Chip Kelly’s Downfall Is The NFL’s Downfall
Chip Kelly is probably gonna get fired or run screaming out of Philly sometime in the next month, perhaps to the relative stability (hahahahaha) of college football, where he will be free to sign all the terrible quarterbacks and running backs he could ever possibly want to fit his offensive scheme—a scheme perfectly suited for running up the score on non-conference Christian military academies. Or perhaps he’ll end up trading himself to the Titans and fulfill his wet hot fantasy of getting Marcus Mariota hurt.
Either way, Kelly will leave the Eagles with a winning record, regardless if they lose every game left on their schedule (don’t put it past them). But even so, his tenure will be noted as a failure. Most of that is on Chip, of course. It’s strange that the man in charge of such a fun offense seems to have no idea which players would be best suited to play IN that offense. Given full control over personnel, he basically traded one expensive running back for another and then grabbed every injured linebacker and QB he could get his hands on, settling on a completely mystifying collection of players that seemingly had no business working together. Also, he ended Taco Tuesday. You don’t just end Taco Tuesday like that. That’s all on Chip. He fucked up and his players hate him for it.
But as much as I like to joke about firing coaches, the truth is that the NFL is worse off with Chip Kelly failing. Chip did a lot of stupid shit, but he was also a guy who was also genuinely interested in bringing new strategies and training techniques (urine monitoring!) to football. And he had fun sideline placards! I still remember that first game the Kelly Eagles played against Washington, in which Mike Shanahan sat there completely taken off guard by the fact that the Eagles were running plays quickly. HEY THEY CAN’T DO THAT! You can go back and find any number of instant OMG CHIP IS REVOLUTIONIZING THE GAME! takes in the wake of that win. And I was probably among the converted because it’s fun watching teams score lots of points and because it’s genuinely more fun to see innovative football people succeed than it is to see them fail.
But fail they do. For as long as I’ve watched football, I’ve seen big swinging dick gurus like Steve Spurrier walk into the league and then get laughed out of the joint. Any real attempt to revolutionize the game of football tends to get crushed by a league that PRIDES itself on laughing in the face of new ideas. Again, most of these guys have themselves to blame for thinking far too highly of their own strategic acumen, but it would be nice if one of them finally DID revolutionize what has become—at times—a highly stultifying sport. You shouldn’t be pleased that Chip is going down in flames. You shouldn’t want an NFL where even Bill Belichick gets shit for taking the occasional risk.
Because every time someone like Kelly washes out, that only sends a message to everyone else that change is bad and can never work. Better for the average pud coach to fail quietly than to fail as spectacularly as Kelly has in this third season. We’re as far away as we’ve ever been from coaches never punting, and always going for two, and doing all kinds of newfangled shit that ought to be welcome in the sport. And that’s not good. All I want is a mad scientist coach who does NOT turn out to be an egomaniacal fraud who can’t stay around long enough to make his concepts work. That’s not too much to ask.
Seahawks at Vikings: We usually dump on things here at Deadspin because we are a collection of angry BUTTHURT loners, and Lord knows I’ve goofed on Peter King over the years. But I have to say it… Peter King’s vanity site is pretty good! For one thing, it’s divorced from SI.com, which remains unreadable thanks to Richard Deitsch, Thayer Evans and a hilariously incompetent layout, as evidenced here…
King’s site layout isn’t monkey-fucked the way the mothership is. Plus, Robert Klemko and Jenny Vrentas and a handful of other people at the site are fun to read, which is a HUGE accomplishment given that the average football column consists of Woody Paige going DURRRR I LIKE HOW HUNGRY BROCK OSWEILER IS DURRRRRR. They also get good first-person essays from active and former players, AND I still get to hate-read Peter every week…
j. Beernerdness: Now this was an odd one, but very interesting. I sampled Citrus Ninja Exchange by Westbrook Brewing Company (Mount Pleasant, S.C.) on the Thanksgiving holiday and thought it was really, really good.
Ninjas AND citrus? In one beer? Oh, Peter. Oh, I know I can always count on YOU to entertain me.
Packers at Lions: Every team on Thursday Night Football gets some phony-ass “local” to rep them in the promo spot, like the Cincy vendor selling butthole chili to unsuspecting tourists. Anyway, for the Packers/Lions promo, Detroit is repped by a headless child jumping on a trampoline. They couldn’t even give the Lions an adult fan with a job. They had to use an unsuspecting little boy who is mere months away from realizing that his organization is a rotting shithole. It’s not fair. They should have found a Kid Rock tribute band or something.
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