BOCA RATON, Fla. – It was a long time coming, but former Eagles head coach Chip Kelly finally got a chance to give his side of the story.
Kelly, now the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, spoke to reporters — many of whom were reporters from Philadelphia who staked out positions at the roundtable before sunrise — on Wednesday morning.
Kelly spoke pretty candidly about the Eagles during the hour, just a few tables away from his replacement, Doug Pederson, at the NFC coaches breakfast at the annual owners' meetings.
With nearly three months to think about it, why does Kelly think the Eagles fired him?
“We didn’t win enough games,” said Kelly, who became the Eagles' head coach in 2013 to much fanfare, but didn’t last through the completion of this third season.
In fact, the Eagles fired Kelly on Dec. 29, with one game left to play in the regular season. On Wednesday, Kelly said the timing of the decision — he spent that Tuesday game-planning — surprised him.
Looking back, what would Kelly have done differently in Philadelphia?
“Would’ve won more games,” Kelly said. “Would’ve helped.”
Maybe it would have helped.
But maybe the Chip Kelly experiment was doomed to fail in large part because of the power structure the organization implemented around him.
On Wednesday, Kelly revealed that after he was given personnel control in 2015 — control over the 90-man roster, as he says — he rarely spoke with Howie Roseman, who, while banished from personnel decisions, still orchestrated the Eagles’ salary cap.
That means two of the team’s top officials rarely communicated directly.
“I never really saw him, so I don’t know what he did on a daily basis,” Kelly said.
Kelly said it was a “weird situation” because Roseman was the general manager for the first two years, and then was stripped of that power and subsequently banished to the other side of the NovaCare Complex.
Kelly claimed their personal relationship didn’t play a role in the lack of communication. Rather it was the structure put into place by Lurie. Kelly and Roseman interacted through an intermediary, former vice president of personnel Ed Marynowitz.
“It wasn’t set up that way,” Kelly said when asked if he tried to open lines of communication with Roseman. “I wasn’t the personnel guy. I was in charge of the 90-man roster, but I didn’t negotiate and say this guy gets this amount of money and that guy gets that amount of money. That wasn’t what I did.
“And Ed was the one who ran our personnel department. That fell on his shoulders as far as how he handled everything. Ed dealt with him all the time, that’s how that worked out. That’s how it was set up.”
Basically, Kelly explained, he and his staff would evaluate which players they wanted on the team. Then, it was up to Roseman to sign those players to fit within the cap. Kelly claimed he never worked on a contract, which means it was Roseman who negotiated the deals for last year’s free agents, DeMarco Murray and Byron Maxwell.
While it’s a completely different situation because Roseman has now re-ascended back to his role of power in the organization, Pederson said he and the vice president of football operations speak almost daily. Likewise, Kelly seems to have a close relationship with San Francisco GM Trent Baalke, who he’s known since his days at Oregon.
On Tuesday at the owners' meetings, Lurie said he didn’t regret his decision to give Kelly personnel control, but said it was “helpful for [Kelly] to be accountable” for the personnel decisions so the team could move on (see story).
On Wednesday, Kelly said it wasn’t his idea to take over control of the 90-man roster; it was Lurie’s.
“I didn’t like the way it was, but I didn’t ask for anything,” Kelly said about the direction of the team. “It’s his organization, his team. He can run it however he wants to run it. It wasn’t like ‘I’m walking out the door.’”
Maybe Kelly didn’t threaten to walk out the door last offseason, but he was kicked out of it less than a year later. Perhaps no one outside the walls knew it then, but maybe everything was just doomed to go up in flames.