As 2013 dawned, then-Oregon Ducks coach Chip Kelly was the hottest name on the market. Now, he may never be a head coach in the NFL again.
According to Saturday night reports by NFL Network and ESPN, the San Francisco 49ers are firing both Kelly and general manager Trent Baalke, in a housecleaning Niners’ top brass must hope will turn around a franchise that has gone from NFC Champion and Super Bowl XLVII appearance to a three-win season at best in just five years.
Baalke has made a mess of the 49ers in his six years as GM. While the team had an unprecedented offseason in early 2015, with several top players opting to retire, Baalke did little to replace them – he had roughly $60 million in salary cap space heading into free agency earlier this year, and did nothing with it.
Add in sub-par drafts, and it’s a big part of the reason San Francisco is where it is.
But perhaps Baalke’s biggest misstep was shoving head coach Jim Harbaugh out the door after the 2014 season.
Harbaugh turned the 49ers around almost immediately upon being hired in 2011, taking a 6-10 team in 2010 to a 13-3 record and spot in the NFC title game in his first year. In four seasons under Harbaugh, San Francisco totaled 44 regular-season wins; the team had 46 wins over the eight seasons before his hiring.
And they’ve had just seven (possibly eight if the Niners win Sunday against the Seattle Seahawks) since his departure.
Baalke’s firing seemed like a necessary move at this point, and it stood to reason that Kelly might be collateral damage, despite being hired just a year ago – a new general manager almost always wants to pick his own coach.
Whoever San Francisco hires, he will be the fourth head coach the team has had in four years.
Kelly inherited a team that was a mess; after Baalke got rid of Harbaugh, he turned to the untested Jim Tomsula for 2015, and Tomsula was a disaster nearly from Day One. He, however, did manage to win five games.
The Niners’ roster is thin; they ended last season with Blaine Gabbert as starting quarterback, almost lost Colin Kaepernick in the offseason, and then had to wait for him to rehab from offseason surgeries before seeing if he’d thrive under Kelly, one of the more creative offensive coaches of the last several years.
But with Kelly as head coach, San Francisco lost 11 straight games. After shutting out the Rams in Week 1 to open his tenure as head coach, the 49ers did not win again until Christmas Eve, again against the Rams, who had by then fired their own head coach, Jeff Fisher.
San Francisco was near the bottom of the league in terms of points scored and offensive yards gained; Kaepernick kept his mistakes to a minimum, with 15 touchdowns against just four interceptions in 10 starts, but was throwing to one of the worst receiving groups in the league: Jeremy Kerley, Quinton Patton and Garrett Celek were the top three targets.
As much as they struggled on offense, the Niners had bigger problems on defense. They were last in the league in terms of yards allowed per game, at over 400, and were dead last – by a long shot – against the run, giving up over 170 yards per game.
It’s hard to know what’s next for Kelly. His old job at Oregon came open in December, but Kelly says he has a firm rule: if he has a job, and he’s working that job, he’s not talking about a new job. So with the Niners still in season, he didn’t take any calls about college openings, whether back with the Ducks or anywhere else; Oregon filled its job weeks ago.
Perhaps, where Kelly bounced through two NFL jobs – his record is now 28-34 with one playoff appearance, in his first year with Philadelphia – he’ll take a year off to decompress (his father, Paul, died in early December) and start anew in 2018.
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