Nick Piccone
Chip Kelly spoke with the media today and opened up a bit on what exactly happened last season while he was with the Eagles. Much was made of his ascension to having full control of the roster, but during the season, Kelly mentioned he wasn’t in charge.
That stuck in the craw of Eagles owner, Jeffrey Lurie, who basically called him a liar after he fired him. But Kelly maintained that he wasn’t the one that had full control.
Chip Kelly said that Howie Roseman negotiated the Byron Maxwell and DeMarco Murray contracts last offseason.
— Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 23, 2016
Chip Kelly said that he didn't have any contact with Howie Roseman last year even though Roseman was in charge of the cap.
— Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 23, 2016
Chip Kelly on trust w/ Howie Roseman: "It was just a weird situation. He was there for two years and then he wasn't there for one year."
— Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) March 23, 2016
Kelly would identify players he wanted, relayed it to Roseman (through Marynowitz) without command of financial implications.
— Tim McManus (@Tim_McManus) March 23, 2016
On Wednesday morning, Kelly said that he had no contact with Howie Roseman last year, and anything that was relayed to him was through Ed Marynowitz. Kelly also said he had no say over the contracts, and that Roseman was still the guy who put them together.
Asked if the structure wasn’t a productive way to do business, Kelly said, “Yeah, you would think.”
He said it was Lurie’s construct.
“I wasn’t the personnel guy. I was in charge of the 90-man roster,” Kelly said during the NFC coaches breakfast. “But I didn’t negotiate and say this guy gets this amount of money and that guy gets that amount of money. That wasn’t what I did.
“And Ed was the one who ran our personnel department. That really fell on Ed’s shoulders in terms of how he handled everything. And Ed communicated with him all the time.”
…
But when he began to be asked questions about the front-office structure, Kelly opened up. He again said he didn’t ask for final say, although Lurie has said that he did and that he did so to hold him accountable.
“I didn’t like the way it was, but I didn’t ask for anything,” Kelly said. “It’s [Lurie’s] organization and his team. He can run it however he wants to run it. It wasn’t like I’m walking out the door.”
Kelly said that the firing of former vice president of player personnel Tom Gamble in December 2014 led him to question the direction the organization was headed. He said he would have been content just hiring a general manager. Lurie chose to keep both, however.
Asked if he thought having Roseman still in the building undermined his ability to run the team, Kelly said, “I never really saw him so I don’t know what he did on a daily basis.”
Was there trust between the two?
“It was just a weird situation,” Kelly said. “He was there for two years and then he wasn’t there for one year.”
Lurie said yesterday that he had Roseman study successful front offices from the sporting world during his year away from evaluation. Asked if his time away was only temporary, Lurie said that there was always the “potential” that Roseman would return to power.
Roseman, in January, took some responsibility for the decoration of his relationship with Kelly.
“I just didn’t think we were on the same page,” Kelly said.
That’s actually quite interesting. Roseman was quick to get rid of Byron Maxwell’s and DeMarco Murray’s contract this offseason – contracts that Kelly says Roseman was responsible for. They were bad contracts, and everybody knew that. But when he re-signed guys like Zach Ertz, Brent Celek, and Vinny Curry while bringing in guys like Rodney McLeod and Leodis McKelvin, the contracts were largely lauded by many as being fantastic manipulation of the salary cap while bringing in really good players that the team needed direly.
So, was Roseman sabotaging Kelly if he was the one really responsible for putting those contracts together? How could he re-sign those Was it because Maxwell and Murray were NFL SUPERSTARS and Roseman had no choice but to put together a bad contract? Or was Kelly really pulling the strings the whole time? This mess has become even more confusing.
It isn’t a good look for Kelly to be pointing the fingers at everyone else, but that’s what he’s basically doing. He’s not taking any responsibility for anything. Should he? Who knows?