COLUMBUS, Ohio - Back in December of 2009, as Ohio State was preparing to play Oregon and its first-year coach in the Rose Bowl, Jon Gruden stood in the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel and talked about Chip Kelly like he was a genius.

"It's a totally different way of attacking, a totally different philosophical offensive style than I've ever seen," said Gruden, a friend of Kelly's who would call that Ohio State Rose Bowl win on radio. "The strange thing about Oregon is they don't huddle. I don't know where the pitch guy is coming from – one time he came from under the Astroturf and showed up, one time there's an unbalanced line – and you don't know what uniform they're going to wear either. I'm enamored with it."

At that point, Kelly's offense was a lot like the Oregon uniforms, more about style than substance. The Buckeyes beat Kelly's Ducks as Oregon finished his first season as head coach 10-3.

Three years later, with Oregon playing in three more BCS games and going 36-4 in those seasons while staying in the heart of the national title picture, Kelly's offense hasn't changed. But it isn't flash anymore. It's not just style.

It's substance.

I'll leave the NFL expertise to our Plain Dealer Browns writers Mary Kay Cabot and Tom Reed and our esteemed columnists. But if you could take one college football coach to succeed in the NFL right now – Nick Saban, Brian Kelly, Urban Meyer – I'd take Chip Kelly.

When Gruden was fired by Tampa Bay, he studied football with Kelly. A couple years later, when Meyer was on his yearlong break between coaching Florida and Ohio State, he studied Oregon's offense. Bill Belichick adapted part of Kelly's plan for the Patriots this season.

Some of the best coaches in football are checking out Chip Kelly. The only thing better than learning from him is hiring him, which is why I think Kelly to the Browns would be a great move for Cleveland.

Other coaches at the college level win by capitalizing on tradition or recruiting better players or over-signing or doing all kinds of things that elite programs can do in college. That often doesn't translate to the level playing field of the NFL.

That wasn't Oregon. You know how many Oregon offensive players were drafted in 2010, 2011 and 2012 off Kelly's high-scoring offenses? Four. A third-round tight end, a sixth-round guard, a seventh-round tight end and second-round running back LaMichael James. You can take that as saying that means Kelly won't fit in the NFL. I'll take it as imagining what he'll do when he gets NFL players to work with.

Kelly wasn't winning with the best players. He was winning with the best plan.

Innovation translates. Smart translates. Kelly translates.

Much of what Kelly did at Oregon was tempo as much as scheme. He's not going to come to the NFL and just throw a zone-read scheme out there every play. Not in a league where super-athletic defensive linemen and linebackers are begging for chances to get hits on million-dollar franchise quarterbacks.

But tempo translates. That's what intrigued Meyer and Belichick.

Any coach is going to want his own type of quarterback, but Kelly will be able to make it work with any number of quarterbacks. And turning down a coach like this because he might not fit with a couple of middling young offensive players makes no sense.

Hire the coach. He'll make whatever players he gets that much better.

People like to talk about the college coaches who failed in the NFL, but you also might notice that two former Pac-12 coaches – Stanford's Jim Harbaugh and USC's Pete Carroll - are having a pretty good time of it in the NFL right now.

While it's not a perfect comparison, because Bill Walsh had experience as an NFL assistant, this could be like Walsh moving from the head coach at Stanford to the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and seeing his West Coast Offense change the game.

There aren't a whole lot of ways to play this game in a new way. Not many guys come along who make their own path. Kelly made his, because, as you might remember, Oregon wasn't a yearly national title contender before him. And he wasn't handed prototypical dropback passers to work with.

So he found his own way. He'll find a way in the NFL, too. Wouldn't it be something if he found it in Cleveland?