I think this article gives some really good insight as to why Oregon fans are so confident in CK.
College football 2009: In Chip Kelly they trust, but he trusts the numbers
Posted by John Hunt, The Oregonian September 03, 2009 05:01AM
Categories: Football
EUGENE -- Chip Kelly, whose popularity at Oregon is so high you'd think he'd never lost a game as a head coach, laughed when he heard the phrase going around Eugene: "In Chip We Trust."
"I haven't heard that, but that's OK," said Kelly, who hopes his deification will last at least through tonight's season opener at Boise State, his head coaching debut.
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Success already seems a given for this man who only two years ago had never coached at college football's top level. What Ducks fans have seen so far of Kelly, they like very much. What they will see from Kelly the head coach, they don't really know, but they are pretty sure they'll like that, too.
He is a player's coach and a disciplinarian who is just as quick to admire a recruit's Nike gear as he is to order a veteran off the practice field. Players respect his X's and O's and live in fear of landing on his "list," which would earn them some stomach-emptying after-hours drills.
Since he took over, the Ducks already have made the cover of Sports Illustrated and the front page of USA Today. Neither pictured Kelly, 45, but he is the face of the program.
So far, though, it is much ado about nothing -- no wins, no losses. So what will the Kelly era be like? Here is what Ducks fans could expect in Year One ...
More of the same
Make no mistake. Kelly the coach is still Kelly the play-caller. He's not about to ask his offense to do something other than what it does best; nor will he ask himself to give up what he does best, and that's calling plays.
"If the play's good, then Coach Kelly called it," said Mark Helfrich, the new quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator. "If the play's not good, then I'll take that one."
It's hard to argue with that, considering in Kelly's two seasons as Oregon offensive coordinator -- after 13 years as an assistant coach at the University of New Hampshire -- his teams have scored 50 or more points in 10 games. The two Kelly offenses have racked up more than 10,000 yards, the most prolific two seasons in school history. His reputation is built on an innovative, "spread-em-and-shred-em" offense. It also was built on his rags-to-riches relationship with quarterback Dennis Dixon in 2007 and his transformation of Justin Roper from fifth-stringer into Sun Bowl star later that season, as well as his work with Jeremiah Masoli last year, bringing him from the fifth string to a fearsome spread-option quarterback.
But it's the rushing offense -- second-best in the nation last season -- that is largely responsible for the Ducks' 19 wins in Kelly's two years as coordinator.
"A lot of times it comes down to, this is what we do -- stop us," said Kelly, citing Masoli and the complementary running tandem of Jeremiah Johnson and LeGarrette Blount, along with three NFL players on the offensive line.
The only difference now is that Kelly will be calling the plays from the sideline instead of the coaching booth. The previous two years at Oregon were the only two of Kelly's career in which he sat in the booth. So although it will feel like old times for Kelly, Oregon fans will be seeing Kelly's game face for the first time.
Now in the booth will be Helfrich, who comes to Oregon from Colorado. It took Kelly a while to settle on his new coordinator. Before he did, Kelly offered the job to former NFL coach Jon Gruden, now a broadcaster for "Monday Night Football." Kelly and Gruden keep in touch, and during a conversation last week, Gruden offered advice for his coaching friend.
"Don't get away from the football part of it," Gruden told him.
He hasn't.
Even gambles calculated
Kelly may be a fast-talking offensive guru, but he does not shoot from the hip. His coaching decisions can be traced not only to his hometown of Manchester, N.H., which has produced other bright offensive minds such as new Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen and Boston College assistant Ryan Day, but also to Johns Hopkins University. As defensive coordinator there in 1993, Kelly coached with linebackers coach Bob Babb, who also has coached the John Hopkins baseball team for the past 30 years.
Babb's analytic prowess is legendary in Baltimore. He brought reams of statistics and a suitcase full of well-educated guesses to his coaching, and Kelly soaked it all in.
"It was phenomenal -- everything was a situation that had its answer," Kelly said. "I just learned as a young coach that if you get your players to understand the situation, then that's half the battle."
Asked for his statistics of choice, Kelly bounced out of his chair to a closet full of bound volumes. He pulled out two: Numbers from the Pacific-10 Conference in 2007 and 2008 that you won't find online.
"If you lead by more than six points after the first quarter, you have a 79 percent chance of winning," Kelly said, poring over the reports. "When people talk about winning, they talk about winning the fourth quarter. Well, a lot of times, the game's done before you even get to the fourth quarter."
So will Kelly's players hold their index fingers over their heads at the start of a game, instead of four fingers at the start of the fourth quarter? Probably not, but the point is driven home in practice, where the Ducks go up-tempo from the first drill.
Then they run 27 percent of their snaps in first- and second-down situations because that's how it breaks down in real games. Third down, red zone, clutch -- it's all predicated on how much those situations occur in the game.
Field position is crucial. From the reports, Kelly knows that a team starting a possession inside its 5-yard-line has a 3 percent chance of scoring, with odds increasing as the field position improves. He knows the team that gets the most "explosion plays" -- runs of more than 12 yards and pass plays of more than 16 yards -- win 70 percent of the time.
He also knows that the team with the most rushing touchdowns wins 86 percent of the time.
"People talk about total offense," Kelly said. "That stuff doesn't matter. What matters is what's your red zone defense like? Did you win the turnover/takeaway battle? Did you win the first quarter? Did you win the rushing touchdown battle?"
Kelly is already doing a statistical analysis with a UO professor. Together, they have analyzed 100,000 drives to determine a fourth-down strategy.
"If you go for it and don't get it, what happens?" Kelly said. "If you go for it and get it, what happens? If you don't go for it and punt, what happens?"
Practice as they play
For Kelly, it's not all about down and distance. Sometimes a team can put itself in a bad situation, and that's what Kelly hopes to contain with his tight-ship coaching style.
Navy was the only team with more rushing yards than Oregon last season, but Kelly wants to outperform the Midshipmen in another category: penalty yards. Navy had the fewest penalty yards in the nation, less than half that of the Ducks, who ranked 101st.
In one practice this fall, receiver Jamere Holland jubilantly held the ball up before crossing the goal line after beating Walter Thurmond for a touchdown on one of the "competition days." Kelly took away the score from the offense and took away more points, calling a penalty on Holland.
"We need guys to play with emotion -- not let emotion play with them," said Kelly, who knows that an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty would cost his team field position and lessen its chance of scoring. "It's all about leadership."
If it had been a real game, Kelly said, he would have taken Holland out of the game -- just like he threw Blount out of practice when the running back didn't hear his whistle. Yes, Holland scored, but he wouldn't have if all five linemen hadn't blocked and the quarterback hadn't thrown a good pass.
Another time, feisty players on offense and defense began chirping at one another, prompting another whistle from Kelly.
"Shut up!" he yelled. "Just shut up!"
His assistants gradually moved to the sideline as fall camp progressed, forcing players to make their own decisions instead of having a coach in their ear. The coaches have to be officials, too.
"If one of your players is holding, then you've got to call him on it -- you can't tell him it's a good play," Kelly said. "You hear that adage, and I hate it, that says, 'If you're not cheating, you're not trying.' No, that hurts your football team.
"If you accept it in practice, then expect it in the game."
Robotic tackling dummies?
Practice observers have seen some unexpected stuff, too: Quarterbacks with tiny cameras on their helmets, team managers with makeshift cardboard "samurai flags" posing as pass rushers. Again, there is a method to the strangeness.
Kelly already had changed the perspective of practice by utilizing two end zone cameras where there used to be only one. That way, offensive and defensive coaches can view plays from behind their units.
Kelly also talked with Chris Miller, the former Oregon quarterback who is now quarterbacks coach for the NFC champion Arizona Cardinals. Miller uses field-level cameras that focus on a quarterback's footwork. Kelly employed that method at times but was looking for a different angle, so when he discovered Helfrich used helmet cams at Colorado, the gadgets were ordered, and soon they were atop the quarterbacks' heads.
As for the samurai flags, Kelly said the idea came to him while watching a movie about feudal Japan in which soldiers used tall flags to identify themselves. So he bounced the idea off strength and conditioning coach Jim Radcliffe, and a few cardboard boxes and a couple of rolls of duct tape later, the contraptions were on the backs of equipment managers.
Kelly knew he needed something. He no longer had the taller Dennis Dixon and Brady Leaf types; instead, he has the 5-foot-11 Masoli and 6-1 Nate Costa, who have trouble seeing over the linemen.
"I want to simulate a rush, but I don't want to rush and hit Jeremiah Masoli every play," Kelly said. "He needs to learn how to step and throw through windows."
Kelly could have used real defensive linemen, but that would keep them out of important drills on the other field. He could have used ladders, but resetting those would slow Kelly's brisk practice tempo. So in came the samurai flags.
It isn't the first time Kelly has employed the handiwork of the tireless Radcliffe. When since-transferred quarterback Chris Harper had trouble throwing the ball last season, Kelly had Radcliffe attach a yardstick to Harper's shoulder pads -- if he dropped his elbow too low, the yardstick would stop the throw.
Kelly couldn't think of any other technological advancements that have come to him in a movie, but he is looking for a way to add a little animation to blocking dummies.
"In the game of football, that guy isn't stationary," Kelly said. "Is there a way to have what you're hitting move? But if that thing moving is another body, there's a chance that thing moving, or you, could get hurt."
He's enlisted the help of a statistics professor; why not an engineering professor?
"I'd love to get with those guys," he said.
Kelly also has his playbook on EA Sports Football 10, calling it a "flight simulator" for his players, who can put video game time to good use, such as practicing routes against certain coverages.
His tech-savvy ways stop short of Twitter, as Kelly asked famously this spring, "Who cares what I had for breakfast? You think a recruit's gonna come to Oregon because I ate Oreos?"
Probably not. And Kelly does not eat those Oreos in his Casanova Center office, where he arrives at 6:30 a.m. and leaves at 10 p.m. every day. Asked if he has ever slept on the office couch, Kelly, who is engaged, said, "Nah, it's too short."
Coaches who sleep on the office couch, he says, do it because they want people to know they sleep on the office couch. Kelly can take comfort in knowing that Oregon fans won't be losing any sleep over his schedule -- as long he wins games, of course.
Because in Chip, they trust.
