On Thursday afternoon the San Francisco 49ers announced that they hired Chip Kelly to be the new head coach of their team. Kelly was fired by the Philadelphia Eagles.
Kelly was a great head coach for Philadelphia for the first two years of his tenure there. The Eagles won 10 games both seasons. He installed high-tempo, exciting offenses that wore other teams down and ran the football extremely well. They seemed destined for years of dominance in the NFC East.
Then Chip Kelly the general manager had to go and muck everything up.
For how good Kelly was as a coach, he was that bad (and worse) as a general manager. He let go of the perfect running back for his system in LeSean McCoy and brought in DeMarco Murray, who promptly had his worst season ever as a pro. He got rid of Nick Foles and paid to bring in Sam Bradford, who spent most of his first year with the team trying to figure out Kelly’s offense.
Kelly, as the GM, took a team that won 10 games in back-to-back seasons and turned it into a 7-9 team.
In San Francisco, Kelly won’t have to be the general manager. The team already has a GM in Trent Baalke. (How good a job he’s done is something up for debate, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Kelly only has to coach. That’s it. He can leave the roster-building, something he’s proven incompetent at, to someone else.
This is also interesting because it raises the question: Are the 49ers now intent on keeping Colin Kaepernick? Kaepernick is owed $12 million if the team keeps him, but with the hiring of Kelly, who’s proven adept at getting the most out of mobile quarterbacks, it may be a sign that San Francisco is not quitting on the QB.
The 49ers’ issues will not be fixed overnight. This roster is a mess. It needs a lot of work. But Kelly is a good hire for head coach. He’s shown he can do that. He just can’t let other things get in his way.