Chip Kelly, 62, won the 2024 national championship as Ohio State's offensive coordinator. This season he runs the offense at Northwestern, the Big Ten's brainiest school. Soon after he arrived last spring, he gathered his players and turned on grainy old film. Quarterback Aidan Chiles wasn't sure he was serious. He was.
Robert O'Connell tells it in Thursday's Journal. The film showed the 'Wing T,' an offense the University of Delaware first ran in the 1950s and '60s. Delaware coach 'Tubby' Raymond perfected it. It uses several running backs and tricky blocking to fool a defense. Kelly made his name at Oregon with the fastest-paced offense the sport had ever seen, and he later coached the Philadelphia Eagles. Now he was asking college kids to run plays about as old as their grandparents.
It works. Northwestern averages 204.6 rushing yards a game, second in the Big Ten. Both top backs, Caleb Komolafe and Joseph Himon, are at career bests in yards per carry. Chiles transferred in January just to play for Kelly, and he has the best completion rate in the conference. The Wildcats beat Penn State 34-13 and outgained them on the ground by 365 yards. They ran for 283 yards in a 42-14 win over Rutgers. They're 6-1 and ranked No. 20, in the first season of a new $875 million stadium.
Why he took the smaller job
Head coach David Braun needed a way to beat teams that sign bigger, faster players every year. Kelly had his own reason to come. Decades of big jobs had worn him down, mostly the boosters and the year-round recruiting. “I want to coach football. I want to worry about football,” he told Braun. Donor relations could be someone else's job. Braun would find him in his office with the lights low and decades-old film on the TV. Himon admits the players' first reaction was “Man, what are we doing?” Then they watched it work.
Our read
Career. Most people picture a late career as a straight line up, or a cliff at the end. Kelly drew a third shape. He kept the part of the job he loved, the coaching, and dropped the parts that wore him out. That meant a smaller program than the one where he won a title. A lot of readers near 60 have a choice like that in front of them, and few plans are built for it. A smaller job with less stress still has to pay the bills.
Here's where it touches your plan. Open your retirement projection this week and find the income line for your last five working years. Many projections assume it keeps going up. Run it once with a one-quarter pay cut and see whether your retirement date holds, or moves, and by how much. If you've ever thought about trading the title for the work, that's the number you need before you talk to your boss. It's easier to find when nobody's asking you to decide. Bring both versions to your next review. Kelly studied the old film long before anyone saw it work on a Saturday.