Chip Kelly’s Greatest Challenge

Sooner or later, Chip Kelly is going to get another NFL head coaching job.

And it might sooner. Kelly is the odds-on favorite to land the San Francisco 49ers opening, and two other teams that Kelly has negotiated with in the past – Cleveland and Tampa Bay – are looking for coaches as well.

Considering the high demand, Kelly’s renowned football mind, and the back-to-back ten win seasons in Philadelphia, there’s no way Chip doesn’t land on his feet. If you’ve got half a clue, you get two chances to fail as an NFL head coach.

But only two. And Kelly was, despite his playoff appearance and promising start, a failure in Philadelphia. His team backslid in year three, and by the end of the season, no one in the Eagles organization could stand him. He got fired with prejudice.

It’d be too easy to say that Kelly got axed because he couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with people the right way. There were football concerns too.

Kelly’s offense, for one, exhausted his players. Offensive lineman hated it. The Eagles consistently wore down late in the year. And Kelly proved pretty thoroughly this year that he couldn’t evaluate talent – his work as the Eagles’ GM this season was abysmal.

But I have every confidence in the world that Kelly will solve the football part of what ailed his first stint as an NFL head coach. He’s too smart – football smart, at least – not to adapt.

And, that being said, most coaches who win ten games in their first two seasons don’t get fired after a subpar year three. But Kelly did, and he did because once he stopped winning games, no one saw much reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Nice guys might finish last, but arrogant guys get canned first. That’s a cold reality that Kelly has had to square up to.

Chip infuriated people in Philadelphia. The racism charges of last summer were a smokescreen, but the discontent was very real. Players, the front office, the media – even owner Jeffrey Lurie, in the end – couldn’t stand him.

And that’s a very real problem. In the NFL, if players don’t want to play for a coach, that coach doesn’t make it. It’s as simple as that.

So now Kelly is faced with an entirely different challenge: Fix not the football, but the personality. Is Kelly, a man who, up until a few weeks ago, had never failed or been fired in any major job, willing to change his sacredly held methods?

I have no idea. Everyone handles failure differently, and Kelly is getting his first taste of true failure right now.

Kelly had no trouble connecting with players at the University of Oregon. He was extremely well liked by most of his players, so it didn’t matter if the media, boosters, and administrators were much more fond of his success than his company.

The Ducks bought in to Chip and helped him create his kind of culture – and it was no surprise that Kelly brought in a number of his former players to try to help facilitate the growth of that culture in Philadelphia.

But it never happened. Maybe Kelly’s totalitarian rule just doesn’t work on professionals who don’t want to have their sleep monitored and their diets measured.

Chip has to figure that out in the coming weeks. Does he need to drastically change his style to fit the NFL game? Or was it just the veteran locker-room in Philadelphia that was so aggrieved by his style?

There were other, troubling stories. Kelly’s fiat against the Eagles’ traditional holiday party was trivial but grating, while the story one reporter shared after Kelly was fired about his multiple-block New York City tirade against the Philadelphia front office sounded just about right.

Kelly has never been all that interested in connecting with people below the level of his football intellect. Several in the aftermath of his firing charged him that he treated players like nothing more than numbers or commodities.

Kelly has to rebuild his NFL reputation. Despite all this, he’ll get his shot. The upside on Kelly is higher than that of every other unemployed coaching candidate combined.

But it seems like he has to change. He has to accept that his way didn’t work in Philadelphia, and it worked less and less the more power he amassed and the more people got to know him.

Kelly’s relationship with his team in 2015 seemed more adversarial than anything else. Can he get along with NFL players? Can he buy himself time and leeway by not being so condescending and dismissive of the media?

In essence – can Kelly push himself? The football part comes easily. The other stuff won’t. But if Kelly is going to be a great coach, he’s going to have to take on some of the more ugly allegations that dragged down his Eagles career.

For a long time, maybe five or more years, it seemed like Chip Kelly was pretty close to invincible. Turns out, he’s plenty mortal. And if he coaches in San Francisco or Tennessee or wherever like he did in Philadelphia, he’ll done in the NFL.

Kelly can get his career back on track. But first, he needs to get out of his own way.