No matter how poorly Chip Kelly was performing, no matter what you thought of his personnel decisions or management style or the direction in which the Philadelphia Eagles were trending, firing a coach on a Tuesday night with one game left in the season is shocking. It speaks to a deep personal divide between team and individual. It is, at its core, very personal.
It's a bold move by Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, and such a decision is, as several people who know him put it, "totally out of character." To do so less than a year after casting general manager Howie Roseman in a different role and handing full autonomy over the organization to Kelly makes the reversal all the more stunning. Had Kelly been fired next Tuesday, I would have been surprised. For it to occur in this fashion, at this time, was such a departure for this organization I had to read the official statement on the team's website three times before I totally believed it was not a hoax of some sort.
Sure, the team was off the rails. And yes, Kelly the wannabe personnel guy had botched this year about as bad as he possibly could, and he had major issues within the locker room and all over the building, for that matter. But he is not a buffoon. He had won 10 games each of his previous two seasons. He had, by last December, shown Lurie sufficient acumen that he was deemed the man worthy of overhauling the entire organizational paradigm, of altering the entire flow chart of the Eagles, and of bestowing Bill Belichick-ian levels of power upon. He was, in Lurie's own estimation, the man to take the franchise "from good to great," and now, just 15 games later, he is no longer wanted in the team facility.
There were monumental failures since then, without a doubt. After already alienating many around him, and discarding DeSean Jackson and Evan Mathis and others, and then shipping out LeSean McCoy and trading for and empowering Sam Bradford and whiffing on his reshaping of the offensive line and losing Jeremy Maclin and paying Byron Maxwell like a top-five corner ... well, I could go on and on. And his hubris was getting old. And his big brother tendencies of monitoring everything everybody was doing had long worn people out -- even some of the very coaches he initially brought in with him.
But still. He didn't even finish his third season. That's truly bizarre, even in a league where nothing should really surprise us anymore and where coaches are getting fired in damn near September. I never pegged this for more than a three-year dalliance from the get-go, but for it to end in a terse statement in late December, well, even I wasn't skeptical enough to have predicted that.
So what else went wrong? Well, Kelly was losing people throughout the building, sources said, even outside of football operations. His autocratic tendencies got the best of him. His allies were few and far between. The idea that DeMarco Murray somehow led this charge is preposterous, I'm told, but in fact Lurie had begun having serious reservations a few weeks ago, when he began reaching out to confidants about how to proceed and began doing research on the pool of potential candidates elsewhere. He started to doubt whether Kelly The Innovative Coach was quite smart enough to overcome Kelly The Personnel Demagogue. Everything having to be Kelly's way -- moving events around to fit his schedule, things having to accommodate him -- grew troublesome.
Lurie didn't go into his meeting with Kelly with the intention of firing him, I'm told. More, it was to take his temperature and continue to feel him out and gather information that would lead to his ultimate decision on what to do with his organization in 2016. Obviously, things went sideways and what Kelly had to say didn't mesh with the owner's vision, and Lurie became convinced that for as radical as a Week 17 firing might be perceived, it was time to do it. The fact that Kelly didn't seem inclined to scratch and claw to remain in his perch, sources said, did him no favors as well.
Thus, the divorce. And one that is anything but amicable, despite whatever parties will say publicly. It's a bit ironic that within hours of the Jaguars giving a public statement affirming that Gus Bradley will indeed return for 2016, with Bradley a cumulative 12-35 (.255 winning percentage while playing in the woeful AFC South) since arriving, Lurie announced Kelly was fired. Bradley would have been the Eagles hire had Kelly not agreed to come east -- after a second pursuit -- with permission granted to bring in his own personnel man (Tom Gamble, who lasted two years). And now Kelly, with a 26-21 record, one playoff appearance and two 10-win seasons, has been ousted. The other coaches the Eagles had most recently interviewed were Ken Whisenhunt (fired earlier this season) and Brian Billick, who I don't believe has interviewed for a job since.
Kelly's entire system, it seems, has failed. Former coordinator Bill Lazor took it to Miami, where it did not work and Lazor, too, was an in-season casualty about a month before Kelly. The quarterback who Kelly somehow found success with in 2013 -- the one season where this offense really did appear possibly revolutionary -- Nick Foles, lost his job midseason to Case Keenum despite the Rams trading Bradford for him and rewarding him with a foolish though fairly lucrative contract extension. (I've said before and will say it again, the crowning achievement of Kelly's pro coaching to this point is without a doubt culling a 27-touchdown, two-interception season out of Foles in his first season at the helm).
Perhaps the league has caught up to him, as Kelly's offense has been middling at best the past two seasons. His hyperspeed approach did leave his defense hanging and his teams did seem to fade in the final quarter of the year. Maybe his approach really is best catered to kids playing 11 games a year rather than pros playing 16. Or maybe he just lacked anything close to sufficient talent to run it (even though he was now hand-picking it, oddly enough).
I tend to think he will not achieve close to the level of success he deems worthy of him until or unless he returns to the college game. And if he were to sit out nine months, he'd have every crooked booster in America beating down the door of his agent, David Dunn. He'd be the man. Instead he's saying he's all about this NFL thing, which might just end up being his ego getting the best of him again. The 10-win seasons and all the attention he brings with him will have other owners flirting, though they'd be best to try to get Lurie to speak candidly to them first before they wave contracts Kelly's way.
I'd venture to say that Chip Kelly needs Marcus Mariota exponentially more than Mariota needs his college coach, and anyone turning over the building to him had best understand exactly what they are getting into. Kelly is going to have a tough time winning over any pro locker room. He'd have to be willing to first truly admit his varied mistakes in Philly and then be willing to actually make significant changes to avoid repeating them. The idea that he will be the next Belichick, who builds a dynasty when given a second chance, may not be wrong, but if it happens it won't be without considerable self-evaluation.
I have no doubt that someone like Stephen Ross in Miami, perpetually trying to find some big fish to take his money to coach his team, will be enamored, and the idea of Kelly "fixing" Ryan Tannehill will certainly be yapped about in that front office. Browns owner Jimmy Haslam tried like hell to land Kelly three years ago. You could make a case for the Colts or 49ers, too, I suppose. But even without total personnel control -- and an owner would have to be wacky to hand that to him now -- you are still making a bargain that all of Kelly's other control -- practice schedules, sports science, player monitoring, analytics, weeding out big personalities from the locker room, prizing his own schemes but always criticizing "execution" -- actually works as well.
Certainly, he has displayed enough to warrant a second chance. And in a year with so few A-list coaching candidates, and with the Eagles already the third team on an interim coach and Black Monday sure to be ugly next week, there will be some opportunity. Ultimately, however, some approaches just work best in college, and without significant self-scouting and a willingness to reinvent himself at least to some degree, Kelly might find that out again on some December night a few years from now.
