Chip Kelly did a terrific job at Oregon, going 46-7 and taking that program from good to great. He came to the NFL and delivered consecutive 10-6 records. Even the most reasonable detractor has to see that he’s a good coach with some interesting ideas.

For some reason, Kelly drives some people nuts. I don’t mean disgruntled Eagles fans, but rather outsiders who don’t normally care about the team. Heath Evans likes taking potshots at Kelly and the Eagles. I think he does that because he was critical of Chip early on and simply isn’t smart enough to actually adjust his opinion.

Bart Scott hates Chip Kelly. Really hates Chip Kelly. Luckily Jimmy Bama got the comments for us from a radio show.

“I’m rooting for the Jets,” said Scott, “and not just because I played for the Jets, but because I love a good car crash. I love a good accident waiting to happen. You have one guy who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world. Trust me, I played for Brian Billick, so I’m used to being around guys that believe that they’re really smart, and Brian was. But come on now, are you kidding me? This guy needs to figure out what time to get a protein shake because obviously he’s giving the protein shakes at the wrong time, with his scientists and stuff that he has back there, because his teams aren’t ready to play in the first half.”

And

“He can’t win. You know why he can’t win? Because you can’t win and tell people that you devalue great players and get rid of them just because you want to. So I think there’s a little bit of karma coming back to him. Nelson Agholor hasn’t replaced Jeremy Maclin. Jeremy Maclin was a class act guy. You can’t just replace people like they’re things, you know what I mean? Like they’re toys that you’re tired of playing with because you want something new. So I hope that he loses. I hope he loses every game.

Ugh. As Jimmy pointed out, Kelly wanted Maclin back. Kelly wanted to pay him a boatload of money. KC just happened to pay more.

If you want to get on Kelly for cutting DeSean Jackson and trading Nick Foles and LeSean McCoy, that’s fair game. Kelly clearly wanted to move on from those players. Maclin does not fit that category.

It just seems that some people see Kelly to a bunch of weird extremes. They think he is a finesse coach that needs a mobile QB to run his offense. They think he chooses science over football. They think he is all about gimmicks and doesn’t understand real football.

Kelly’s offense is built on being physical.

“The inside zone is our “go to work” play. It has become our signature play. We want to get off the ball and be a physical, downhill-running football team. This is not a finesse play. We teach our offensive linemen a block we call the “bust block”. The idea is to bust their sternums up against their spines on every play. We want to come off the ball, create a double-team, knock the crap out of the defender, and deposit him in the linebacker’s lap.”

That sounds like something Buddy Ryan would say. That’s physical football 101. But somehow Kelly is still seen as Mr. Finesse, Mr. Gimmick.

You would think Kelly would want a 1-gap, attacking defense. Nope. He comes in and preaches the need for size and strength. Kelly wanted a 2-gap, 3-4 base defense. No finesse whatsoever.

Kelly does embrace technology. These days, a lot of coaches are doing that. He gets a lot of publicity for it, but don’t think the Eagles are the only team to give smoothies to their players and mix science with football. Every NFL sideline now has tablets for the coaches/players to check out what the other team is doing. Technology is slowly taking over our lives. How is football supposed to be different?

I understand Kelly isn’t going to appeal to everyone. No coach does.

The funny thing about Kelly is that while he’s an outsider to the league who has come in and changed things, I don’t see the arrogance with him that guys like Steve Spurrier and Jimmy Johnson had. Spurrier turned out to be a major failure. Johnson backed up any of his talk with all-time great results. Both came to the NFL with the attitude that the league needed change.

Kelly came to the NFL and hired NFL coordinators. His offense is a mixture of the Oregon playbook and some West Coast Offense stuff. His defense is as conventional as it gets. Rather than thumbing his nose at the league, Kelly’s attitude was to take his ideas and combine them with those of NFL coaches. The hope was to get the best of both worlds.

Chip is arrogant in the sense that many successful people are…he believes in himself and his ideas. But I don’t get the perception of Kelly as this jerk sitting on top of Ego Mountain looking down at the rest of the football world and laughing because they are too stupid to copy all of his ideas.

Kelly does nothing but praise other coaches, teams and players. In college, he traveled to different teams every summer so he could learn new schemes and pick up ideas from other coaching staffs. Does that sound like a guy who is sure he’s got all the answers?

Right now Kelly could use some answers. His team is struggling in a major way and the detractors are out in full force. Kelly is fair game. He is a big name coach (making big money) and does things his way. That opens him up for criticism.

I guess I just don’t get the over the top hatred for Kelly. Ray Rhodes was as NFL as it gets and led the Eagles to a 3-13 season in 1998. Anyone who thinks this team is bad should go watch some of those games. After the first three weeks, the Eagles had been outscored 72-15. That team had no hope. I watched Bobby Hoying throw to Irving Fryar (age 36), Jeff Graham (age 29) and Freddie Solomon (4 career TD catches).

The current Eagles do have hope. Sam Bradford, Jordan Matthews, Nelson Agholor and Josh Huff must play better, but they are infinitely more talented than the 1998 bunch.

Kelly can shut up Bart Scott and the doubters if he can get this team to win on Sunday and start turning the season around. If that doesn’t happen, More guys will come out of the woodwork, telling us how they knew Kelly was a fraud.

Because, you know, he’s too finesse and gimmicky.

*****

PERSONAL NOTE

You may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet recently. The Eagles have played 2 games and I haven’t written a DGR for either of them.

My mom spent some time in the hospital in the past week or so and that threw my schedule out of whack. The good news is that she’s back home.

Hopefully I can get back on schedule with my writing. That just had to take a backseat for a little bit. I can’t tell you how miserable Sunday was. I desperately needed the Eagles to cheer me up. Ugh. Not even close. As bad as the game was, it was still the highlight of the day.

Sometimes we need life to help put sports in perspective. But as the guys in Spinal Tap will tell you…

Luckily mom got better during the week and I can go back to my completely unhealthy obsession with 53 guys that dress in tight pants and run around hitting each other for 3 hours on Sunday.

And who knows…maybe the Eagles will actually win. I’m probably being greedy. At this point, I’ll just be happy to see a 1st down before halftime.

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