Bradford's play will determine if Eagles' recipe is a success

We are taught it is healthier to take our time and chew our food, but it's impossible when you are being served a seven-course meal with no palate-cleansing sorbet in between.

Who knew the Eagles' moves to release Todd Herremans and Trent Cole were nothing more than hors d'oeuvres? Little doggies on tiny buns. Who knew the LeSean McCoy trade was just an appetizer? Only one torn anterior cruciate ligament came with the Kiko Alonso special. Who knows whether the Sam Bradford-Nick Foles trade or the DeMarco Murray signing was the main course? What's for dessert? A Marcus Mariota on Sundays?

We have never seen an offseason menu like this one, and we even left out some of the costly spices (Byron Maxwell, Ryan Mathews, and Mark Sanchez), but you have to compliment Chef Kelly on his restaurant's fast service.

Rather than focus on the entire meal we have been served by "the only Chip" the Eagles have had over the last 10 days, we will fixate on the portion that always gets the most attention: quarterback du jour Sam Bradford.

The speculation about Mariota will not die, of course, until the University of Oregon quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner is selected and signs with a team other than the Eagles. Until then, we have to take Kelly at his word that his 2015 quarterback duo will be Bradford and Sanchez.

"The deal with Sam Bradford is if he never tore his ACL, he never would have been traded," Chip Kelly said Wednesday as he answered questions for more than 20 minutes about his overflow of roster moves. "There are a lot of injuries in this game. Tom Brady has torn an ACL before. . . . Peyton Manning has missed a season. It is very rare that you have a quarterback in this league that hasn't been hit and hasn't been knocked out."

"If you talk about the Saints, I think their revival and what happened down there was the acquisition of Drew Brees . . . ," Kelly continued. Give [Saints coach] Sean Payton and [general manager] Mickey Loomis credit. They didn't count Drew Brees out, and look how it paid off for them. That's . . . some of the chances you've got to take."

Brees to Bradford is a leap of faith too big to make. It is true Brees had shoulder surgery to repair a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder just a couple of months before the Saints signed him as a free agent in March 2006, but he was also a much more established NFL quarterback than Bradford.

In his two seasons before signing with the Saints, Brees completed 65 percent of his passes for 51 touchdowns and just 22 interceptions. Bradford has played in just seven games over the last two seasons and is still rehabilitating after tearing the ACL in his left knee for the second time.

Kelly is right about injuries, however. The quarterback he traded for Bradford missed time with injuries in all three of his seasons with the Eagles, and last season was the only one that Foles actually opened as the starter. If the deal had been Foles for Bradford straight up, the argument about which one was better would be fair and winnable for either side.

Foles' sample size is too small to make a strong case for him. and Bradford has been too injured and too erratic to say anything definitive about him. Bradford, the Heisman Trophy winner in 2008, obviously came out of college with better credentials, but injury issues had already started to haunt him. He missed most of his junior season with a shoulder injury.

In the three games he did play as a junior, he completed only 56.5 percent of his passes (39 of 69), an alarmingly low number, especially at the college level. Blame the shoulder if you want, but there has to be concern about Bradford's accuracy. His NFL completion percentage is just 58.6 percent in 49 career starts. That would have ranked 29th in the NFL last season, just behind Foles (59.8), Geno Smith (59.7), and Blake Bortles (58.9).

Does anyone think any of those three quarterbacks had a good season?

"I think everybody is a by-product of what is around you and where you are," Kelly said. "Sometimes when a quarterback throws the ball exactly where it needs to be and the receiver drops it, is that the quarterback's fault or is that the receiver's fault? So what does it go down for the quarterback? That's 0 for 1, and he doesn't gain any yards on it."

Kelly likes baseball analogies, and the best one here would be that these things tend to average out, and as Bill Parcells once famously said, "You are what your record says you are."

It should, however, be fascinating to see what Bradford becomes under the guidance of Kelly and Eagles offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur, who was St. Louis' offensive coordinator when the quarterback was the NFL offensive rookie of the year in 2010. Kelly's system makes quarterbacks better. It made Foles better.

And DeMarco Murray makes quarterbacks better, too. He made Tony Romo better in 2014, and he was carrying the football when Bradford won his Heisman Trophy in 2008.

If the keys to Chef Kelly's restaurant are being handed to Bradford, it's entirely possible the new quarterback could find the recipe for success. Unless, of course, Kelly still wants that Mariota on Sundays as dessert.

@brookob