Two things make Chip Kelly very proud; and they're not wins, records, or awards (BTW, Kelly just picked up his third, nope . . . . make that fourth Coach of the Year award.)
Kelly has said two things to the media. 1) He strives to make Oregon the fastest team in the nation. And 2): Nobody practices harder than Oregon.
Today, we can look back and agree with what he's been trying to tell us all along -- that those two goals he CAN control translate into the wins, records, and awards that he otherwise could not control.
I am currently working on a story of the glaringly different approaches between Auburn and Oregon toward practices for the big game.
But first, I'm giving you some homework. The following is a MUST READ if you are to better understand Chip Kelly's philosophy behind his team's approach to success. On December 2nd, Michael Sokolove wrote in The New York Times Magazine about his peek inside the practice routine of Chip Kelly's Oregon Ducks.
It's too long to paste here, but let me give you a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite. Then you'll see the link.
In the city of the distance-running legend Steve Prefontaine — Eugene is known as Tracktown, U.S.A., and is also where the sporting-goods company Nike was started — Kelly has transformed football into an aerobic sport. This style is particularly of the moment because it is apparent that football, at least in the short term, will become less violent. Kelly’s teams have found a new way to intimidate, one that does not involve high-speed collisions and head injuries. “Some people call it a no-huddle offense, but I call it a no-breathing offense,” Mark Asper, an Oregon offensive lineman, told me. “It’s still football. We hit people. But after a while, the guys on the other side of the line are so gassed that you don’t have to hit them very hard to make them fall over.”
Asper, who is 25 and served a two-year Mormon mission before starting college, is among several Oregon players who told me that opponents sometimes beg them to slow down. “A guy from Tennessee said to me, ‘If you keep running plays that fast, I’m going to throw up.’ I just said, ‘Sorry, but Coach will get mad at us if we slow down.’ I mean, what else are you going to say? But I admit that I’ve messed with guys’ heads. One defensive lineman started complaining to me in the first half, and I said: ‘This ain’t nothing yet. Wait till you see how fast we go in the second half.’ ”
Oregon does no discrete conditioning during practice, no “gassers” — the sideline-to-sideline sprints that are staples in many programs — and no “110s” — sprints from the goal line to the back of the opposite end zone. The practice itself serves as conditioning. Just as they do during games, Oregon’s players run play after play — offensive sets; punt and kickoff returns and coverages; field goals; late-game two-minute drills — but at a pace that exceeds what they can achieve on Saturdays. Nick Aliotti, Oregon’s defensive coordinator, explained that the team can go even faster in practice because the “referees” — student managers sprinting around in striped shirts — spot the ball faster than any real game official would.
The way he [Kelly] trains his players is drawn, in part, from documentaries he has watched of military training. “You see how they train the Navy Seals. They squirt them with water, play loud music and do all these other things when they have to perform a task. That’s how we practice. We want to bombard our kids.”
Here is the link to the whole article: Speed-Freak Football
After reading this, I'd love to hear your comments.
--kb
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