Eagles players, including Michael Vick himself, may think the starting quarterback job is Vick’s to lose.
But Eagles coach Chip Kelly downplayed any suggestion there’s a clear favorite at this point, and did nothing to diminish the possibility that rookie Matt Barkley is firmly in the mix with Vick and Nick Foles.
Asked about Vick getting most of the practice reps with the ones, Kelly quickly asserted the depth chart wasn’t so fixed at the moment.
“He hasn’t,” Kelly said, via Geoff Mosher of CSNPhilly.com. “Someone charted them, I would imagine. He and Nick switched to different groups, so that’s what we did.
“I mean, it could have been 48 to 52 [percent], but we’ll count them up. Again, it’s May 13. We’re just trying to get reps off and trying to get film and look at it. To your original question, ‘What would I make of it?’ It’s May 13 and we’ve got a long ways to go before we ever set a depth chart or do anything like that.”
The longer it remains an open competition — and there’s no indication Kelly intends to call it too soon — the longer Barkley will have a real chance.
Barkley said last week he was there to compete for the starting job, and Kelly clearly didn’t do anything to diminish that.
“I would hope anybody that came into this place isn’t sitting here and saying, ‘I think I’m going to be a really good, solid backup,’” Kelly said, via Les Bowen of the Philadelphia Daily News. “I want guys to come in here and show us everything that they can do, and our job as a coaching staff is to put the best guys on the field the first game against Washington.
“If that’s Matt, that’s Matt, so we’ll see how that goes. But if anybody came in here and said they were really vying for a backup job, then they would probably be on the bus down [Interstate] 95 pretty quick.”
Among the many changes Kelly’s bringing to the Eagles, he’s clearly trying to foster competition, and he’s doing it from the top down.