Chip Kelly, The Eagles Mess, And The Triumph Of The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle is a delicious idea, although it hasn't necessarily improved most workplaces or our government or most other large institutions. Essentially, the idea is that people get promoted one level beyond their ability to do a job.

It keeps happening because it makes a perverse sort of sense. Do a good job and you get a promotion with more responsibilities. Congratulations! Do a good job there and you'll get another promotion with more responsibilities. Congratulations! Do a lousy job there and what happens? Nothing! They don't send you back. You just stay there, fucking up for eternity, or until the 401(k) vests. The truly wonderful part is the person promoted beyond their capabilities isn't really the one who suffers. After all, that person has a job, and presumably a pretty good one! The suffering runs downhill, thick and constant, onto those left to deal most directly with the incompetence.

This is a story about the unfair things that have happened to Chip Kelly, who left the University of Oregon three years ago to become head coach of the Eagles. He took over a team that had gone 4-12 and took them to the playoffs. Very impressive! Then, last season, he won 10 games again and only missed the playoffs through a tie-breaker and ridiculous NFL seeding rules. By Football Outsiders DVOA metric, which measures overall team quality, the Eagles were the seventh best team in football last season. A few changes here or there and they'd seem a good bet to contend for the division crown again.

Instead, a new GM arrived and blew the team to hell. This GM traded the starting quarterback, cut a bunch of offensive linemen, traded one of the NFL's best backs and then signed two starting running backs for big money, and let the best starting wide receiver leave in free agency. There's probably more but you get the gist. It was a bloodletting and it completely gutted the team Kelly had run so successfully. You'd think Kelly would be furious at this new GM, and probably normally he would have been—except for the fact the new GM was Chip Kelly. This is now an article about what Chip Kelly has done to Chip Kelly.

It's unclear how it happened, but last offseason Kelly managed to elbow out GM Howie Roseman and take full control of the organization despite never having come close to running a draft room, scouting NFL players, or dealing with the notoriously complicated NFL salary cap. And now, 10 games into the present season, we can say with some authority: wow did this dude ever fuck it up.

The real loss though is greater than Eagles fans being forced to endure another crappy season, or the simple and unnecessary destruction of a decent football team. The real loss, and what Kelly the GM has effectively destroyed, is for anyone to able to take Kelly the coach's inventive ideas seriously. These are ideas the NFL had never seen before, and ideas that were starting to work. The NFL is a horrendously copycat league. It's also a don't-ask-questions league. Coaches do things a certain way not necessarily because that's the best way to do it, but because that's how they've seen it done and they haven't put a bit of thought into it beyond that. Kelly was not like that. He thought it through, and he thought about it in a way other coaches mostly don't.

In fact, he thought everything through. He was revolutionizing how teams train, how they practice, how they approach conditioning and even player nutrition. In doing all this—and by calling some interesting plays on offense—Kelly was putting his team in position to win by using these new-to-the-NFL methods he picked up and developed during his rise through the college ranks.

But, even as Kelly the coach's ideas were working—the first two seasons are evidence enough of that—Kelly the GM came in and sabotaged them. The NFL needs people like Kelly to show up from time to time and point out how stupid everyone has been. They needed Bill Walsh when he showed up, and Don Shula back in the 1970s. And now they need Kelly to show them how to practice, how to avoid injuries, and how to get the most out of their players—not just how to coach a modern football team, but how to most effectively manage one.

But they won't get Kelly the coach to show them those things because Kelly the GM has ruined Kelly the Coach's team and nobody, in the NFL or anywhere else, takes ideas from losers. The only thing that could prevent him from succeeding was his ego. And eventually it did.

Because of this, Kelly has effectively TP'ed his own house. The Eagles may yet make a run this season, but that's more due to the unholy mess that is the NFC East. Even that run seems less likely by the week, though. These Eagles are bad, and the moves Kelly has made as GM have neatly undone his great work as a head coach. This could and even should have been Kelly's year, too. Instead his team is 4-6, deeply dysfunctional and fresh off getting kicked around by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; the incessant rumors that he'll return to college have never seemed less rumor-y, or more sensible. And the fact so many college programs appear so eager to hire him is yet another endorsement of Kelly the coach. It could have been different with the Eagles, but instead it's this—in large part because Kelly Peter Principle'd himself into a job he couldn't do, and because there was no one to tell him no.