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Chip Kelly, SUPERGENIUS: The Next Chapter

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One lesson of Chip Kelly’s regrettable flameout in Philadephia is that in the NFL there are severe limits to how much good tactical coaching can overcome inferior personnel. One person who has apparently not learned this lesson, alas, is apparently Chip Kelly. I think he deserves another shot as an NFL coach. But this gig — for a badly run franchise with bad ownership and a hollowed-out roster sharing a division with two of the best five organizations in the NFL — is really one he should have passed on. I suppose there is a ray of hope with Kaepernick — an above-average QB as recently as 2013, although you can’t like the trajectory or injury history — but I think he’s really setting himself up to fail here.

Having said that, Kelly’s decision-making isn’t the real story here. I can understand Kelly not wanting to sit out the year, and he’s hardly alone among potential NFL coaches in overestimating what he can do with a limited roster — indeed, to be a successful coach you probably have to think that way to some extent. But this is part of a sequence of just astonishing incompetence on the part of the 49ers. In 2011, Jim Harbaugh took over an underachieving 6-10 team and immediately went 13-3, 11-4, and 12-4 without a top-level QB. He was one play away from winning a Super Bowl and one play away from making two more. Admittedly, Harbaugh can be faulted for some of his decisions in those close losses — as I said recently about the Pats/Broncos game, having untested second-stringers return punts when your top returner gets hurt is a classic far-more-downside-than-upside blunder that cost his team its first shot at the Super Bowl.

But the fact that someone with a strong case as the best coach in the history of the sport also made this mistake recently shows what a minor quibble this kind of thing is. Harbaugh did a spectacular job. He did have one 8-8 season, and maybe that shows he was losing it (although the 49ers were considering getting rid of him even before that.) A much more plausible explanation is that the 49ers personnel evaluation has been an utter trainwreck since Scot McCloughan left. The fact that in a power dispute between Trent Baalke and Harbaugh York sided with the former was just remarkably dumb. Compounding the ineptitude, the 49ers didn’t have a major coaching candidate lined up as a replacement, but instead gave the job to a guy they didn’t even think merited a coordinator position before he was promoted, with predictable results. Kelly is certainly a step up from Tomsula. But the only possible reason for firing Harbaugh is that he’s a Tough Person To Work With whose act would wear on his players and make it difficult for the front office to collaborate with him. So they decided to replace him with…Chip Kelly, who demanded full personnel control with 2 years of NFL experience under his belt and who players were ripping in the media even when he was winning (and also has a track record that’s decent but distinctly inferior to Harbaugh’s.) Although maybe giving total control to Kelly is the long-term plan — if you like Trent Baalke picking your players, you’ll love Chip.

As a Seahawks fan, I hope they clone York so that he can operate the team in perpetuity.

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