Kelly paid his dues at New Hampshire
Chip Kelly keeps crossing the country, going from one big-time football job to another.
University of Oregon. Philadelphia Eagles. San Francisco 49ers. Now UCLA. Head coach of all of them just since January 2013. Sounds like a restless soul. Or a guy who can’t keep a job.
Nothing is further from the truth.
The offensive mastermind who Saturday steps onto Owen Field to match wits with Lincoln Riley became a football savant on the most unlikely of gridirons.
Kelly spent 14 seasons as an assistant coach at his alma mater, the University of New Hampshire. He was a 43-yearold offensive coordinator in the Atlantic 10 Conference when his big break came.
“There’s great football coaches everywhere,” said Riley, who at age 35 hasn’t even been 14 years out of college yet and is considered one of the nation’s brightest football minds. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. Not everybody’s lucky to get an opportunity at this level. That’s one thing I’ve always been really thankful for, that I got mine so early.”
But New Hampshire? Upper New England, where college football really hasn’t changed much since the 1940s? Where the Wildcats match up against Maine and Rhode Island and Stony Brook? Kelly finally caught his break with the Oregon Ducks.
Not because Oregon found him. Because Kelly found Oregon.
Oregon coach Mike Bellotti hired Gary Crowton as the Ducks’ offensive coordinator in 2005. Crowton had coached three years, 1988-90, at New Hampshire, and had met Kelly, who in 1992 joined the UNH staff.
Kelly called Bellotti, asking if he could come out and watch the Ducks practice as Crowton installed a new spread offense. And during the season, on Sunday film review, Crowton often would call Bellotti in to check out the latest wrinkle from New Hampshire, the no-huddle, uptempo spread for which Kelly became famous.
When Crowton left in 2007 for the LSU offensive coordinator job, Bellotti interviewed seven people for the job, including some with NFL coordinator experience. He chose the guy from New Hampshire.
Bellotti, who had taken Oregon to great heights, caught some flak, but he reminded Oregonians that he had been at Chico State before he was brought to Eugene by predecessor Rich Brooks. Then two years later, Bellotti stepped away from coaching, Kelly was elevated to head coach and the Ducks went 46-7 over four years. They played Auburn in the 2010 national title game.
“It was clear to me Chip was the best choice to go two steps forward without taking one step back,” said Bellotti, now an ESPN analyst. “Coaches who do more with less are much more attractive to me.”
Kelly doesn’t say much about his New Hampshire days. He doesn’t say much about anything. A bornand-bred New Englander,
he is wary of outsiders. That has carried over to football. Bellotti says Kelly appeals to football players, because he’s so sharp about the game, but Kelly doesn’t win the press conference and doesn’t win over fans easily. He was fired one game shy of three seasons with the Eagles, despite a 26-21 record.
On the Pac-12 teleconference this week, I asked Kelly about his New Hampshire days, which included playing for the Wildcats and then coaching there for 14 seasons.
“It was a great experience,” Kelly said. “I loved it. I really enjoyed it. Worked with some great people. Had the opportunity to coach some unbelievable kids.”
But even in New Hampshire, Kelly was guarded.
Jim Jeannotte spent 35 years as the radio voice of New Hampshire football and told the Sacramento Bee that “nobody remembers anything about him as a football player. Even when he was offensive coordinator, I think he could walk around the streets of New Hampshire and nobody knew who he was. Now it’s like, ‘He’s our boy!’ But he wasn’t our boy until he left.”
Kelly took a long time to make his mark outside Durham, New Hampshire. But his football ascension was rapid once Kelly got to Oregon.
“We had fairly quick success,” Bellotti said. “We’d already been in the spread. We had had quite a bit of success. Going forward, it gave us a chance to go full speed into the no huddle, which is what I wanted to do.”
The NFL soon came calling. His offense worked in Philadelphia, didn’t work his one year in San Francisco and he was fired from both jobs, apparently because of personality issues.
Kelly was mentioned for a variety of college jobs, including Florida, but he chose UCLA.
Now he’s trying to install the same principles, with some NFL wrinkles, back in the Pac-12. In a lot of ways, Kelly has been as influential in college football as the Hal Mumme/ Mike Leach Air Raid. All from stemming from 14 seasons in New Hampshire.
“There’s a lot of great ones that have been at those levels,” Riley said. “Some have stayed. Some have gotten opportunities to move up. Chip’s came in a little bit later in his life, when he got the opportunity to move up. There’s great high coaches, great high school schemes. Shoot, we probably take more from high schools than we do pros, honestly. There’s just so much creativity everywhere.”
College football has been recently populated
by coaches who make the transition from high school and are immediate successes. Guys like Gus Malzahn, Chad Morris and Hugh Freeze.
“You coach with less talent and less facilities and less resources,” Bellotti said. “The guys at the highest levels, they’re very good, but a lot of them would struggle at a high school or at a place without 30 people in their staff.”
For a decade or more, Chip Kelly has been on the fast track and been on the move. But that’s after 14 years at New Hampshire. Kelly earned such a wild ride.