BLOOMINGTON, Minn. – A little more than two years ago, when Jeffrey Lurie pulled the plug on the Chip Kelly experiment in Philadelphia, fear and uncertainty rippled through Kelly’s Eagles staff.
When the head coach fails, so does everyone who worked for him. It’s a little like working for a losing political candidate: you have to wonder how badly you will be marked, and how quickly the mark can be erased, if it can be erased.
Kelly failed again the next year in San Francisco, or at least, he didn’t survive a change in general managers, and now he is back coaching in college, at UCLA – something he was very clear about not wanting to do when he first arrived in the NFL.