Tennessee Titans Should Give Chip Kelly Chance To Test His System

If the Tennessee Titans have cooled on the idea of reuniting Chip Kelly with quarterback Marcus Mariota, they should turn the heater up a notch. The Kelly-Mariota pairing is a match made in football heaven, and even neutral fans around the NFL have to possess a strong curiosity as to whether it would work at the game’s highest level.

The league got a little sneak peak of the Kelly read-option system when it worked on a spectacular level for a few games with Michael Vick as a quarterback in his first year as head coach with the Philadelphia Eagles. Defenses had to be honest with Vick doing the reads, and Mariota presents even a bigger challenge because he understands the principles of the offense even better. What Mariota grasps that perhaps Vick did not is that the quarterback should only take the run read when there is a wide-open gap in the defense. Vick took every little gap he could find.

Even Kelly’s quarterback of last year, the slow-footed Nick Foles, found he could pick up eight yards any time he wanted when the offense was run the right way. One of the reasons why things fell apart with the Eagles this year was that Sam Bradford’s injured knees were such a risk that they could not have him running under any circumstance. Kelly had to compensate by making the reads a short pass, and that’s not the way the system was designed to be run.

Mariota knows how to run it, and if it is ever going to work in the NFL, the time is now. And since Kelly is available, the reward of it working outweighs any risk a Kelly hire might bring.