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Chip Kelly may have downgraded from his previous role as a head coach when he became the offensive coordinator at Ohio State, but there was a silver lining based on his response to a question about the biggest differences between those two jobs.
As is the case with virtually every person who’s served as the head coach of a football team at the college or NFL level, Chip Kelly spent plenty of time paying his dues while working his way up the ranks.
The man who played defensive back at the University of New Hampshire spent time as a positions coach at a handful of fairly unheralded programs before working as the offensive coordinator at his alma mater for eight years, and his performance there led to him being hired for the same position at the University of Oregon in 2007.
Kelly got his big break a couple of years later when he replaced Mike Bellotti as the head coach of the Ducks, which marked the start of an incredibly impressive four-year tenure where he posted a 33-3 record while leading the team to a BCS bowl every single season he was there.
In 2013, Kelly made the fairly inevitable leap to the NFL when he was hired as the head coach of the Eagles. Unfortunately, he was unable to replicate his previous success at the next level, and a disastrous one-year stint with the 49ers in 2016 preceded a six-year run at UCLA where he never came close to recapturing the magic of his time at Oregon.
Kelly was expected to return as the head coach of the Bruins in 2024, but things took an interesting turn when he decided to defect to Ohio State to fill the offensive coordinator void that formed when Bill O’Brien departed for Boston College in the wake of Jeff Hafley’s departure.
It was a fairly surprising pivot, but Kelly seems to have settled in just fine with a Buckeyes team that’s currently ranked at #3 after getting off to a 4-0.
On Tuesday, the 60-year-old OC shed some light on an overlooked upside that came with accepting the position, as he noted “You can go to the bathroom between series if you have to” when a reporter asked him about the biggest differences between being in the booth and roaming the sideline.
I asked Chip Kelly what the biggest difference so far has been in being an offensive coordinator vs head coach
“You can go to the bathroom between series” pic.twitter.com/bSR4oCHV9Z
— Adam King (@AdamKing10TV) October 1, 2024
Never change, Chip. Never change.