Chip Kelly pays a visit to Davie, Lobos
Former NFL, Oregon coach says he is a football junkie
This was not, Chip Kelly said, a belated mercy call stemming from his Oregon Ducks’ 72-0 beatdown on the New Mexico Lobos in 2010 — sort of like a heavyweight boxer visiting his battered victim in the hospital.
“That was a different time, different era,” said Kelly, laughing. The former Oregon, Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers head coach was a visitor to UNM’s spring practice session on Monday.
Indeed that was a different era, and Kelly said he sees sixth-year coach Bob Davie as having nursed the UNM program back to health.
But the operating room never closes, and that’s what Kelly came to see: the inner workings.
Currently unemployed after his dismissal by the 49ers in January, he remains a self-described football junkie.
“If I get a chance to watch someone else practice and train, I jump at the opportunity,” he said. “It’s always good to see how other people do things.”
Kelly and Davie became acquainted when Davie was a game analyst for ESPN. Davie worked Kelly’s first game as Oregon’s head coach in 2009 — a loss to Boise State marred by Ducks running back LaGarrette Blount’s knockdown punch of a Broncos player during postgame handshakes.
Davie said he remembers calling
Kelly the following week, “because I know in this profession it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.”
Kelly finished strong at Oregon, going 46-7 in his four years as head coach. He won or shared four Pac-12 Conference titles, took the Ducks to the 2010 national title game and earned a reputation as one of the game’s greatest offensive innovators with his blindingly uptempo attack.
“Very few guys can say they’ve actually introduced something or done something unique,” Davie said. “And certainly Chip Kelly’s that guy.”
Kelly said that from attending coaches’ meetings and then observing practice, he could see how Davie has taken UNM football from the wreckage of that 2010 game during the Mike Locksley coaching era to 16 wins the past two seasons.
“When you go out on the practice field, you actually see it,” Kelly said. “There’s a correlation between what’s going on in the meeting rooms and what’s going on on the practice field.
“To me, that’s education. The transportation of knowledge is what they’re imparting in meetings to their players. You see it implemented on the field.”
Kelly was on the field Monday as an observer, not as a consultant. But Lobos senior quarterback Lamar Jordan said “He’d chime in when he needed to. Everything he says you take that all in, because he’s been around the best. He’s been at the top level.
“... It kind of helps you just to see where your game’s at, just talking to him, because he’s a great offensive mind, especially from my view as a quarterback.”
Kelly said UNM will be one of several stops he’ll make the next couple of months.
“I’m gonna go to a few colleges here during the month of April and some NFL teams during the month of May,” he said. “Just out kind of charging the battery.”
At Philadelphia, Kelly was fired despite a threeyear record of 27-22. At San Francisco, he went 2-14 in his only season with a team almost universally picked to finish last in the NFC West — swept out, it was said, as “collateral damage” in the ouster of general manager Trent Baalke.
As for his future, in coaching or otherwise, Kelly said, “I’m not sure. I just want to be around good people.”