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How Chip Kelly is a liar

    by Marcus Hayes
    Published 
Reporters following the presidential campaign of Donald Trump no longer bother to point out when Trump lies. He lies so often and so outrageously about so many things -- silly things, such as attendance at rallies and performance in polls -- that the exercise has become both redundant and exhausting.
Those reporters now know what it’s like to cover Chip Kelly.
You might love Kelly, and you might love Trump, but regardless of your politics, their pathological lying has become as automatic as breathing.
Kelly’s latest whopper: 
“I didn’t negotiate and say this guy gets this amount of money and that guy gets that amount of money,” Kelly said Wednesday at the NFL owners’ meetings. “I’ve never negotiated a contract in my life.”
Kelly was blaming Howie Roseman for the large contracts given to Byron Maxwell and DeMarco Murray last year. Kelly had unseated Roseman as Eagles general manager, assumed full control of personnel decisions and begun reconstructing the team. Roseman’s role diminished to contract negotiator. Both Maxwell and Murray underperformed and were major reasons why Kelly was fired last year.
Kelly landed with the 49ers, where he will install his up-tempo offense and, apparently, will continue telling outlandish lies.    
Yes, lies.
You see, last year at the owners' meetings, Kelly issued a detailed explanation of his involvement with player negotiations. He addressed the costly acquisition of cornerback Byron Maxwell and the departure of franchise receiver Jeremy Maclin thus:
“You can’t pay everybody. Everyone has the same amount of money. You’ve got to divvy it up however you’re going to divvy it up. We were inadequate in terms of the money allocated defensively to offensively, and we’re trying to balance that out. … 
“We didn’t think there was another receiver in that price range in free agency. We were trying to get Mac back. Felt we gave him a real competitive offer. Kansas City offered him a lot more than we did. We just weren’t going to go that high.”
Kelly was knee-deep in every decision, and he even offered insight on his views of asset allocation.
“It’s all based on what’s available at the time,” he said. “How do you allocate it? You can philosophically say we want to pay X, X, and X at each position. But that’s not available to you. … We wanted to pay our center (Jason Kelce) really good money (in 2014) because he deserves really good money. If somebody else is playing center, we wouldn’t have that money allocated to center. You can’t look at it and say philosophically, let’s put a price tag on each position.
“Because, No. 1, you don’t get to start from scratch. And then No. 2, just because you want to pay your left tackle $10 million, what if there’s not a $10-million player available to you at that position? So it’s an ebb and a flow. It’s not a philosophical thing where you can say it’s this or that.”
As Eagles coach from 2013-15 Kelly routinely  lied about injuries, lied about in-house meetings, lied about processes and practices.
It is part of who he is.

Even if  Kelly had not admitted last year that he was involved in negotiations, your intuition would tell you that it would be implausible that Roseman could effectively negotiate contracts without input from Kelly; absurd that owner Jeffrey Lurie would allow that sort of dysfunction. It would be an impossible situation.

Intuition isn’t necessary.
Kelly’s own words in 2015 serve to undress this latest, ridiculous contention in 2016.
Maybe he should run for president.
    MH
    Marcus Hayes
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