Chip Kelly is 0 and 2…Arians is 2 and 0

Chip Kelly’s Good Ideas Have Gone Bad for Eagles

By Mike Tanier, NFL National Lead Writer

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2569921-monday-morning-hangover-chip-kellys-good-ideas-have-gone-bad-for-eagles

In the NFL, being a maverick will either get you glory or get you fired. And there’s not a lot of glory to go around.

Going 0-2 is always bad, but most teams can do it without sparking some kind of philosophical crisis. The Saints can bungle badly against the Bucs, then point to their track record. The Seahawks can gut their offensive line, play inconsistent defense and cite the salary cap and challenges of staying on top as reasons for their slow start. Nearly everyone can invoke a “play here and a play there” and claim they were a bounce or a flag away from 1-1 or 2-0.

But the Eagles are different, because Chip Kelly made them different. He put a bull’s-eye on his team and himself this offseason. So far, opponents are looking like Robin Hood.

If you are having a hard time putting your finger on the Eagles’ problem this season, try using your whole hand, or just belly flop on top of the last six days of Eagles football like it’s a fumble in the end zone. The Eagles have been close in both of their losses, the 26-24 opener Monday night and the 20-10 defeat at the hands of the Cowboys on Sunday. But the Eagles cannot point to a play here or a play there. Because of Kelly, they must point to an entire offensive system here and an organizational culture there.

The Eagles are supposed to be the team that changes the way football teams are assembled, how they practice, how they call plays, what plays they run…everything down to the lengths of team meetings and the contents of the cafeteria. Everything is supposed to work in harmony. Right now, there is nothing but cacophony, and the whole Chip Kelly program—the “culture”—looks ridiculous.

That’s a shame, because Kelly has many great ideas. Perhaps too many. If the Eagles fail, the ideas will suffer more than the coach.

The Eagles only possessed the ball for 19 minutes and 30 seconds against the Cowboys. Eight of their possessions lasted fewer than two minutes of game time and weren’t much longer in real time. The Eagles, employers of a three-headed backfield you’d expect to see in an eight-team fantasy league, rushed for seven yards. They gained 21 net yards and netted one first down in the first half.

Sam Bradford committed three turnovers. DeMarco Murray rushed 13 times for two yards. Ryan Mathews touched the ball once. Byron Maxwell is bringing back bad Eagles fan memories of Nnamdi Asomugha of the infamous 2011 “Dream Team.” The Cowboys committed 18 penalties and Tony Romo fractured his left clavicle while the Eagles still had the game within reach, but Philadelphia steadfastly refused to do anything with any opportunity but squander it.

The no-huddle looked bad. The new acquisitions looked bad. The defense played fairly well but cracked under the strain of 40 minutes of field time. The Eagles line blocked terribly, reminding us that Kelly released veteran guard Evan Mathis in a fit of pique in June.

The Cowboys had zero concern about option fakes: In a league where even Peyton Manning pretends to run outside after handoffs, Bradford does not dare risk a hit. The Eagles’ only 3rd-and-long play appears to be a screen to Darren Sproles, which gets called back for holding as often as not. The uptempo three-thrills-a-minute offense is bogged down in micro-passes and stuffed runs. The team built to play smarter football commits stupid penalties and makes foolish mistakes.

Kelly doesn’t have a safety net after his offseason of coups and trades. The Lions can go 0-2 without a wholesale indictment of Jim Caldwell’s philosophy. The Texans can putter around without a quarterback and call it careful regime building. The Giants can make the same dumb mistakes week after week and year after year because they are traditional NFL mistakes, a little clock mismanagement here and a prevent defense there. Heck, we almost expect the Ravens to start out ugly. Only Kelly threatens to take a whole ideology down with him.

Conservative tactics stave off skeptics. They buy coaches benefits of the doubt and votes of confidence. Kelly must worry about non-believers not just in the owner’s box but in a locker room full of guys who did things a different way in the past, with more success.

It’s easy to buy in to fast-paced practices and massive personnel changes when you are marching up and down the field. It’s not so easy to buy in if, for example, you’re Murray or Maxwell and you go from Offensive Player of the Year to 0.5 yards per rush or a pair of Super Bowls to 40 minutes per week of chasing receivers all over the field.

If the Eagles don’t turn things around, Kelly will lose his locker room, which will be the first step toward losing his job. If Kelly leaves the NFL, it could all leave the NFL with him: the full-time no-huddle offense, uptempo training techniques, aggressive offseason overhauls and even some of the cutting-edge tenets of sports science.

Some of those ideas can be written off as a failed experiment. A few deserve a longer look, especially after some success in 2013 and 2014. Some may be quietly succeeding in the background of all of this early Eagles failure.

The NFL needs many of the innovations Kelly is trying to introduce, ideas that can keep players healthier, make football more fun and shake up the status quo. But if the Eagles go in the tank this year, only the boldest, safest coaches—Bill Belichick, primarily—will dare adapt a Kelly concept without disguising where it came from.

Did you ever have a boss that just made too many changes too fast? Someone who refused to account for the fact it takes large groups of people time to adjust to even a few changes, let alone a dozen new radical ideas, implemented in a hurry on a tight deadline?

That’s Kelly. All of his ideas are getting in each other’s way, and his own. He created a big, brilliant mess. He can still recover to clean things up: Romo’s injury clouds the NFC East picture and makes the Eagles the healthiest, most talented team in the division. Despite the ugly start, Kelly’s Eagles still have a clear path to the playoffs.

If they don’t make it, the whole heap will get hauled away, treasure and trash alike.