Eagles players are still slowing down the Chip Kelly offense

Posted by Mike Florio on September 18, 2013, 5:17 PM EDT

AP

As Eagles coach Chip Kelly tries to maximize the performance of his no-huddle, hurry-up offense, he needs maximum cooperation from his players.

So far, he’s not getting it.

Before Sunday’s unexpected loss to the Chargers, Sal Paolantonio of ESPN reported that Kelly has instructed his players not to leave the ball on the ground after a play but to hand it to an official.  During Sunday’s game, Kelly’s players consistently left the ball on the ground.

The biggest culprit was running back LeSean McCoy.  Based on a review of the full game broadcast, McCoy left the ball on the ground at least 10 times.

At one point in the second quarter, McCoy flipped the ball to the officials after a play.  Soon after that, he left it on the ground, stopped, retrieved it, and gave it to the officials.

If the change was the result of being reminded about it on the sidelines after consistently failing to give the ball to the officials during the first quarter, it didn’t stick.  He quickly resorted to leaving the ball on the ground after a play.

Others who left the ball on the ground at least once include running back Bryce Brown, receiver DeSean Jackson, quarterback Mike Vick, and receiver Jason Avant.

While it doesn’t create a major delay, every second counts in Kelly’s go-go offense.  And for Kelly, who wants the system to run a certain way, it has to be maddening that the guys aren’t doing what they expressly have been told to do.

It’s unclear when they were first told to do it this way.  Either Kelly has been harping on it throughout the offseason program, training camp, and the preseason and they continue to ignore him, or he has just realized only recently that time was being wasted by leaving the ball on the ground instead of getting it in an official’s hands.

Regardless, the Eagles could be getting even more plays called if the players start doing what Kelly wants them to do.

It’s unclear how many more snaps they would have had on Sunday against the Chargers.  As it stands, Philly had only 58.  San Diego had 79 plays from scrimmage, despite often draining the play clock in a no-huddle approach while quarterback Philip Rivers made changes based on the pre-snap look.

The Chargers ended up having the ball more than 40 minutes, too.  Kelly has said that he’s not concerned about a 40-20 split, as long as the Eagles get their snaps in.  On Sunday, it was less like the UCLA game Kelly mentioned in August and more like the far bigger NFL game in which the Buffalo K-gun offense was stymied both in time of possession and snaps by a grind-it-out Giants team.

While the Chargers did much more throwing than grinding on Sunday in Philly, they came up with an approach that others surely will copy in the coming weeks.

Starting on Thursday night, when the Chiefs and Andy Reid come to town.

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When Vick was shaken up, Kelly didn’t know NFL injury rules

Posted by Michael David Smith on September 16, 2013, 3:24 PM EDT

AP

Eagles coach Chip Kelly admitted today that he didn’t know the NFL’s rules about taking an injury timeout when quarterback Michael Vick was briefly shaken up late in the game.

After taking a shot from Chargers defensive end Jarius Wynn, Vick went down and the referee stopped the clock to give the Eagles’ medical staff time to check on him. Vick (who was not seriously hurt and was not listed on the Eagles’ injury report today) left the game and was replaced by Nick Foles for one play. Foles threw an incomplete pass on that play and Vick came back in.

What Kelly acknowledged at his Monday morning press conference was that the Eagles had the option of calling a timeout to give Vick a moment to recover and then keeping him on the field, instead of putting Folk on the field for a play. Kelly said that’s what he would have done if he had known it was allowed, but he thought a player who gets hurt has to come out of the game for a play.

“That was on me,” Kelly said, via CSNPhilly.com. “I should have asked.”

Until taking the Eagles job this year, Kelly had never worked in the NFL in any capacity. But he disagreed with a reporter’s suggestion that his lack of experience with the NFL was a problem, saying that there are probably rules that longtime NFL coaches don’t know, either.

“It’s difficult for anybody to be snap familiar with any rule because the rule book is so thick,” Kelly said.

The rule book may be thick, but that’s a rule a head coach should know. And Kelly’s admission that he didn’t know the injury timeout rule is the second time that Kelly has admitted he didn’t manage the clock properly on that late Philadelphia drive: Kelly previously admitted he should have bled the clock instead of continuing his hurry-up offense in the final minutes of the fourth quarter.

Kelly brings to the NFL a fresh perspective and an exciting approach, and he may some day be viewed as one of the best coaches in the NFL, just as he was viewed as one of the best coaches in college football during his days at Oregon. But right now, Kelly looks like a coach who’s experiencing some growing pains.

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Kelly explains Reid knows Philly personnel, but not Philly schemes

Posted by Mike Florio on September 17, 2013, 2:31 PM EDT

AP

As long-time Eagles coach Andy Reid prepares to return to Philadelphia for the Thursday night launch of Week Three, Reid’s successor realizes that the new Chiefs coach has a bit of an edge.

“Andy was here for a long time with those guys,” Kelly told reporters on Tuesday, via quotes distributed by the team.  “So if you know what they’re good at. . . .  But he doesn’t know our scheme and how we deploy those guys.  So he may have little ins and outs.  There is a familiarity.  He’s familiar with [defensive end] Trent [Cole].  He’s familiar with [linebacker] DeMeco [Ryans] and familiar with those guys.  But the scheme defensively has changed.  The scheme offensively has changed.  The scheme [on] special teams has changed.  So maybe from how fast a guy is to some of those things from a physical standpoint, I know he’s probably got an intimate knowledge from the guys on the team.”

That doesn’t mean Kelly believes Reid won’t be able to figure things out.

“I have great respect for Andy,” Kelly said.  “He was the head coach here for 14 years, and if you’re a coach in the NFL, anybody that coaches at one spot for 14 years you look to them and say, ‘Holy smokes.’  You just walk down the hallways and look at the division championships won here, the conference championships, and what he’s done.  He’s had a huge impact on this organization, and I’ve got a ton of respect for him.  There are not a lot of guys out there in this profession that have carried themselves from a coaching standpoint when you get to be around him like Andy Reid.  I’ve got all the respect in the world for him.  It’s exciting to go get a chance to go compete against him and it should be a lot of fun.”

It definitely will be a lot of fun to watch.  It could be something other than fun for the guy who ran the show for nearly a decade and a half, and for the guy who is trying to replace him.

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Chip Kelly: “In hindsight, maybe we should have bled the clock”

Posted by Michael David Smith on September 16, 2013, 10:25 AM EDT Getty Images

Chip Kelly’s hurry-up offense has caused everyone who follows the NFL to take notice in the first two weeks of the season. But while Kelly’s strengths as an offensive schemer are easily apparent, we’re also starting to see some of the weaknesses of his approach.

One of those weaknesses is that Kelly’s offense is always hurrying, even in situations when it would be strategically smarter to take some time off the clock. Kelly acknowledged after Sunday’s loss to the Chargers that on the Eagles’ last offensive drive, it might have made more sense to try to take some time off the clock with a slower, more methodical drive than to kick the game-tying field goal with 1:51 remaining, which gave San Diego enough time to drive down the field for their own game-winning field goal.

“I was trying to score; that’s all on me, that’s my call,” Kelly said on WIP, via Philly.com. “I didn’t want it to leave it in the hands of, it’s a tie ballgame. If you score, you’re up four. You got to drive a length of the field to try to score a touchdown. When you look at it in hindsight, maybe we should have bled the clock and not giving them enough time to come down and do it. You learn from those situations. But we were trying to score seven, not three. We felt like we had three, and just thought we had the opportunity to put one in there, and we didn’t get it. We didn’t capitalize.”

Obviously, Kelly is right that playing for a touchdown is better than playing for a field goal. But the Eagles could have played for a touchdown while also managing the clock better than they did. Whether the Eagles were going to score a field goal or a touchdown, they should have tried to do so with as little time remaining as possible, to give the Chargers as little time as possible on their subsequent possession. Instead, the Eagles stayed in hurry-up mode even after they got to the Chargers’ 14-yard line with two and a half minutes to play. At the very least, the Eagles should have let the clock run to force the Chargers to use their timeouts. But they didn’t, and the Chargers had two timeouts and plenty of time for their final drive.

So far, it looks like Kelly’s offensive schemes from Oregon translate to the NFL. But Kelly rarely had to worry about clock management in close games at Oregon, because his Oregon teams usually won by large margins. Clock management is a skill Kelly still needs to learn.

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