense at Oklahoma that shared traits with Kelly’s.
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Johnson, despite having never coached in the NFL before jumping from Miami to the Cowboys in 1989, moved swiftly to implement a small and fast defense when the rest of the NFL still thought bigger and stronger was the way to go. That approach led to two Lombardi Trophies, and another for successor Barry Switzer with a team built upon the players Johnson picked.
“Jimmy realized that you could replace a Herschel with a near-Herschel and still be pretty good,” former Cowboys personnel exec Gil Brandt says of the old Dallas coach. “Chip realizes the same thing, and he has an eye on the cap. This guy didn’t come in on the turnip truck. He was talking to NFL people, picking their brains, getting ready for this for a long time. He’s a lot more tuned in to personnel than people know.”
Others, though, believed.
Four years later, in 2011, Kelly was heading to his hometown of Manchester, N.H., when he rang up his old hoops and beer buddy, O’Brien, who was then the Patriots’ offensive coordinator. “Can I stop in and b.s. with you?” he asked. Soon he was in a Patriots’ meeting room with O’Brien and offensive assistant George Godsey, talking football for an entire day. “It was cool,” says O’Brien. “Just three football minds trading ideas. He was averaging 50 points at Oregon [Kelly was the Ducks’ head coach by this point] so we wanted to figure out what he was doing. He’s not going to give you exactly what they’re doing, but he gives you the concept.”
Two more visits to Foxborough followed, and eventually Belichick joined the discussions. That’s when Kelly explained that he was running his Oregon offense with just a series of one-word play calls. The Patriots were incredulous, but Kelly put them at ease. Players can memorize elaborate song lyrics and movie lines, he explained; why should a football play be any different?
“It was very interesting to understand what he was doing,” Belichick said in 2012. “Certainly I’ve learned a lot from talking to Chip about his experiences.”
Chip, too, has made a career of questioning established practices. At New Hampshire he began wrapping multiple options (backside slant, bubble screen, read-option) into single prepackaged plays. Kelly’s theory: With different avenues predicated on defensive alignment in every play, the defense should always be wrong.
It was around this time that he also began fighting the practice of huddling after every play, which drove defensive coordinators crazy in practice. “We would have great discussions to the point of arguments,” says his UNH coach, Sean McDonnell. “I said, ‘Chip, we’ve got to slow down. We’re getting killed on defense.’ He would say, ‘We’re going to score 60 points; trust me.’ As usual, he was right.”
It’s impossible to say whether Kelly’s method will thrive long-term in the NFL, but he’s made all the right moves at every level of his career while naysayers shook their heads and said, That’s not the way things are done. He sets his own course and, so far, it’s been one that everyone else ends up following.
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