No one ever said Chip Kelly hasn't done some odd stuff, at least by the puny intellectual standards of mortal humans.
He brought in one quarterback (Sam Bradford) who's broken all the time. He brought in another (Tim Tebow) who's not really a quarterback. He got rid of Jeremy Maclin and LeSean McCoy, and he kept Riley Cooper.
Which, of course, is the flash point for all this Chip-Kelly-is-a-racist talk right now.
It came from McCoy in the wake of his trade to Buffalo, and McCoy didn't back down from it the other day, saying, essentially, that he stands by his initial assessment. I'm not going to question why he feels that way, although a lot of people will note that the fact he's now in Buffalo instead of Philly probably has a lot to do with it.
I don't know. He feels the way he feels. And there are a lot of black players still in Philly who aren't happy with Kelly's apparent attachment to Cooper, last seen spewing the n-word at a concert security guard and then begging forgiveness for it from his understandably skeptical teammates.
That said ... I seriously doubt Kelly has a white sheet hanging in his closet somewhere.
I doubt it because it's 2015 and this is the NFL, and that's not where Kelly would be if he made decisions based on pigmentation. That would be stupid. It would also mean Kelly would likely be coaching somewhere else, like the Hog Wallow, Idaho, youth league.
What is it the real estate guys always say? Location, location, location.
Kelly's location would seem to cut the legs out from under McCoy's allegations. This is not to say there aren't racists prowling the halls in the National Football League. It's only to say a man who attains the status Kelly has in a profession so dependent on men of color would by necessity have to value those men and connect with them on a pretty basic level.
An avowed racist couldn't do that. He couldn't even fake it, at least for very long.
Maybe that makes me naïve. But that's how I feel about it.
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