Chip Kelly is officially worse than Jim Tomsula after 49ers lose to Jets

On Jan. 1, the San Francisco 49ers fired then-head coach Jim Tomsula after one season and a 5-11 record. On Dec. 11, new head coach Chip Kelly officially declared himself worse than his predecessor with his 12th straight loss.

Sunday’s defeat at the hands of the 4-9 New York Jets dropped the 49ers to 1-12 on the season and pushed Kelly’s career NFL coaching record to 27-33. After starting his run in the big leagues with back-to-back 10-6 seasons, he has bottomed out as the leader of the worst team in the NFC.

Kelly, however, wasn’t exactly set up to succeed in Santa Clara. The franchise saddled him with a depleted roster that has yet to recover from the wave of retirements and free agent losses that turned a 2013 Super Bowl participant into an easy win for visiting opponents. The 49ers also have one of the league’s least enviable quarterback situations, as Colin Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert have combined to complete just 55 percent of their passes while throwing for an awful 6.4 yards per attempt.

San Francisco is in the midst of a rebuild, and bottoming out in an otherwise lost year is a great way to begin the process. The 49ers are a safe bet to earn a top-two pick in the 2017 NFL Draft, and while there’s no franchise quarterback waiting for a new home this spring, they’ll be able to find a potential superstar to lead the franchise out of these dark times.

If the plan was to hit the reset button with a high draft pick, Kelly has done a tremendous job. The former Oregon coach made waves in Philadelphia with his attempts to rebuild the Eagles’ roster with his own players. However, that shift ran several beloved players out of town — DeSean Jackson and LeSean McCoy among them — and eventually turned a 10-6 playoff team into a 6-9 afterthought before being fired. New head coach Doug Pederson is still trying to extinguish the dumpster fire Kelly left raging in fewer than three seasons on the job.

A 1-12 start may be the method behind Kelly’s madness, but it didn’t take a high-profile coach to lose games on the West Coast. No matter how the 49ers finish, they’ll be worse in 2016 with their new high-profile head coach than they were in 2015 with Tomsula.