Back in the college game, Chip Kelly focused on winning at UCLA no matter the method

George Schroeder | USA TODAY

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LOS ANGELES – The follow-up stumped him, if only for a moment. Chip Kelly had just stepped off a makeshift television set and pronounced: “This is my favorite day.” Which led naturally to this: What’s your second favorite day?

Kelly thought for a moment, then laughed.

“Groundhog Day!”

After five seasons away, a college football revolutionary reemerged Wednesday. He wore Under Armour rather than Nike. The logo on the all-black ensemble was powder blue instead of fluorescent yellow or green. Otherwise, as Kelly navigated the gauntlet of interviews at Pac-12 media day, it could have been 2012.

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Now as then he cut a swath as the league’s biggest coaching star. And now as then, it was clearly not his favorite day. Since taking the UCLA job, Kelly has essentially hibernated when it comes to media requests; in the last few months, he routinely turned down almost all of them. Which only made his appearance – and makes his reappearance in college football – more fascinating.

A sampling from more than 30 interview stops: Hey Chip, Stanford’s David Shaw said you’ll make the game better in your return. What’s your reaction?

“David’s a good friend,” Kelly said. “That’s very nice of him to say.”

(Moments later, standing behind a television set as Shaw prepared for an interview, Kelly got his attention. Waving his iPhone, he said: “I’m going to call recruits in the background of your shot!”)

Someone asked what he’ll feel the first time he coaches from the other sidelines at Autzen Stadium.

“It’s gonna be an away game in October,” he said – it’s actually Nov. 3, but if you’re worried about his grasp of the calendar, don’t be. “I’m worried about Cincinnati. We start worrying about Game 9, we’re gonna have a lot of trouble in games 1-8.”

Same thing when it came to beating crosstown rival Southern California: “To look ahead at your schedule is wasted energy,” he said. And on it went from there, answers that approached flippant but were delivered with a disarming grin. What’s your biggest concern, and what’s the most exciting thing about returning?

“I have no concerns,” he said. “What excites me is just to get back on the field.”

All of which is only to say: Same old Chip. And it’s going to be exciting to see him back on the field. But in his college comeback, will he produce the same results?

Earlier Wednesday, noting Pac-12 positives, commissioner Larry Scott listed winning “the ‘Chip Kelly Derby,’” and he wasn’t wrong. Kelly essentially had his pick of several attractive open jobs last November, but chose UCLA. It’s cool for college football that he’s back. It’s even better for the Pac-12 that he’s back on the West Coast. Nick Aliotti, the Pac-12 Network analyst who was Kelly’s defensive coordinator at Oregon, said Kelly injects “energy and hope” into a league that needs both.

But it’s also a fascinating experiment.

Kelly rose to prominence at Oregon on the wings of a spread offense played at warp speed. They called it the “blur,” and it routinely discombobulated defenses en route to 46 wins in four seasons. One of the Ducks’ seven losses in his tenure came by three points in a BCS championship game.

Kelly went off to try to speed things up in the NFL. And although he was fired twice, by Philadelphia and San Francisco, some of the concepts he introduced have, uh, spread throughout the league – not that he’ll take credit.

“If you weren’t in the room with Amos Alonzo Stagg and Knute Rockne, you stole it from somebody,” he said.

But in college football, it’s hard to underestimate the impact Kelly had. There’s no real way to measure, unless it’s this:

“When I first got into the (Pac-12), there was only one spread team and only one with shiny helmets,” he said. “Now it seems like everybody’s a spread team and everybody has a shiny helmet.”

That’s true across college football. And it’s more than formation and uniform. Though not solely, much of that shift can be traced to to Kelly’s success at Oregon. That goes for offenses playing fast, too. But it makes for an interesting situation in his college football encore.

“The tempo thing is not as panicking to defenses anymore,” Aliotti said. “Everybody does it.”

Said Kelly: “Things become cutting-edge, and they all get a shelf life.”

Will the Bruins play at a supersonic pace? Will Kelly even run the spread? Aliotti joked that he might switch to two tight ends and power formations, and then got serious to note that Kelly spent his year out of coaching not just at ESPN, but studying concepts.

“I think he’s gonna do something else,” Aliotti said. “He’s been in the NFL. He’s got some new ideas, I’m sure. He probably watched a lot of people and knowing Chip, he went and visited people. … I think he’ll find another way. Whatever that is, I can’t answer.”

Kelly isn’t tipping his hand, other than to say he plans to fit his scheme to his personnel rather than the other way around. UCLA hasn’t determined a quarterback yet, and the bulk of the roster was recruited to fit a different offensive philosophy. But Kelly wouldn’t even commit to recruiting players who fit his version of the spread. In saying “we can never be too fast,” he meant foot speed, not tempo.

“I look at it as we’re just trying to figure it out,” Kelly said. “We’re not trying to revolutionize. It’s not a revolution, it’s an an evolution. It’s how do we put the players we have right now in position to make plays. And what’s that look like? I don’t care.

“We never did it (the offense) for the aesthetics. If that’s a bonus, that’s a bonus. … What it looks like, as long as we get from Point A to Point B I’m happy. Whether we run for a first down, throw for a first down, have someone pick someone up and carry them for a first down, I’ll take it.”

Midway through the day, Kelly finished a round of questions and was pointed toward a spot a dozen feet away, where more reporters waited.

“Didn’t we just do this?” he asked.

And then the same old Chip Kelly stepped in front of another set of television cameras for another set of the same old questions. But when it comes to his return to college football, we’ll have to see if we get the same old results.