Chip Kelly was once regarded as a college football genius but it’s become undeniable his UCLA Bruins will never be a winner under his watch.
There is no confidence in Chip Kelly when he grabs the clipboard on the UCLA Bruins sidelines right now. And why should there be? After taking the job in November 2017, the once celebrated head coach and offensive guru has yielded three wins in 15 games. Sure, one of those wins came in 2018 to break a three-year losing streak against rival USC, but how much is that worth if the rest of the season is essentially lost?
For anyone thinking Kelly would turn it around in his second season, though, the early returns have not been inspiring. The Bruins are 0-3 with losses to Cincinnati, San Diego State and Oklahoma, scoring just 14 points in all of these. Put simply, there appears to be no sign of improvement in year two under the head coach.
Rewind to just shy of a decade ago and Kelly was the golden child of the college football coaching ranks. At the helm of the Oregon Ducks, the head coach was virtually untouchable in every sense of the word.
In terms of team success, he certainly had it. Kelly’s Ducks went 10-3 in his first season and then lost just one game in two of his final three seasons in Eugene, losing just two in the other season of his four-year tenure. That’s seven losses in four seasons, which also resulted in three top-five finishes in the final AP Poll of the season.
But it wasn’t just the success of Kelly at Oregon that made his star so bright. It was the way he was winning. This wasn’t just an unprecedented recruiting boom that brought in droves of elite talent. He was designing and orchestrating what was hailed as truly revolutionary offenses with the Ducks.
Per Team Rankings, Oregon ranked seventh in points per game in his first season with the Ducks, had the top scoring offense in the country the next season, ranked third the next year and was second in the nation for what ended up being Kelly’s final year at the helm of the team. It was fast-paced, exciting and game-changing.
Then, of course, Kelly made his ill-fated trip to the professional ranks. After years of he and the NFL flirting with one another, he took a job with the Philadelphia Eagles. And while they went 10-6 in his first two seasons, things went more poorly than that would indicate. Most importantly, his revolutionary offense didn’t look quite as much so when truly put to the test.
Kelly then went 6-9 in Philadelphia in the 2015 season before being fired and was then hired by the San Francisco 49ers. As nothing more than a figurehead of a stripped roster, though, he was around for just one year to go 2-14 and then be shown the door. And after one year with ESPN, the head coach landed not just back in the college ranks but back in the Pac-12 as UCLA made the hire.
Given his failures at the NFL level, the mystique around Kelly had certainly faded a bit when the Bruins made the move to bring him in. At the same time, though, the prevailing thought around the hire was this: UCLA might not be a title contender but at least the offense will be good and fun with Kelly taking over.
Only that hasn’t happened through 15 games. Instead, it’s been an immense disappointment.
In his first season with the Bruins, the offense ranked 91st in college football in points per game. But hey, that was Kelly’s first season without any of his recruits in the mix. Perhaps things would start to turn around in his second season, right? Well, not exactly.
The Bruins have scored just 14 points in the first three games of 2019, the same amount of points Oklahoma also conceded to South Dakota in Week 2. And after three games, UCLA ranks a dismal 117th in the country in terms of scoring offense. Whatever offensive genius that was once there with Kelly is clearly not there anymore.
Over the roughly seven years since Kelly was at Oregon, college football and modern offenses have changed or evolved. Kelly undeniably laid the groundwork for the marriage of spread concepts, RPOs and so on being widely used in both the college game and the NFL. However, the old blueprint he founded is now the groundwork for a good offense, not the final product.
Kelly hasn’t done himself any favors in his brief time at UCLA, for what it’s worth. While at Oregon, he was routinely bringing in top-15 recruiting classes, per 247Sports. In the one full year Kelly had to recruit, the 2019 class, the Bruins ranked as the 40th best class in the country according to 247Sports. And for what it’s worth, UCLA had a top-10 and top-20 class while Kelly was in Eugene.
In 2019, great offensive coaches like Lincoln Riley, Tom Herman, Ryan Day or even Mike Leach are using industrial-grade tools and materials to build their offenses; Chip Kelly is stuck building with Lincoln Logs. The times have passed him by and it’s painfully obvious after just 15 games.
Even in the most optimistic viewpoint, Kelly could bring in more of “his guys” in recruiting and improve from where UCLA is currently at. But at 0-3 on the 2019 season and coming off of a 3-9 campaign, that kind of improvement isn’t going to amount to anything more than being a team on the fringe of making a bowl game.
There’s no question hiring Kelly was a worthwhile gamble for the Bruins when they made the hire.
But it’s not going to work.
His time as a titan of college football is no more.
He’s not the mastermind he once was — he belongs in a museum display as a relic of the past. And sooner than later, that’s exactly where UCLA needs to leave him: in the past.