Chip Kelly: "As a coach, your job is to be a problem solver"

Chip Kelly has been extraordinarily successful in his first year as Northwestern's offensive coordinator. Because he's Chip Kelly, his name is populating the early hot boards for the coaching jobs that have popped open this cycle. 

Which is funny, because it seems a complete understanding of what makes Chip Kelly successful as Northwestern's offensive coordinator, which is why his name is on those lists in the first place.

Kelly walked away from the UCLA head coaching job after the 2023 season not because he wasn't good at it -- the Bruins won 25 games in his final three seasons -- but because being a head coach of a college football program in an era of constant roster turnover was the opposite of why he got into coaching. 

"Ryan Gunderson, who's a great quarterbacks coach, left to go to Oregon State as a coordinator, so he wasn't there. So I actually coached the quarterbacks for the bowl game," Kelly recalled after taking the Ohio State offensive coordinator job. 

"I had started to think, ‘I haven't actually coached a position since 2008.' I think my wife remarked, 'I haven't seen you this happy in a long time.' To me, the best part of football is football. So, you've got to do football and not do some of the things involved with what a head coach does."

Being Ohio State's offensive coordinator was about as "all ball" a job there is in college football but after helping the Buckeyes to the 2024 national title, he left for a job where recruiting occupied 5 percent of his workload to none at all. Because the Raiders are the Raiders, that arrangement lasted 11 games, and now he's at Northwestern.

At Northwestern, Kelly is "all ball" again.

"Just coach football, and [don't] worry about anything else," NU AD Rick Jackson said recalled of his pitch to Kelly in a piece on ESPN. "Go in and design plays and work with incredibly bright young men that have a tremendous capacity for a lot of complexities in his offense."

One of the best living historians of the game, Kelly has reached deep into his bag to scheme up ways for the Wildcats to move the football. A week after rushing for 32 yards in a close loss to Indiana, Northwestern broke out a modern Wing T and rushed for 413 in a 34-13 win over Penn State.

Kelly doesn't do that stuff to impress the Ball Knowers, he does it because he has to:

"I don't think of coaching as being creative," he told ESPN. "As a coach, your job is to be a problem solver. What's the problem that's presented to you, and how do you solve the problem? That's it."

As Kelly said later in the piece, no one would be doing deep dives into the Northwestern offense if the Wildcats were losing 35-7 every week. 

The whole piece is worth a read.