Chip Kelly gained his eighth win as an NFL coach today when his Philadelphia Eagles beat the Detroit Lions at home in a game that was affected by the most inclement of weather. Okay, that may be putting it lightly. It was a near blizzard out there today in Lincoln Financial Field.
For a while, especially in the first half, it didn’t look like the Eagles were going to get the win, as the Lions held an 8-0 lead at the break.
In the second half, though, the Eagles looked like a completely different team as they ran away with a 34-20 victory over their opponents from the NFC North.
You could definitely tell that Kelly made some key adjustments, which he did.
But, it’s more interesting to learn where the idea for the adjustments came from.
In that first half, defensive back Cary Williams was having a hard time keeping up with Calvin Johnson on certain routes. He noticed what was happening to him out there, and went right to his head coach to explain how Johnson was getting the upperhand. Kelly then implemented that into his offensive gameplan, and the rest is history:
"“It was funny, Cary Williams was the one who came up to me, and he was like, ‘Coach, this is what you’ve got to do because you can’t make up speed if the guy makes a stick move on you just because of the footing,’ ” Kelly said. “Cary was kind of the one, and it’s coming from a defensive guy saying, ‘Hey, if you have an opportunity to either throw a post or throw a corner route, it’s hard to make that up.’ Finally we hit Riley [Cooper] on it. It was almost like that kind of got us going, got our confidence back a little bit, and then we got rolling there.”"