Chips are up for UO’s Kelly

Oregon’s offensive coordinator is a hot coaching commodity

By jason vondersmith

The Portland Tribune, Nov 25, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

UO had quarterback turmoil early on, but offensive coordinator Chip Kelly has stuck with Jeremiah Masoli for the past eight starts.

JONATHAN FERREY / GETTY IMAGES

EUGENE – Chip Kelly, Oregon’s superb assistant football coach, will be getting married next year to fiancee Kobi Biagini.

It’ll be a departure for Kelly, because he basically has been married to his job. The 44-year-old New Hampshire native has ascended to an elite status in college football coaching – just look at the numbers: 39 points and 463 yards per game since he took over as UO offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach and put his touch on the spread offense.

Countless hours on the job – it’s the nature of being an assistant coach. Kelly figures he works 80 to 85 hours per week during the football season.

The nuptials will take place in February or July, “depending on my football schedule,” he says.

And things figure only to get more intense for Kelly, a hot commodity in the coaching business. Openings exist for head coaching jobs at Washington, Tennessee and Clemson, for instance. More opportunities are sure to come up, maybe even to leave Oregon to become an offensive coordinator elsewhere.

Duck coach Mike Bellotti says nobody has contacted him about wanting to interview Kelly yet, but Bellotti expects to hear from other schools wanting permission to talk to him.

Kelly has a lucrative, escalating contract with the Ducks and enjoys a superstar status among UO athletic department administrators. The Ducks might not want to let him go. But everybody at Oregon figures it’s just a matter of time before Kelly leaves, unless it’s a situation in which he stays to someday replace Bellotti.

“Do I aspire to be a head coach? Yes,” Kelly says, as he chomps on dinner in his Casanova Center office, enjoying a little window of free time. “Would I be interested in talking with somebody? That’s not my call. I don’t control whether people call me.

“I just coach and get ready for the next opponent. It’s not time for me to be looking for another job. You cross that bridge when you get there. I have an agent, and I don’t have to deal with that stuff. We talk all the time; he deals with that stuff.”

Bellotti says Kelly is ready to be a head coach but also says being the head man is a lot different and “less about coaching football.” Kelly’s fondness for teaching players and drawing up game plans probably would be limited by other peripheral things.

Kelly looks up to Bellotti, a former UO offensive coordinator who seems to balance the responsibilities, although Bellotti sometimes yearns to simply coach football again.

“Mike’s really organized, and he does a great job of delegating,” Kelly says. “He runs the whole program, like the CEO here.

“Am I the CEO type? I haven’t been there yet. When you become a head coach, you’ve got to be your own person. I can’t be Mike Bellotti. If I tried to be Mike Bellotti, then I wouldn’t do a good job.”

The Ducks plucked Kelly from New Hampshire in 2007, after Gary Crowton left for LSU despite Bellotti’s enticing offer to try to get him to stay. Kelly had been at New Hampshire for 14 years.

“The money’s better (here), but it doesn’t matter to me,” he says. “I wanted to do it somewhere else. It’s a challenge to go to another program.”

UO graduate assistant Eddy Morrisey sat in on the interviews, already armed with some knowledge of Kelly. Morrisey grew up 20 minutes away from Kelly in New Hampshire, met him while serving as graduate assistant at Plymouth State College and coached against him while an assistant at Massachusetts.

“They asked my opinion,” Morrisey remembers, “and I said, ‘You’d be foolish if you didn’t hire this guy.’

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