The players seem to like Kelly, and to some degree may see his life as not that different from their own. He has never been married and is unburdened by responsibilities other than coaching their team. When I asked LaMichael James, a running back and a leading Heisman Trophy candidate, if he ever talked to Kelly about anything other than football, he said: “Sometimes, but he’s more or less all about football. Everybody on the team is all about football. I think that’s why everyone gets along with him so well.” James did have one complaint, having to do with the music: “The other day he had like ‘Hakuna Matata’ or some [expletive] from ‘The Lion King’ playing, which I don’t think nobody wants to hear. He needs to bump some Lil Wayne on there.”

Bellotti, who hired Kelly in 2007, anointed him as his successor even before stepping up to athletic director in 2009. (Bellotti is now a college-football analyst for ESPN.) Bellotti had installed the spread offense with a previous offensive coordinator. “When we started this offense, we could figure out after the game what we should have done,” Bellotti said. “We progressed to the point where we could figure it out during the game. When I interviewed Chip, I realized he was the guy who would know, going in to the game, what we should do. He took it to the level where we were not the ones having to make adjustments; we were dictating to other teams.”

College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years, but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass. They are aerial circuses, like Texas Tech under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from 2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast, Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts. The run plays — because receivers are not spread all over the field at the end of a play — allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field where he finished.

Bellotti never got to feel that he knew Kelly on a level beyond football. “I don’t know if I’d say anyone on staff truly knows him. He’s probably closer to the players than his fellow coaches. He’s still got a sort of East Coast posse; that’s where his friends are.”

Sean McDonnell, the head coach at the University of New Hampshire, is part of Kelly’s inner circle. In Kelly’s first season as head coach, Oregon had a 10-2 regular season and played in the Rose Bowl, where it lost to Ohio State. McDonnell was among about 25 of Kelly’s friends from back East who flew to Pasadena for the game.“Chipper’s just a homegrown Manchester kid,” he told me, using the name that Kelly is known by in New Hampshire. “Everybody in the state knows who Chipper is. He was a tremendous hockey player. A basketball player. A great high-school quarterback. The people he knows best are back here.”

One of the least attractive aspects of college sports is its naked careerism. It is full of coaches who preach character, commitment and team loyalty but can’t wait to get the hell out of town and move on to the next job and the bigger salary. McDonnell said Kelly turned down numerous offers to become an offensive coordinator or quarterbacks coach at major college programs. “The thing that held him back is that he had no ego invested in it,” McDonnell said. “He would have been happy staying here forever. Bellotti was the first guy who convinced Chipper that he’d really give him the autonomy to coach football the way he likes to coach it.”