Oregon coaching search: Chip Kelly gone, Mark Helfrich believed to be successor

Older readers will remember Frost best as the quarterback at Nebraska during the mid-90s. Frost won two national championships with the Cornhuskers, and went 24-2 while the starter in Lincoln. During his senior season in Lincoln in 1997, Frost became only the 10th player in college football history to both run and pass for over 1000 yards.

Following a six year NFL career, Frost served as a graduate assistant for Nebraska and Kansas State before becoming an assistant coach at Northern Iowa for two seasons.

Newly-minted Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich is facing a daunting task in Eugene: Replacing Chip Kelly, who went 46-7 in four seasons with the Ducks. It’s a tall order for the 39-year-old Helfrich, who has never been a head coach before. Helfrich has spent the last four years as Kelly’s offensive coordinator in Eugene, though, and as he told Colin Cowherd of ESPN Radio, he does not expect much to change with Kelly gone:

Prior to joining Kelly’s staff at Oregon, Helfrich was offensive coordinator for Dan Hawkins at Colorado. He also served as Dirk Koetter’s quarterbacks coach at Arizona State and Boise State. While those coaches may have influenced him, his scheme at Oregon will borrow much more from Kelly than the pro-style attacks of his other mentors.

With the specter of NCAA violations hanging over Oregon, the university’s contract with new head football coach Mark Helfrich has specific and far-reaching stipulations about how the coach must handle potential breaches of NCAA rules -- and how he’ll be penalized if he doesn’t.

Helfrich isn’t just tasked with not breaking NCAA rules, he’s supposed to “actively look for red flags of potential violation” per Steve Berkowitz of USA Today. The contract features a ten-point list of Helfrich’s responsibility with regards to preventing violations, and mandates that he meet with the athletic director, Rob Mullens, annually to discuss potential compliance issues and how to handle them. Berkowitz called the extent of the contract’s stipulations “extraordinary in scope and detail.”

A few weeks ago, when everyone assumed that Chip Kelly was going to leave Oregon for Cleveland, SB Nation’s Jason Kirk sent me a message suggesting a Chip Kelly Spillymeal. However, once Chip woke up and realized he’d be living next to a river that bursts into flames every once in awhile, he quickly thought better and decided to stay at Oregon. The Chip Kelly meal got shelved until next year, it seemed. On Wednesday, we received an unexpected surprise, as the Eagles somehow convinced Chip that getting booed in the second quarter of Week 2 would be a better alternative to the listless depression of Cleveland. More importantly, the Chip Kelly meal was back on. Surely, no other sports story could surpass that on Wednesday, right? In any case, Chip will be hungry after moving all of his stuff east, so let’s give him a hearty meatloaf dinner, shall we?

STEP 1: I’ve never made meatloaf. It seemed easy enough. Just pile a bunch of meat in a pan and bake it for an hour. It turns out, blending a pork chop is difficult because they have ‘bones’ and ‘gristle’ that ‘break’ blender motors. So I had to call an audible here (football term!). We will use some softer meats for our dinner:

Oregon ended up interviewing Stanford’s Pep Hamilton after Kelly’s departure, but the top target to replace Kelly was always Helfrich.

Oregon doesn’t have much time until National Signing Day (three weeks and counting), so Oregon wasted no time in hiring Helfrich. Chief among Helfrich’s concerns is assuaging recruits that the status quo holds in Eugene, and that there is nothing to fear from the NCAA regarding the investigation into improper recruiting practices.

As rumors of Kelly’s possible departure for the NFL began to swirl in recent weeks, multiple media outlets reported that the Ducks had a plan in place to replace their head coach. Oregon would simply promote offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, the same action the school took with Kelly when former head coach Mike Bellotti retired after the 2008 season.

As it turns out, executing such a plan would likely violate Oregon state law, which says the school must interview at least one qualified minority candidate or make a good-faith attempt to find such a candidate. Helfrich is white, and Hamilton is black.

Despite earlier rumors that Oregon would promote offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich to replace Chip Kelly after the head coach decided to take the Philadelphia Eagles job, athletic director Rob Mullens said in a press conference that the school would have an open coaching search, saying that there was “no leader in the clubhouse”.

Mullens indicated that although there are a “a number of internal candidates”, no one person is in the driver’s seat to take the job. Many had reported earlier that Helfrich would step up, much as Kelly had risen from offensive coordinator before him, but Mullens said that was not the case, saying that the school would definitely be interviewing outsiders as they look for a perfect fit for a “unique” program. The athletic director said that no interim coach would be appointed.

Kelly’s potential move to the NFL has been a looming specter for some time, but Wilson had been sending out conflicting messages regarding how it would impact his recruitment. The consensus four-star running back told SportsDayHS recently at the Under Armour game that if Kelly left “it would be back to square one.”

That statement conflicts with others that he has made in the past:

There are reasons to criticize the hire. Kelly’s likely getting a daunting level of personnel control, he’s never worked for a NFL franchise and there’s no telling how his systems (on the field and off) will translate to a different league.

But the three reasons Evans chose to use to discredit the hire (he calls it, “one of the worst hires in pro football history,” and says it, “simply won’t work”) have nothing to do with anything.

The Oregon Ducks didn’t have to wait long to get some tough recruiting news regarding the departure of Chip Kelly to the NFL. Tyree Robinson reported that he and his twin Tyrell will reopen their recruitment and take a look around the college football landscape. The twins do remain committed to Oregon, but are willing to listen to select schools like USC and Notre Dame.

And Ohio State didn’t waste any time trying to gain the interest of the twins, as they offered the twins just around an hour after the announcement.

WAIT WHAA--- Yup. Weeks after Chip Kelly effectively ended his flirtation with no fewer than three NFL teams, Chip Kelly has left Oregon for the Philadelphia Eagles. Remember when every NFL INSIDER said that Chip had ruined his chance to become an NFL coach by turning teams down? Ah, that was fun being right for 10 days or so, wasn’t it?

But he said he was staying and-- Evidently not. Maybe the delays came down to negotiations over his powers in Philadelphia, or Kelly’s indecision, or the fickle demands of attorneys hammering out the details in a darkened conference room. Whatever the delay between Kelly’s initial interview and today’s announcement was, it’s done. The era of the Blur offense at Oregon under Kelly is over.

Since November, Oregon offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich has been expected to be named Oregon’s head coach in the event of a Chip Kelly exit. Wednesday, it was announced Kelly has decided to move onto the NFL as the new coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. Helfrich’s promotion could be made official during Oregon’s 5 p.m. ET Wednesday press conference.

Helfrich has coached at Oregon since 2009, replacing Kelly as offensive coordinator when Kelly replaced Mike Bellotti as head coach. Helfrich also took on the additional responsibilities as quarterbacks coach. Since Helfrich took over, the Ducks have finished near the top of every offensive category the past four years, particularly scoring and rushing yards.

Despite being the offensive coordinator at Oregon, Helfrich was not the playcaller for the Ducks (that role belonged to Kelly). He mostly spent his time in the box relaying defensive alignments and formations to Kelly, who would then call plays based off this information. Helfrich would almost certainly take over Kelly’s role and thus hire a new offensive coordinator to handle duties in the box.

With the news that Chip Kelly has left the Oregon Ducks to become the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, many Oregon fans are left to wonder how the Ducks will recruit without Kelly and with a serious case before the NCAA.

The good news? Oregon shouldn’t lose much. The bad news? Oregon really didn’t have much to lose.

But Oregon players ain’t mad. The early reaction from Chip Kelly’s players tells you a lot about the way he ran his program -- you could call the reaction surprise, but there doesn’t seem to be any bitterness just yet. It likely helps that the Ducks already pretty much know who’s taking over the program next, too.

As for Oregon’s likely next coach? The welcome mat has already been laid out:

Update, 12:22 p.m. ET: This is official, according to PhiladelphiaEagles.com. There’s no article at their site yet.

Chip Kelly will be the next coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, according to ESPN’s Chris Mortensen (and FOX’s Jay Glazer confirms). This comes less than two weeks after Kelly turned down the Eagles to remain at Oregon.

With Doug Marrone and Bill O’Brien also off the board (to the Bills and back to Penn State, respectively), it’s pretty safe to say the Eagles will not be hiring a college coach, though Terry Bowden forever lurks. Bruce Arians, Jay Gruden and Gus Bradley appear to be among the next names on the list.

In four years as Ducks head coach, Kelly has been to four BCS bowls, winning the most recent two, and swept the national coach of the year awards in 2010. His offensive attack has finished in the nation’s top 10 for five of the last six years and in the top five for three straight years now. The two-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year was previously Oregon’s offensive coordinator, plucked by Mike Bellotti from way out in New Hampshire.

La Canfora tweeted earlier he believed Kelly would be staying at Oregon based on what his sources were telling him. Some of the more powerful people at Oregon didn’t understate Kelly’s importance to the university, telling Rob Moseley Kelly’s return would be “the greatest comeback in the history of Oregon.“

When we see coaches leveraging open jobs, the typical reaction is to follow the money. Whether taking a new, higher paying job or keeping the same job with a raise, the coaching carousel is almost always about the Benjamins. From November through January, it’s not at all uncommon to see rumors pop up, only to watch as a coach announces they’re happy in their present situation -- an announcement that typically comes with a contract extension and pay increase. None of this is the case with Chip Kelly.

Right now, Kelly is playing a game with NFL teams. He’s wanted, just as he was last year. Kelly’s stock remains high, giving him an incredible amount of leverage in negotiations with NFL teams. Add in the fact that he can happily walk away and go back to Oregon, and you’ve got a situation where Kelly holds all the cards.

Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ian Rapoport of NFL.com, Mary Kay Cabot of the Plain Dealer and Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports are all reporting that Chip Kelly is leaning towards staying at Oregon, once again turning down the opportunity to join the NFL ranks.

According to one report, issues of roster control were a key point in the negotiations between Kelly and the NFL teams pursuing him. The Eagles left most the personnel matters to Andy Reid when he was the coach there, with GM Howie Roseman handling cap and contract matters with aplomb. Cleveland’s structure, or what they offered Kelly, isn’t so clear.

On Saturday night, Kelly was reportedly meeting with the Eagles. According to Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that meeting ran long and forced him to miss a date with the Browns in which he was supposedly going to start hammering out contract details.

A deal with the Browns was said to be close on Friday afternoon, which sure looks like a convenient way to setup his Saturday meeting with the Eagles. Now, reports are coming out of Philadelphia that the team’s brass is doing all they can to woo the coach. There was even a report that the Eagles and Kelly were close to a deal.

The Bills fired Chan Gailey at the end of this season after the team finished 6-10 and in last place in the AFC East division. Gailey spent the last three seasons with the Bills.

Chip Kelly has been the head coach at Oregon since 2009 and is coming off a 35-17 win over Kansas State in this year’s Fiesta Bowl. The Cleveland Browns interviewed Kelly on Friday, and the Philadelphia Eagles were also set to interview the Ducks coach.

Kelly has been the head coach at Oregon since 2009, compiling a 46-7 record, four years at the top of the Pac-10/Pac-12 standings and three division championships, two trips to the Rose Bowl, one to the Fiesta Bowl, and one to the BCS National Championship Game.

The Browns have not had a winning season since 2007, and an ownership change in 2012 brought about the dismissal of head coach Pat Shurmur and general manager Tom Heckert. The Bills have a similar recent history, with their last winning season coming in 2004, while the Eagles have suffered more high-profile failures.

Kelly, 49, has served as the head coach at Oregon since the 2009 season and was the team’s offensive coordinator for the two seasons prior. He had coaching experience at New Hampshire, Johns Hopkins and Columbia in the 17 seasons prior.

On Monday, the Browns fired general manager Tom Heckert and head coach Pat Shurmur after the team finished with a 5-11 record. The Browns’ offense ranked No. 24 in the NFL in points scored and No. 25 in yardage gained. The team has just one winning season in the last 10 years, but has not made the playoffs since 2002.

So why are NFL owners so adamantly chasing Chip Kelly?

Most of the commentariate can’t seem to get past his new-fangled offense, the one that made Oregon so prolific during Kelly’s last three years as a head coach and two more prior to that as the offensive coordinator. There’s good reason for that. At Oregon, Kelly implemented one of the most prolific offenses in college football.

Kelly had declined to speak about his coaching future until this point, as the coach and his staff prepared for the Fiesta Bowl.

Here’s Kelly, from the report: