Kelly sheds light on issues with Eagles Lorenzo Reyes
49ers coach says structure flawed
BOCA RATON, FLA . At one point he told a reporter he loved him. At another he recalled a scene from the movie A Few Good Men to contextualize one of the proposed NFL rule changes.
This was an hour with Chip Kelly.
The new head coach of the San Francisco 49ers sat at a table Wednesday morning surrounded by a group of reporters and cameras. But he couldn’t escape his past.
So after answering a few questions about Colin Kaepernick and the 49ers — Kelly really didn’t say much he hasn’t said in the past about that, being vague with most answers — he faced questions about the trail that led him to San Francisco.
The Philadelphia Eagles, who fired him in December, still hung over his head during this early- morning NFC coaches breakfast. It didn’t matter that he was one of the splashy coaching hires of this offseason. The questions still came. For the first time since he was dismissed, Kelly opened up.
Kelly faulted what he called a weird organizational structure in which he was given final say of the roster but Howie Roseman, who was the general manager for Kelly’s first two seasons with Philadelphia but was shifted to executive vice president in 2015, continued to execute contracts.
According to Kelly, he and Roseman barely spoke and exvice president of player personnel Ed Marynowitz acted as the middleman to communicate which players Kelly wanted to acquire.
Kelly said he didn’t think he and Roseman ever were on the same page, despite the organizational structure being the idea of team owner Jeffrey Lurie.
“I didn’t like the way it was, but I didn’t ask for anything,” Kelly said. “It’s (Lurie’s) organization, and it’s his team. He can run it however he wants to run it. It wasn’t like I was going to say, ‘I’m walking out the door.’ ”
The breakfast was the first time Philadelphia media members had a chance to ask Kelly questions since he was fired. It was never contentious. It ran the entire span of allotted time. Although he previously had declined to get into specifics of his failures with the Eagles, Kelly was candid.
Based on his comments, one widely reported rumor was emphatically confirmed: The relationship between Kelly and Roseman was frayed if not entirely dysfunctional.
“I wasn’t the personnel guy,” Kelly said. “I was in charge of the 90-man roster. But I didn’t negotiate any contracts and say, ‘ This guy gets this amount of money.’ That wasn’t what I did. Ed was the one who ran our personnel department. That all really fell on Ed’s shoulders in terms of how he handled everything. Ed communicated with him all the time.”
He later added, “(Roseman) was there for two years, and then he wasn’t there for one year.”
Kelly said it was Roseman who crafted the expensive contracts last offseason of DeMarco Murray and Byron Maxwell, both of whom have been traded away after their performance fell below expectations.
Roseman, who was moved to the other side of the Eagles facility last year, has declined to comment on his role with the team last season. Lurie, however, has said it was Kelly who requested control over the roster — a charge Kelly denied Wednesday.
“Yeah, I was surprised,” Kelly said of the timing of when he got fired in December, one week before the end of the season. “We had spent the whole day gameplanning and had been at practice. That was not something we saw coming.”
In his three seasons with the Eagles, Kelly compiled a 26-21 record, taking the team to the playoffs in his first season in 2013.