Chip Kelly is always blunt, and that continued when he was asked how the Eagles’ 2014 draft went.

“I honestly have no idea,” he said. “Everybody says (they did well). They do it in college after signing day. ‘We had a great signing day.’ After the draft, ‘We got everybody we wanted and had a great draft.' No one knows. Three or four years down the road, we’re going to be, ‘Hey, that guy turned out to be a good player.' There’s going to be somebody that surprises everybody, us included. ‘I didn’t know that guy was going to be that good.’

“It’s an inexact science, and if someone thinks they have a formula or metric that can get you there, I haven’t seen it yet. But I feel comfortable with the direction we’re going and the guys we’ve brought in here. I’m not prediction guy. I don’t think anybody can.”

All seven picks the Eagles made came from BCS conference schools, including two from Kelly’s former home, Oregon. Asked if he prefers players from major conferences, Kelly said it was simply how the Eagles’ board lined up, but there are advantages to big-school kids.

“There is something to it, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule,” he said. “It’s not like we say, ‘We’re not going to look at a guy from a small school.’ When you end up selecting, you look at it, and that’s the way it is. I know from a standpoint, it’s easier to evaluate, because it’s apples to apples, not apples to oranges in terms of who he played against. How did he fare against this competition? You can tell.

“You’re not projecting a guy that’s playing against a lower level and saying, ‘What’s it going to be like when he makes a jump to the National Football League?’ It’s not by design, but I know, from an evaluation standpoint, it’s a lot easier to for us to evaluate that way.”