For UCLA, Chip Kelly and the NFL never happened

Chip Kelly’s return to gainful employment (and no, television work is never actually gainful) is being hailed by the raging college punditocracy as a great acquisition for UCLA.
 
And 49er fans are gnawing their arms off in response.
 
Then again, there have always been two Chip Kellys – the one who owned college football with his frenetic offensive style, and the one who had to see if he could reinvent pro football by force of will.
 
That’s how he failed in Philadelphia. And then he failed in San Francisco by finding out that having no talent and working for people who don’t trust you while paying you trumps every clever idea in the playbook.
 
But his reputation among the collegiate types never deteriorated. He’d consolidated the gains made by predecessor Mike Bellotti and made Oregon a national power. Being a tyrant in Pennsylvania didn’t work, and neither did rowing a boat without a boat in California.
 
So he cooled his heels on the Eagles’ and Niners’ combined dimes until an opportunity to reinvent himself on his own terms came – and UCLA’s persistent underachievement relative to its self-image matched his desire to get back to what he knew and did best.
 
It’s as though he never coached in the NFL at all, which one suspects is just fine by everyone.
 
Kelly learned in Philadelphia that a paid workforce has the power of pushback. He learned in Philadelphia and San Francisco that a general manager with a drawer full of knives and a penchant for political scheming and ass-covering is the death of any sport.
 
But he must also know that no place reliant on the money of others to thrive is without politics or ass-coverers. The benefit that he got in Oregon was that there was only one of those – Phil Knight, Keeper Of The Swoosh.
 
UCLA has nobody of that wealth, but it has lots of people with opinions who give just enough money to expect those opinions to be heeded. Today, they are all-in on Kelly because it makes the Bruins’ football program a national talker, and in late November, when only a few teams are doing meaningful things competitively, talking is the currency of the realm.
 
Put another way, nobody talked about Chip Kelly in such glowing terms when he came to San Francisco because the failure in Philly was too fresh. At Westwood, his pro career is almost irrelevant because Los Angeles has only been an NFL town for two years, practically speaking. At Westwood, he is the man who perfected Eugene, and in the world of college football he is the man who reordered the world they care about.
 
In sum, for UCLA administrators and fans, Chip Kelly is the same guy he was the day he left Oregon. Philadelphia was a brief interlude and San Francisco essentially never happened at all.
 
If only all our histories worked that neatly.