

PHILADELPHIA – Even if Chip Kelly never wins a game and the Philadelphia Eagles dump his visor and multipage practice plans into the Delaware River, he will have been good for the NFL. For in two months the Eagles' new coach has done something hundreds of his predecessors in professional football have failed to do.



He has made practice interesting.

He has done this without turning the time-held routine of grunting and helmet clacking into some spasmodic new-age movement. His football players are still football players. They still run football plays. But what the Eagles are doing in their OTAs and minicamps is like nothing you will find on any other NFL practice field.

It starts with a TV camera clutched in the hands of a coaching assistant who stands on the field during warm-ups filming the running backs as they take handoffs and catch passes. Mind you he is not filming them as they run full speed in a team drill, but rather he does this in a session with only the quarterback and the running backs as they move at a pace barely quicker than a walk.

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Then there are the men with the nets on their backs. They stand in a row just behind the defensive linemen in certain scrimmages wearing a contraption of shoulder pads and mesh that give them the look of giant flyswatters or fairy wings. The wings sit high above the men's head in what Kelly says is a simulation of a pass-rusher's upraised hands.

The coaching assistants who wear the fairy wings stand with strained expressions that seem to say they don't like wearing such a device and certainly don't like doing so without helmets as they stand about 10 yards from Michael Vick as he winds up to throw.

But an Eagles practice is a living thing, and the men lined up before Vick in their fairy wings are never standing in the fire for long. Music pumps through huge speakers which boom at levels that might trigger small seismic events. Players juggle soccer balls on one corner of the field while all five of the team's quarterbacks line up in another and fling passes all at once to a group of receivers who somehow decipher the chaos.

At times, a siren wails over the speakers for seemingly no reason. But in a Chip Kelly practice everything has a reason. The players run, bounding from drill to drill and station to station as a man's computer-generated voice soothingly calls out each practice segment and its purpose.

"Period 16. Teach."

Kelly is a New England man who talks fast in a crabapple staccato and moves as quickly through his day, both welcomes and repels inquiries about his practices. He will explain in detail the idea behind the fly swatters on the shoulder pads in great detail ("it's the exact height of a 6-foot-4 defensive lineman with his hands up") but bristles at suggestions he is reinventing the game.

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