Michael Vick Wants Chip Kelly to Name Him Starter Before Training Camp
By Josh Hill
Michael Vick caught a huge break when the Philadelphia Eagles decided o give him another shot with the team after an abysmal season in 2012 — a season so bad it cost Andy Reid his job. But the laughing and good feeling has apparently worn off and Vick is not only saying he doesn’t like splitting first team reps at Eagles camp, but he also wants Chip Kelly to name him the starter before training camp.
According to Geoff Mosher of CNSPhilly.com, Vick wants new head coach Chip Kelly to make him the starting quarterback before camp starts.
“Hopefully, Chip makes a decision before training camp and we won’t have to answer that question,” Vick told CSNPhilly.com, “so we can go out there as quarterbacks and just focus on this season and not answer questions about competition every day.”
An instant reaction to today’s ramblings by Vick are that he’s not really in a position to make demands. After a comeback 2010 campaign that saw the quarterback return to MVP style form, he fell off hard in 2011 and even harder in 2012 to the point where he was benched and replaced with Nick Foles in the middle of the season.
Foles is still on the team and so is rookie quarterback Matt Barkley. If Vick thinks the job is going to be handed to him a few months after it wasn’t even a certainty that he’d be sticking around, he’s obviously more entitled than we thought. He earned his keep back in 2010 but he lost the good graces of Eagles fans with terrible follow up campaigns.
According to Mosher’s report, Chip Kelly isn’t’ addressing questions regarding what could be growing tension between himself and his quarterback. But while the Eagles quarterback situation was already something to keep an eye on, this latest escalation from Vick means more than a few new eyes will be glued to what’s going on.