It’s safe to say that a 1-3 start to the season is not what anybody expected. Not you, not me, and certainly not Chip Kelly. No, the Eagles’ head coach likely expected his team to be a perfect 4-0, first in the league in scoring and close to the top 10 in defense.
After all, he’s Chip Kelly, and he’s experienced nothing but success during his coaching career. He posted a 46-7 record at the University of Oregon before winning 20 games during his first two seasons with the Eagles.
Failure? That’s not possible for Chip Kelly, and after wrestling away complete control from the Eagles’ ownership this past offseason, a Super Bowl title seemed inevitable, perhaps as early as 2015.
After all, Kelly was finally going to get to hand-pick the players HE wanted to construct the perfect football team. A fantasy team. A Super Bowl team.
What ensued next was perhaps the craziest offseason by any NFL team in the new millennium. Essentially, Kelly gutted the Eagles, stripping the team of Pro Bowl players like Nick Foles, LeSean McCoy, Jeremy Maclin and Evan Mathis, while replacing them with guys like Sam Bradford, DeMarco Murray, Nelson Agholor, Kiko Alonso and Byron Maxwell.
It was an offseason that began with the shocking trade of LeSean McCoy for injury-prone linebacker Kiko Alonso, centered around a widely-publicized failed attempt at Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota, and ended with the highest scoring preseason by any NFL team in more than two decades.
And that was the start, the start of what many truly thought could be the most magical season in team history.
After all, despite 10 new starters on the 2015 Eagles, the team was supposed to jell together immediately. Bradford would revive, no jumpstart, his career as the next Drew Brees, a top draft pick who failed on his first team before turning into a yearly MVP candidate on his second squad. Murray would break The Curse of 370, leading the league in rushing for the second straight season. Agholor would catch 100 balls as a rookie, Alonso would return to the elite form he showed as a rookie in 2013, and Maxwell would essentially become the next Darrelle Revis.
There wouldn’t be any early struggles, any miscommunication, any injuries (SportsScience!), any losses. No, not on a team run by Chip Kelly. He’s too good of a head coach to experience failure, and as general manager of one of the biggest offseason overhauls in history, Kelly would basically revolutionize the game of football as we know it.
You got what you wanted, Chip: full control despite never zero playoff wins in your first two seasons. And how’s that worked out for you so far? How’s this team looking so far? Best offense in the NFL through the season’s first month? Razor-sharp, accurate quarterback with surgical precision and an uncanny ability for leading clutch drives? Unstoppable running game powered by not one, not two but three former Pro Bowlers? Invincible offensive line with stars on the outside and perfect “scheme fits” on the inside? And a fiesty, underrated defense built primarily around a group of talented castoffs who have managed to stay perfectly healthy thanks to smoothies and eight hours of sleep per night?
That’s how this season has gone, right?
Or nah, not quite?
Nah, not at all. Not even close. And there’s only one person to blame for this abomination of a team.
This is your problem, Chip. You built this team, and when I say built, I mean blew up. You’re the one who took back-to-back 10-win seasons and decided that just wasn’t good enough?
Courage is an admirable trait, but foolishness is not.
And that’s how most of Kelly’s offseason moves look right now. Foolish. Incredibly foolish.
The trade of Nick Foles and two higher draft picks for former first-round disappointment Sam Bradford can best be described as a question mark right now, although it’s worth noting that Foles has been clearly the better of the two quarterbacks this season. DeMarco Murray has been injured, on and off again, since training camp, and his yards per carry average wouldn’t be possible if you simulated Madden on beginner mode. The receiving corps is a one-man show, and collectively the team has combined to drop footballs like they were covered in grease.
And then there’s that offensive line. That’s where things get really interesting. Kelly, who hasn’t drafted an offensive lineman in consecutive drafts for the first time in franchise history, also decided that All-Pro guard Evan Mathis wasn’t worth keeping around for a slight pay raise. It was June 11th when Kelly released Mathis, one of the top free-agent signings in franchise history, and that’s the moment the franchise took a hit that they haven’t been able to recover from.
It’s almost symbolic to the torn Achilles suffered by Jason Peters in March of 2012, as the absence of one talented offensive lineman has led to the destruction of a complete five-man unit.
It takes a lot of work for a team to go from as high-scoring as they were in 2014 to as mediocre and blah as they’ve been in 2015. This team is moving in the wrong direction, and does anyone really think things will improve?
You can point to a number of problems on this team that have to be fixed for this disastrous unit to have any chance of qualifying for a postseason berth. Sam Bradford. DeMarco Murray. Nelson Agholor. The kicking game. And yup, that patchwork offensive line, where there are no scheduled reinforcements coming in the middle of this season – just like Kelly wanted it six months ago. That’s what this team is built on – the offensive line.
And no matter how you spin it, this entire mess all falls on Chip Kelly. It’s his fault and nobody elses. There’s no one else to blame. There’s no scapegoat to fire or bench or players to throw under the bus, despite what Kelly consistently has said in his press conferences about players needing to execute.
Nope. There’s just one person to blame, and that’s Charles Edward Kelly.
Kelly dug his own grave this offseason. And now he’s got to find a way to climb out of it. Because if this team doesn’t start winning, and winning a lot, things are going to get a whole lot messier in Philadelphia- perhaps the point of no return.
