The Chipster's Doin' That Bruin Thing

Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good lyric comes to mind:

Just looking for clues at the scene of the crime.

Chip Kelly was wildly successful at Oregon, but it's still believed up and down the West Coast that he didn't just leave for the NFL to accept another challenge.

He was beating the posse outta town.

If nothing else, dude coaxed some serious coin outta the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers during his hiatus from the college game.

Kelly was always gonna return to it.

 

Still, contrary to the optimists around UCLA, Kelly considers recruiting to be a necessary evil. It's his reckless outsourcing of it that got him in trouble at Oregon.

In some ways, the biggest surprise in this deal is that it's even happening at all.

With the exceptions of USC, Oregon, and possibly Arizona State, most donors at Pac-12 schools are more concerned about upper campus than athletic departments. UCLA is in the forefront of that sentiment. If it wasn't for their massive UnderArmour deal, Mora would still be their coach; no way the school woulda sanctioned setting fire to $12million.

The Bruins should be a good match for Kelly's speed-based, wide-gaps system.

It's run-oriented, so Josh Rosen won't return, but he probably wouldn't have done so, anyway.

The question in the next couple of season will be how the other Pac-12 coaches react. They've seen how the NFL cracked his code, so it may well be Kelly's gonna need to keep right on innovating if he's to recapture what he did in Eugene.