Chip Kelly’s season still going downhill, and the biggest problem is familiar
Nick Saban failed in the NFL. So did Steve Spurrier. Chip Kelly might soon be lumped in that group too, fairly or not.
The Philadelphia Eagles were run off the field again, getting blasted 45-14 by the Detroit Lions to fall to 4-7. The Lions are usually the team that ruins the first Thanksgiving game with terrible football, but this year the Eagles were the punch line. Matthew Stafford looked like Dan Marino and Calvin Johnson looked like, well, Calvin Johnson. Stafford had five touchdowns, three to Johnson. Philadelphia looked entirely disinterested in figuring out a way to slow them down. Thursday’s debacle will lead to another round of analysis about whether Kelly will pick USC or LSU to be his job next season.
But this is worth mentioning too: Saban, Spurrier, Butch Davis, Kelly and plenty of other coaches with no background in college football had the same issue, and it’s not that their schemes were terrible or they didn’t understand football.
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Spurrier’s starting quarterbacks with the Washington Redskins were Patrick Ramsey, Tim Hasselbeck, Shane Matthews and Danny Wuerffel. Saban’s Miami Dolphins picked Daunte Culpepper over Drew Brees. Davis was choosing between Tim Couch and Kelly Holcomb.
You want some college-to-NFL success stories? How about Tom Coughlin and Pete Carroll. Coughlin had Eli Manning. Carroll had Russell Wilson.
Here’s the fact about Kelly, as the pitchforks come out and try to drive him back to college: He’s 24-19 as an NFL coach with two double-digit win seasons in three years, and he has never had a quarterback anyone would say is very good.
Michael Vick can’t play anymore. Kelly did turn Foles into an MVP candidate one season, long before he was getting benched for Case Keenum elsewhere. Sam Bradford has played exactly how he did with the St. Louis Rams, and that’s not a compliment. Mark Sanchez is nobody’s idea of a franchise quarterback.
People rip Kelly for the Bradford-Foles trade, and it didn’t make much sense when it happened. It hasn’t worked out, either. But it didn’t take Kelly being away from Oregon too long to learn this truth of the NFL: You can win with a poor quarterback, but it’s really hard. He knows because he won 10 games each of the last two years with below-average quarterbacks. He took a shot on Bradford, a former No. 1 overall pick. He was wrong. Then Bradford got hurt, as anyone should have predicted, and the Eagles’ season has gone downhill fast.
Bad quarterback play doesn’t excuse the Eagles’ dreadful defense, which is an absolute mess (Thursday’s plan was horrendous and the execution was even worse), or the offensive line that doesn’t protect well or open up anything in the running game. And the Eagles don’t look very motivated to play for Kelly lately, though it might just be that they are not very good this season. And yes, a lot of the blame for that falls on Kelly the general manager. He has had a really bad year.
Nobody knows exactly what Kelly wants to do after this season or what the Eagles ownership is thinking (Les Bowen of Philly.com summed these points up very well). People have been in a frenzy to chase Kelly back to college, mostly because the NFL and a lot of people who cover it hate any change and immediately reject any new ideas. Kelly is having a truly miserable season, but there wouldn’t be many coaches left if they got run out of town for one bad season out of every three. Maybe Kelly will want to leave after this season or the Eagles will give in to pressure and fire him, but it’s hard to argue he’s an NFL failure if you look at the totality of his first three seasons.
And, Kelly hasn’t had the one thing that everyone needs to survive in the NFL: a competent quarterback situation. He’s still 24-19 with Vick, Foles, Bradford and Sanchez. And the way things seem to be trending, we might never get the chance to see what Kelly would have done in the NFL with a real quarterback.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
