BOCA RATON, Fla. — The Chip Kelly as personnel czar experiment didn’t live to see its first birthday.
Despite its short run, the experiment left a pile of rubble in its wake.
A pretty expensive lesson, isn’t it, Jeffrey Lurie?
“The expense of the lesson is just time, it’s not money,” Lurie said on Tuesday at the annual NFL owners meetings. “We’re all about wanting to win big. No amount of money will ever prevent us. We’re all in, as you know. It’s all about winning championships for Philadelphia. So we lost some time, we didn’t lose in the classic way of expense. It was a time expense.”
Basically, the Eagles lost at least the year they had Kelly in power, and possibly more, depending on how irreparable the damage turns out to be.
Former general manager and current de facto general manager Howie Roseman is trying to do his part to repair the organization, and Lurie even said the work Roseman has done this offseason has been “outstanding” (see story).
Last year, Lurie explained the decision to give Kelly personnel power as an opportunity to maximize Kelly’s potential. Lurie wanted the organization to go from good to great.
NFL
That didn’t happen and Kelly was fired before the end of the 2015 season.
Giving Kelly that personnel power clearly didn’t work out, but still, it’s not a move Lurie regrets.
“I think it was a necessary way to go to find out if Chip was the right guy,” Lurie said. “Let him be responsible for all the decisions that he wanted to inject and make. No question I have that it was the right way to dissect if Chip was going to be the right guy going forward or not. We dissected it and decided with all of the great things he brought, he wasn’t the right person going forward. And it was helpful for him to be accountable for those decisions so we could move on in a great way.”