Bleacher Report’s ‘Gridiron Heights’ Uses UCLA Coach Chip Kelly in Urban Meyer Christmas Episode
Riding the high of his success with the Ducks, now-Bruins coach Chip Kelly made the leap to the NFL nearly a decade ago.
This season, another high-profile college coach joined the professional ranks, and his stint was even more dramatic and brief than Kelly’s.
Urban Meyer won national championships at Florida and Ohio State, staking his claim as one of the premiere college coaches of the modern era in the process. But after retiring in 2018 and spending a few years on TV sets, Meyer was hired to be the next coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Meyer didn’t even make it through one season, as he was fired with cause after going 2-11, berating his assistants and even kicking his players. From benching top running back James Robinson to getting caught on video touching a woman who wasn’t his wife, the Meyer experiment was messy from start to finish, the next in the long line of college coaches failing in the NFL.
The Meyer fiasco inspired Bleacher Report’s latest episode of its online miniseries, “Gridiron Heights,” which played off of many of the small details to come out of his tenure in Jacksonville, as well as Meyer’s past and the track record of others who tried to walk the same path.
Meyer is played off as Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in the animated parody short, and he is therefore visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. His former Florida quarterback, Tim Tebow, is the Ghost of Christmas Past, and then UCLA football coach Chip Kelly stands in as the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Kelly, who went 20-12 across his first two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles before going 8-23 over the next two NFL campaigns, enters the picture wearing his signature visor to give Meyer insight into what’s going wrong for him with the Jaguars.
“Ho, ho! It is I, Chip Kelly, the Ghost of Urban Present,” the character says to introduce himself, before joking that another failed college-to-NFL coach Bobby Petrino was too busy to play the part.
Kelly takes Meyer to a Jaguars Christmas party, where the players are mocking the coach and his motivational tactics he tried to bring over from Ohio State.
“See, the college ways don’t work in the pros,” Kelly says.
Quarterback Trevor Lawrence, last year’s No. 1 overall pick who currently ranks 28th in the league with a 31.7 QBR, is the stand-in for Tiny Tim, and Kelly tells Meyer he could be ruining the young signal-caller’s career.
“You see, Tiny Trevor may not make it because of one bad coach,” Kelly says.
When Kelly was in the NFL, he had five starting quarterbacks in four seasons – Nick Foles, Mark Sanchez, Sam Bradford, Colin Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert.
After fizzling out in the pros, Kelly took one season off to work for ESPN before signing a five-year contract with UCLA. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who is the narrator of the story in the episode, flopped with the Miami Dolphins after winning a title with LSU, then returned to college and led the Crimson Tide to six national championships.
While Kelly has not approached a fraction of that success in Westwood, he did lead the Bruins to an 8-4 record and is in line for an extension this offseason.
The moral of the episode, as the Saban character says at the end, is that college coaches should stay in college.
Follow Connon on Twitter at @SamConnon
Follow All Bruins on Twitter at @SI_AllBruins
Like All Bruins on Facebook at @SI.AllBruins
Subscribe to All Bruins on YouTube
Read more UCLA stories: UCLA Bruins on Sports Illustrated
Read more UCLA football stories: UCLA Football on Sports Illustrated
