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 – a strong contingent of which were from Philadelphia – 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 – it was questions about the trail that led him to San Francisco.
So what exactly went wrong in Philly?
Inquiries about the team that fired him in December, the Eagles, still hung over his head on 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. But this time, he answered. For the first time since he was dismissed, Kelly opened up.
Kelly faults what he called a “weird” organizational structure in which he was given final say of the roster, but Howie Roseman, who had been the general manager for Kelly’s first two seasons in Philadelphia but was demoted with the move, continued to execute contracts.
According to Kelly, he and Roseman barely spoke and former vice president of player personnel Ed Marynowitz acted as the middle man to communicate which players Kelly wanted to acquire.
Kelly now says he doesn’t think he and Roseman were ever “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.’ ”
This was the first time the Philadelphia media had a chance to ask Kelly questions since he was fired. It was never contentious. It ran the entire span of allotted time. And even though he had previously declined to get into specifics of his failures with the Eagles, this was undoubtedly the closest to candid – at least from his perspective – that we have ever heard from Kelly.
And 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 that it was Roseman who crafted the expensive contracts of DeMarco Murray and Byron Maxwell last offseason, both of whom have since been traded away after their performance fell below expectations.
After Kelly’s departure, Roseman was promoted to the executive vice president of football operations and the Eagles hired Doug Pederson as head coach.
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 that it was Kelly who requested control over the roster – a charge that Kelly denied on 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 game planning 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.
Follow Lorenzo Reyes on Twitter @LorenzoGReyes.
