Bill Streicher – USAToday Sports
With the firing of Chip Kelly, the Philadelphia Eagles have basically hit the reset button on their immediate future. The grand scheme that was supposed to be Kelly’s big rebuild of the roster is now scrapped on the heap, probably laying on top of Terrell Owens’ contract from 2004 and Todd Pinkston’s gloves.
Bailing out so quickly on Kelly is already the most scrutinized topic the Eagles will have to face all offseason long. But at the end of the day, believe it or not, firing Kelly was exactly the right thing to do.
The whole thing is hard to wrap your head around. It’s even harder to justify firing Kelly because why do you give him so much power over the personnel, give him carte blanche to only give him one season of it? I mean, Jeff Lurie had to know this was a long-term thing Kelly was looking to do, right? And that hiring him and giving him all this power had to play out over the next three to four years?
With everything that’s out there, with everything that’s known about Kelly and this team, Lurie couldn’t fire him like this. Not so soon, anyway, and not so unceremoniously.
But to me, it’s not so much about what we do know about Kelly than it is what we don’t know. The surface of this looks extremely terrible for Lurie’s decision to bag Kelly. But then you have to imagine that behind the scenes, something was going on. We’re already getting glimpses of it with the reports about Howie Roseman struggling for power and Lane Johnson calling Kelly a dictator. I suspect those things are just the tip of the iceberg. There is much more to this firing that we don’t know that will probably always stay in house.
It’s those things that make me feel like getting rid of Kelly was right. If the facts that we know spell out so clearly that Kelly needed to stay and figure things out, the stuff we don’t know behind the scenes must have been ten times more influential. Lurie isn’t that stupid to be so rash and reckless with a move like this.
If you accept that to be true, it does sort of make the Eagles’ lackluster performance this year much more explainable. Between Kelly not being as accepted as everyone though, the power struggles with Roseman, and the players looking lost and disheveled out there, it all adds up. We all thought Kelly was going to be the solution, but it appears he was the problem all along. With all that power comes the responsibility, and the only way anything was getting better was if Kelly was out.
Doug Green is a Featured Writer for www.RantSports.com covering the Philadelphia Eagles and the NFL. Follow him on Twitter @DGreenNFL.
