Eagles new head coach Chip Kelly is ready for this thing to get started. He’s eager for training camp to get started and next week at this time, the Birds will be on the Nova Care Complex practice field and they’ll be preparing for the 2013 season.
Kelly will have the task of adjusting to the NFL after spending his entire career on the college football level. The coach who talked to a group of media persons at the end of last month’s mini camp, doesn’t seem to awed by the challenge of coaching in the NFL..
“It’s just longer. It’s still the same exact thing. We had 27 opportunities for practice at the NCAA level, and I think we have 28 here. The only difference is we play four games here and we had three scrimmages in college. It’s less (hitting) here than it is in college. In college, you can put the pads on I think by the third day or the second day and then it’s not regulated at all. It’s always been football, though. The only difference is obviously that the season is longer and the size of your roster is different, but the game of football is still the same. It’s still 11-on-11. It’s still us going out there and being more fresh and ready to play than the other team.”
Kelly decided not to take the team up to Allentown, Pennsylvania for the workouts like his predecessor Andy Reid did. The Birds new coach sees advantages to having the boys stay nearby and workout at the Nova Care Complex.
“They’re staying at the hotel. … The first part of camp, everybody’s in there, and then we’ll let them out. But the rookies obviously will stay because they have nowhere to live (for the) first week or so. Then, they’ll go home because they live here. When they’re at Lehigh, they can’t go home. Just to start, so we’re all in the same situation, everybody’s together. Then we’ll break.”
“Meetings at night. Everything’s here (at the NovaCare Complex). The only thing they’re doing there is sleeping.”
“We have a pretty good (cafeteria) here so we’ll do everything here from a meal standpoint. We haven’t talked about (rooming). We haven’t got to the specifics of who’s with who.”
“I just think we have everything here so the fact that we would pack everything up and move, that didn’t make sense to me. All our video stuff is here. Our servers are here. You’re dealing with portable laptops and hoping you can get practice on it. You have issues when it rains up there. Where do you go? Our training facility in terms of how we want to lift (is here). Why would you move everything to go somewhere else?”
He’s right, the rules are very similar and the offense still have the challenge of getting the ball into the end zone, while the defense must find a way to stop them. Still there aren’t a long list of college coaches who come to the Pro level and succeeded. Kelly obviously thinks he will be one of them.
The Birds will practicing at about 12:30 or so every day, which is very close to when their games will be starting during the season and that isn’t an accident.
“That’s when we play. So, 12 or 14 of our 16 games are played at 1 o’ clock, so we try to prepare to play.”
Kelly has a reason for everything he does and of course he’s got a good reason for why he plays the loud music at practice.
“They just have to learn to block it out. It’s like crowd noise. I don’t like crowd noise. That kind of grates to you a little bit. You learn how to perform when you’re not paying attention to anything else except for your time-on-task. It just has to be loud. The particular songs don’t matter. As long as they can get their job accomplished, it depends on how you handle it. It’s just like playing in a game. You need to focus on what you’re supposed to take care of on the field not the crowd itself, not the crowd noise, none of that stuff. “
Kelly refuses to let his coaches stop the flow of practice to correct or teach a player. He demands that the correcting and teaching be done off the field during the position meetings.
It’s time-on-task. If you stop one guy in a drill, then there are 21 other guys standing around, so how much time can you spend on the field? Our educational philosophy here is that, ‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, and I do and I understand,’ so we want them doing it.
“You can only talk so much, and show them so much and tell them so much. They have to actually do it, so when you go to some practices and they only get 15 reps at something and they’ve only run one play one way, just to the left, then the right tackle never got a rep at it, and then you expect him to execute it during the game. Who’s to blame? Us, because we probably didn’t put him in that situation where he had a chance to see what just happened to him, so we’re trying to get as many reps as we can, and then be efficient with cutting our practice tape up so that when we go into our meetings, usually when they do well you don’t have to repeat that because they have it. We’re going to take play 1, play 7, play 10, play 15 and then go into our meeting and be really efficient with our time.”
Kelly has an idea of how much hitting they’re going to be doing during practice. The former Oregon coach has got the entire thing mapped out.
“Well obviously it’s different here than it is in college because we didn’t have any preseason games in college. We usually had three scrimmages in college that we brought referees in for. It’s a little different here because you’re going to get full contact on four occasions with the Patriots, Panthers, Jaguars and Jets. It’ll be sprinkled within though. You still have to do a certain amount of it. That’s the biggest thing that we haven’t been able to do in this offseason because we don’t have shoulder pads, so trying to make full evaluations of who players are and what their abilities are. If you can’t be physical and hit people, then it’s an entirely different game. The offseason is an entirely different game than the preseason just for that fact.”
“You have to. There are certain amounts of work you have to get done, but you can’t go full-go every single day. You still have to be cognizant of that fact that you have to prepare for a season and prepare for games. That’s the big catch-22 for all coaches is how much work do you need to get done, but also you don’t want to injure any of your own players in practice. That’s kind of a fine line and it’s the toughest one I think coaches have to handle. How physical can your practices be? The game’s certainly going to be physical, but you’ve always sort of got your fingers crossed that you’re not going to get anybody hurt in practice.”
I’m eager to see who steps up when they start hitting, so I know he’s eager to see it.
