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Kelly dismisses another star who wouldn't buy in

There is no mystery about why the Eagles - let's get specific here, we're talking about Chip Kelly - cut Evan Mathis on Thursday.

Philadelphia Eagles head coach Chip Kelly runs off the field at the end of the second half against the Seattle Seahawks at Lincoln Financial Field. (Bill Streicher/USA Today)
Philadelphia Eagles head coach Chip Kelly runs off the field at the end of the second half against the Seattle Seahawks at Lincoln Financial Field. (Bill Streicher/USA Today)Read more

There is no mystery about why the Eagles - let's get specific here, we're talking about Chip Kelly - cut Evan Mathis on Thursday.

Mathis wanted a new contract. He thought he deserved one, and he made that desire public. Kelly doesn't want any players on his team thinking about anything but football, which means he doesn't want them thinking about how much money they're making and he certainly doesn't want them talking publicly about it, which means Mathis was bound to be gone sooner or later. Sooner won.

This is who Kelly is. This is what he does. We're still learning about him, about what kind of players he prizes most, about what kind of team he's building here, but this much is certain: He demands total immersion in his system, his culture, his way of doing things. Once a player flinches when it comes to offering Kelly that measure of devotion, it doesn't matter if he's a breathtaking receiver in DeSean Jackson, maybe the NFL's best running back in LeSean McCoy, or a left guard who had made the Pro Bowl twice in Mathis. To Kelly, he's officially jetsam.

Again, aside from Kelly's insistence on total compliance, there isn't much about him that we can grab on to and hold tightly, even after more than two years of observing him as the Eagles' head coach.

Are the Eagles a better team because of what he has done this offseason, the moves he has made? At its core, and at this point, the question is impossible to answer, because Kelly is really asking everyone to trust him, to believe in what few people have or can see. Is DeMarco Murray going to be better in Kelly's offense than McCoy? Will Nelson Agholor step in right away and be a suitable replacement for Jeremy Maclin? No one knows yet. Those are the mysteries, and everyone around here hates mystery in their sports franchises.

Consider each of the three most controversial decisions in which Kelly's primary goal was removing a particular player from the roster - releasing Jackson last year and Mathis this year, trading McCoy to Buffalo - and in a vacuum, each is defensible. The Eagles probably would have been better with Jackson last season, but they still compiled the same record without him (10-6) as they did with him in 2013, and their wide receivers weren't regarded as a weakness. To lose McCoy without replacing him would be debilitating, regardless of whether his running style fit Kelly's system. To lose McCoy and replace him with Murray - the league's leading rusher in 2014 - and Ryan Mathews is more than defensible. It's a potential upgrade.

Now, Mathis. He was terrific in 2013. He is smart, great with the media, a good package of attributes in any locker room. But he will turn 34 in November, already making him the league's oldest starting offensive lineman, and he missed seven games last season because of a sprained knee ligament. It's reasonable to think he'll suffer that kind of injury more frequently as he ages, and it's reasonable, too, for a franchise to hesitate about allocating more money or salary-cap space to a player who was due to count $6.5 million against the cap this season.

The counter-hesitation, of course, is that the Eagles don't appear to have much depth along their line, and given that they had the leverage in their tete-a-tete with Mathis (is another team really going to sign him for comparable dollars?), cutting him now seems hasty at best and reckless at worst. There is natural concern that neither Matt Tobin nor Allen Barbre will match Mathis' level of play, mostly because they've played so little that it's particularly difficult to evaluate them.

Let's look at last season, then, and what Mathis may or may not have meant to the Eagles' offensive line, taking into account all the possible caveats and factors. Those factors include the quality of the Eagles' opponent each week and the understanding that a quarterback can be as responsible for causing sacks, or even more responsible, than an offensive line.

Mathis played in nine games: the season opener, when Nick Foles was the starting quarterback, and the eight games that Mark Sanchez started. Over the seven games that Mathis missed, the Eagles averaged 122 rushing yards a game. Over the nine games he played, they averaged 127. The difference was negligible.

It wasn't when it came to protecting Foles or Sanchez. Foles threw 311 passes last season, Sanchez 309. But Foles, who started seven games without Mathis, was sacked on just 2.8 percent of his pass attempts. Sanchez, who didn't start a game without Mathis, was sacked 6.9 percent of the time. That's 21/2 times more frequently than Foles. You can say that disparity was based largely on Sanchez's tendency to hold the ball, or Foles' to get rid of it. What you can't say is that Mathis made the Eagles' pass protection, or their run-blocking, significantly better last season. Chip Kelly definitely wouldn't, and as everyone learned again Thursday, his is the only opinion that counts.

@MikeSielski