안전놀이터

'I Never Had My Doubts': After Five Straight Losing Seasons As A Coach, Chip Kelly Is Back 안전놀이터

PASADENA, Calif. — Beneath that visor of his, Chip Kelly watched the group across the way do warmups. 

They were huge and they were quick. They were tall and they were speedy. They looked like the groups he sees playing on Sundays. 

"You're similar to 'Blessed smokes! That is a lovely group!'" Kelly says. 

LSU brought its five-star ability here to the Rose Bowl on Saturday evening. It brought its 20,000 fans. It brought its expensive mentors, its public title family, its SEC may, its No. 16 positioning. 

And afterward it left, run out of the arena by the UCLA Bruins in a 38–27 drubbing that most likely wrenches up the warmth on Ed Orgeron's seat and pushes Kelly's club into the public spotlight. 

Chip is back, to some extent for one evening. He has returned to effectively out-conspiring contradicting mentors, to dominating games possibly he shouldn't, to easily trading merriments with correspondents. 

There's another sort of wizard in Westwood. This one wears a visor, is now and again ruthlessly fair and perhaps at last has himself a decent football crew. 

In any case, don't reveal to him that. No, no, don't do that. 

"It don't mean s - on Monday," he says. 

This is one game, multi week. Recall last season, when Mike Leach and Mississippi State opened the year by beating this equivalent LSU group in Baton Rouge? Recollect that, he inquires? 

"I watched the game and I resembled 'Heavenly smokes!' Look at Mississippi State, they just knocked off the public champs," he says. "I found it. They lost their next four games." 

Kelly likewise recognizes, unprompted, that this was certainly not a "commonplace" opener for LSU. They've gone through a great deal, he says, clearing to Houston from Hurricane Ida recently. 

In any case, that changes nothing regarding how this outcome unfolded, in a generally careful and stunning way. UCLA overwhelmed a SEC force in a space in which it normally dominates—at the line of scrimmage. Look no farther than yards surging: LSU 48, UCLA 215. 

It was fairly fitting. While strolling into the arena, TV cameras got Orgeron energetically calling a UCLA fan a "sissy" and proposing the fan enter the arena to discover himself a battle. 

Hours after the fact, it was Orgeron's group that got thumped around. 

It was the Pac-12 group that wore out the one from the SEC. The Pac-12 group made wide running paths for its half backs and harassed the restricting quarterback. The Pac-12 group consumed the clock and drained away the game. It popped unstable plays against busted inclusions (somewhere around four consummations of no less than 35 yards). It had two running backs break the 90-yard imprint and it, the Pac-12 group, pushed around the SEC group front and center. 

"We never discussed it," Kelly says. "It wasn't the Pac-12 against the SEC, since they didn't bring Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Alabama. Fortunately, my God." 

Thereafter, Orgeron recognized his group got beat at the place of assault. What befalls a LSU group that battles, against UCLA, to run the ball, stop the run and ensure its quarterback? The Tigers have games this season against Florida, Alabama, Auburn and Texas A&M. 

It seems like the end is inescapable—a second in a row inferior season and a mentor whose chain, regardless of winning the 2019 public title, is short (they don't make long rope in Baton Rouge for their football trainers). 

"One game doesn't characterize a season," Orgeron said subsequently, "yet we do comprehend that was a setback for our fans and I assume liability for it." 

What's more, kid, did his school bring fans. Loads of them. Their liquor filled rear end scene spilled into the Rose Bowl, painting almost 50% of the arena in purple and gold—a West Coast Mardi Gras in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains. 

Truth be told, one LSU part of fans drank one seller out of brew (relax—they restocked at last!). 

It's great, as well. They should have been sauced up for a particularly harsh exit. Right off the bat in the final quarter, they started spilling out of the arena to serenades of "Ov-Er-Ra-Ted"! Also, a couple of moments later, blue and gold confetti poured down onto the field. Firecrackers detonated noticeable all around. Also, music shook from field-level speakers. 

Players made confetti holy messengers, and a couple of fans even (illicitly) raged onto the field. What's more, there was that visor, swaying and weaving, slicing through the group as it set out toward the exit. 

Later on, in a meeting with SI, along a dim pathway inside the guts of the Rose Bowl, Kelly momentarily glances back at the program he's constructed, the disabled one he took over in 2018, when he had just 57 complete grant players. 

It took him four years of enrolling for UCLA to arrive at the typical measure of 85 grant folks. This gathering has development, he says. It has insight. Furthermore, it has ability, as well, not every last bit of it from the secondary school level by the same token. 

The Bruins have worked the exchange entry, adding key pieces like previous Michigan running back Zach Charbonnet (11 conveys for 117 yards on Saturday) to go with since a long time ago tenured Bruins like tight end Greg Dulcich (three gets for 117 yards). 

Everything's meeting up, Kelly's work of art molding into lovely structure after 10 joined successes over his initial three years and five straight losing seasons tracing all the way back to his expert days. 

"I never had my questions," Kelly jokes. 

You thought he was finished? You thought the one who carried power to the hostile game, who drove Oregon to a public title game, you thought he had lost it?