San Francisco 49ers Set Franchise Further Back By Hiring Chip Kelly

Well, it is official. The San Francisco 49ers have made another disastrous hire. After parting ways with Jim Harbaugh last offseason, the team fired another head coach this offseason in Jim Tomsula. While Tomsula needed to go, the 49ers needed to bring in a head coach with a history of being able to improve rosters and coach up players. The man they chose to do the job, Chip Kelly, does not possess either of those skills and could drive the 49ers into the ground.

Last year was Kelly’s third in the NFL as a head coach, and there were some high expectations for him going into the season. After assuming the general manager duties, it was widely believed that Kelly finally had the roster he could coach into a championship caliber team. He had gotten rid of the team’s top three offensive weapons in Nick Foles, LeSean McCoy and Jeremy Maclin, but the replacements, DeMarco Murray, Sam Bradford and Nelson Agholor, were supposed to be better fits for the scheme.

Instead, Kelly got a rude awakening when the three replacements did not play up to their potential. Murray had a particularly rough season. He hated Kelly’s east-west running scheme and towards the end of the year, he lost snaps to Ryan Mathews and Darren Sproles. Elsewhere, the team’s defense struggled mightily and was the third worst in the league in yardage allowed. Big free agent acquisition cornerback Byron Maxwell was only mediocre in coverage, and the rest of the secondary wasn’t much good either.

What happened was Kelly’s scheme failed because his team was not talented enough and Kelly could not relate to the players well enough to coach them effectively. Despite having the type of players he wanted, things just did not work out. Kelly needs to realize that he must find talented players who fit into his scheme, not just players who satisfy the latter need. This could be a major issue if Kelly makes the same mistakes in San Francisco.

Also, this partnership will be a major problem, because the power structure is going to create a lot of issues among the team. Kelly essentially chased Howie Roseman out of the general manager position in Philadelphia, while the 49ers chased Harbaugh out of town by not compromising enough with him. Both parties are power hungry and will fight for control of the 53-man roster. This will pit Kelly against GM Trent Baalke and owner Jed York, and that is likely to cause some serious tension in the front office.

There are definitely some good parts for the 49ers adding Kelly as their head coach, especially in regards to Colin Kaepernick, but there is likely to be more bad than good in this relationship. Kelly probably won’t last long in San Francisco, so 49ers fans can’t expect too much from him over the next few years.