Chip Kelly became famous for the fast-paced offense he ran at Oregon, and in all four of his seasons as an NFL head coach his offenses have had the fastest pace in the NFL. But Kelly doesn’t think his offense is really all that fast.
“I don’t think we’re playing fast right now,” Kelly said. “So if someone said, ‘How are you playing offensively?’ I don’t think we’re playing fast offensively. I think we’re just not going back [to huddle]. We’re saving seven yards of run time for our offensive line because they don’t have to run back in the huddle, get a play called and then do it. We’re just calling it at the line of scrimmage. So I think it’s a lot of what Denver used to do when Peyton [Manning] was there. But there’s a lot of times that we’re under 15 seconds when we’re snapping the ball and getting the play off. So we’re not playing fast and we’re not calling tempo-type plays in those situations. We’re just calling plays.”
The numbers, however, say Kelly’s 49ers still have the fastest offense in the NFL.
FootballOutsiders.com tracks the offensive pace of each team, adjusted to account for situations when teams are running a particularly fast pace because they’re trailing late in the game or a particularly slow pace because they’re leading late in the game. And by those stats, the 49ers rank first in the NFL in pace, at 23.95 seconds per play. That is slower, however, than Kelly’s Eagles last year (22.21 seconds per play) or in 2014 (21.95 seconds per play) or in 2013 (23.38 seconds per play.) And Kelly’s NFL teams have always run a slower pace than his Oregon teams.
So it’s true that by Kelly’s standards, the 49ers are not running a particularly fast pace. But by the standards of any other NFL team, the 49ers are running a very fast pace.
The problem for Kelly is that NFL defenses seem to have figured out how to account for Kelly’s fast pace. Although the Eagles’ offense was excellent in Kelly’s first season in Philadelphia, it declined in his subsequent seasons as opposing defenses got a handle on it, and this year in San Francisco Kelly has one of the worst offenses in the NFL.