ESPN·United States·Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 12:52 PM UTC

'Be a problem solver': Why Chip Kelly went in the rabbit hole for his offense

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Kalyn Kahler, Adam Rittenberg

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Kalyn Kahler
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Adam Rittenberg
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Adam Rittenberg
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Oct 29, 2026, 07:00 AM ET

EVANSTON, Ill. -- On the night of Sept. 5, Chip Kelly called his first play as Northwestern's offensive coordinator, a crossfield pass from Aidan Chiles to Griffin Wilde that went for 71 yards, the team's longest completion since 2023.

A month later, Kelly christened Northwestern's new stadium, the $875 million Ryan Field, by unleashing an onslaught of unorthodox formations and calls as the Wildcats piled up 413 rushing yards and routed Penn State.

Kelly's play designs have flooded social media and delighted football scheme geeks and casual observers alike. His return to the college game, after just 11 games as Las Vegas Raiders offensive coordinator in 2025, has reinforced the mystique around "one of the most influential offensive coaches," said Northwestern tight ends coach Bob Bicknell, who has worked with Kelly at multiple stops. Kelly is aware of the attention his offense has generated, but he also sees what he's doing a bit differently than most.

"I don't think of coaching as being creative," he told ESPN. "As a coach, your job is to be a problem solver. What's the problem that's presented to you, and how do you solve the problem? That's it."

Kelly, 62, is more archivist than mad scientist. He doesn't just come across plays he likes and reflexively calls them. He has spent a career absorbing everything, at every level, storing away schemes to use at the right time, with the right players.

"You have to have an inventory wide enough to bring out the skill sets and the players you have," he said. "You can say, 'Hey, we're going to be the best wishbone team out there.' Well, my quarterback is 6-4, 225, and he runs 5.3 [in the 40-yard dash]. He can chuck it, but why are you asking him to run?"

This fall, Kelly has gone into his bag at an unlikely destination. Northwestern didn't seem like the logical landing spot for the former NFL head coach who won a college national title as Ohio State's offensive coordinator and whose team was national runner-up when he was head coach at Oregon. He inherited an offense that had been one of college football's least explosive during the past decade and has made it among the most potent this season.

Under Kelly, Northwestern's offense ranks second nationally behind Miami in percentage of plays 10 yards or longer (27.4%). The Wildcats are No. 7 in percentage of runs 10 yards or longer (19%) and tied for 10th in total explosive plays (runs of 10 yards or longer and passes of 20 yards or longer) with 75. They have 500 yards against multiple Big Ten opponents for the first time since 2007.

Kelly has sparked the offense with a range of throwback plays and formations, including the wing-T, orbit motion, and different misdirections, shifts, sweeps and deep or wide alignments. He drew from the CFL and has positioned wide receivers 12-15 yards behind the line of scrimmage, in what quarterbacks coach Jerry Neuheisel calls the "Cover 2 offense."

"It's pretty amazing, just being able to see that transition," sixth-year center Jackson Carsello said. "As an offensive lineman when you're in pass protection, all of a sudden you see a ball sail 50 yards downfield for an explosive pass, or you break a long run. That's a great time."

The 20th-ranked Wildcats hope to maintain the great times this week at Oregon, where Kelly built his national reputation as an offensive savant.

"Creativity is coming up with all this stuff on a board but not contextualizing the men that have to go execute. That's the nuance, and that's where I appreciate Chip," Northwestern coach David Braun said. "It's not like, 'Oh, this is my offense. No, I'm going to discover what formula we're working with, and put those pieces together the appropriate way, in a creative manner.'"

Why a change was needed

Kelly has overseen offenses that produced chunk plays out of radical sets at several coaching stops. His immediate success at Northwestern, though, is the most surprising of all.

From 2015 to 2025, Northwestern averaged 21.3 points per game and 340.1 yards per game, ranking 132nd and 130th nationally. The Wildcats gained 10 or more yards on 16.5% of their plays -- ahead of only Rutgers and the three service academies (Navy, Army and Air Force). The offense's woes amplified in the red zone, where they scored touchdowns only 55.2% of the time, ahead of only Akron and Kent State in the FBS.

Northwestern was second worst nationally in plays of 20 yards or more (4.9%). Of the 129 teams that played full FBS schedules from 2015 to 2025, Northwestern ranked last in pass plays of 50 yards or longer with 17 and second to last in percentage of completions 20 yards or longer (12.8%). The Wildcats still had a winning record (69-67) and four AP Top 25 finishes during the span, largely because they didn't allow explosive plays, ranking 16th nationally in fewest surrendered.

The pattern reached an inflection point last season, when the Wildcats eclipsed 22 points just once in Big Ten play. They ranked No. 2 nationally in red zone field goals (21) while ranking 129th in red zone touchdown efficiency (45.8%).

Braun made a coordinator change after the season, with a clear objective.

"We couldn't just make a change to make a change," Braun told ESPN in January. "Let's make an aggressive, transformational change."

Kelly was available after being fired by the Raiders in November. Northwestern athletic director Mark Jackson had known him for decades. When the sides started talking, Northwestern had a simple pitch to Kelly.

"Just coach football, and [don't] worry about anything else," Jackson said. "Go in and design plays and work with incredibly bright young men that have a tremendous capacity for a lot of complexities in his offense."

Northwestern had never hired an assistant with Kelly's reputation and track record. Excitement quickly spread through the locker room.

"He's legendary in the coaching space," running back Joseph Himon II said. "I knew that he would come in and put us in a position to succeed, just because of his mind."

Kelly had no ties to Northwestern but liked the program's direction, with a new stadium coming and a desire to elevate within the Big Ten and nationally. Braun's main nonnegotiable with staff hires is "low ego, high output." Kelly fit the description.

As Kelly assessed the roster and transfer targets, he saw "a really smart group" that could "present some versatility."

Northwestern was well stocked at running back with Caleb Komolafe and Himon, whom Braun wanted to highlight on offense from the moment he became coach but hadn't figured out how to do it.

The Wildcats needed a quarterback and targeted Chiles, whom Kelly and Neuheisel had recruited while they were at UCLA. Chiles had operated under center in a pro-style scheme with coach Jonathan Smith at Oregon State and Michigan State, but he also could run, a requirement for Kelly QBs, having been clocked at 21 mph.

"We have three good running backs, and then we have some receivers that can play running back, and we have some tight ends that can play running back," Kelly said. "So if you put three good running backs, two or three receivers, two or three tight ends, now you've got 10 different running backs, so you can do some different things."

Kelly got to work. He thought Northwestern's personnel could execute a wide array of plays, including the wing-T, which he hadn't used since his New Hampshire days more than 20 years ago.

There was only one problem.

"We were like, 'What the heck is going on? Who's going where?'" transfer tight end Alex Honig said. "It was frustrating because we were just trying to do what we were good at, and we were not good at that."

Borrowing from the Blue Hens

During most of spring practice, Kelly kept things pretty normal with a pro-style offense. But in the summer, players say Kelly introduced film of Tubby Raymond's Delaware offenses from the 1980s, when the wing-T became a juggernaut.

Outside of the service academies, the wing-T's run-based scheme, which overwhelms defenses with versatile wingbacks and misdirection, is rarely seen at the highest levels of football. It might as well be a sacred text. Foundational, born at Delaware in 1950, but an offshoot of Pop Warner's single wing, which was developed in the early 1900s.

Himon, in his fifth year at Northwestern, had never played in a wing-T scheme before. At first, he doubted the system.

"Everybody was just like, 'Man, like, what are we doing?'" Himon said. "There are just so many moving parts that we weren't used to. It was very uncomfortable going into it because it's a lot of motions, it's a lot of shifts, it's a lot of misdirection, handoffs. It was a lot on our plate."

When Kelly had the group start walking through the wing-T packages, Himon said there was "a lot of craziness happening," including missed handoffs.

"With all the motion, I didn't really know where I was going," Himon said. "Quarterbacks didn't know where they were handing the ball off."

"It was definitely rough," Chiles said.

Once the offense got comfortable with their specific choreography during fall camp, it was the defense's turn to panic. Honig sat next to linebacker Braydon Brus at meals and played a sympathetic ear to Brus' frustrations with the wing-T.

"Screw your stuff!" Honig said Brus told him as they'd eat together.

Against Penn State, Kelly called a deep-cut play that caught the attention of football analysts on social media. The wing-T Sally.

Penn State's defenders were easily trapped by the deception of the fake handoff to the running back in the pistol and the reverse action of the two wingbacks. Himon took the actual handoff and exploded through a huge hole on the right side for an 18-yard gain.

"It's so hard to explain to people," said coaching consultant Dan Casey, one of the most vocal appreciators of Kelly's wing-T, whose cutups of Kelly's wacky formations have gone viral on X this season. "You just never see this play anymore."

Casey said much of the wing-T offense still used today is more quick-hitting and part of the flexbone scheme.

"[The Sally] is a very slow-developing play," Casey said. "There's no pullers. It's like a reverse draw, which is very weird. It's a play that shouldn't work, and for whatever reason, in the wing-T, it works."

Against Penn State, Northwestern also used variations of the strange-looking Polecat formation, which came from the run-and-shoot scheme that leaves the QB and center alone in the middle of the field. On the field afterward, Chiles said Nittany Lions defenders told him how different the Wildcats' wing-T formations looked.

"They said, 'It looks a little funky,' and they didn't understand it," Chiles said.

"The wing-T gives the defense so many problems," said Himon, who is averaging 9.8 yards per rush under Kelly. "They don't really know where the ball is. They don't know who's back there. That package in general just gives us a lot of excitement."

To Kelly, the wing-T mania is a bit overblown.

"We've run it 17% of the season," he said. "It's not the main course. You order dinner, and what do we get for the sides? The sides may be good and you enjoy it a little bit more, but the sides may not be very good sometimes when you go to dinner, so you don't eat them as much."

But no matter how often Kelly calls a wing-T package on Saturdays, Northwestern has put enough of it on tape.

"You're burning practice time for people," Casey said. "They're having to go into the archives and look up old stuff like, 'Are they gonna run this?' Some of it is just giving volume to defensive coordinators to prepare for, and so they end up wasting a lot of time in their week of preparation."

Unleashed and uninhibited

Casey isn't just a fan of Kelly, whom he calls a "football historian." He's a friend. The two met when Kelly was UCLA's head coach and recruited a high school quarterback that Casey coached in Houston. Casey now owns a football coaching consulting business, and he and Kelly stayed in touch. This year, Casey said, he can see a difference in Kelly's style as compared with last year with the Raiders.

"There's a lot of fear in the NFL of looking dumb because every single play gets clipped up and put on social media and made fun of," Casey said. "Everything you try and do could become a meme.

"... You can tell there's a freedom [this year] that he's just gonna let it rip. It seems like the players are on board with it in a way that maybe in the NFL, you would get that side eye like, 'I'm not going to do that,'" Casey said. "When you coach professionals, you have to navigate: What are they willing to do? I think college is still in that liminal state that they will do it."

When Kelly left Oregon to lead the Philadelphia Eagles in 2013, he made a schematic mark right away. He introduced the run-pass option, which is now commonly used among NFL offenses. The Eagles set an NFL record with 98 plays of 20-plus yards and had the league's No. 2 offense in Kelly's debut season.

"When we went to Philly, that was more of a reaction of people saying, 'What did you guys do? What is it,'" said Bicknell, who coached wide receivers under Kelly with the Eagles. "Now everybody does that."

But in Las Vegas last season, Kelly's first time in the NFL in nine years, he struggled to establish a successful run game despite having rookie running back Ashton Jeanty, the No. 6 draft pick.

USF tight ends coach Sean Binckes, who held the same role under Kelly with the Raiders in 2025 and worked with him at Ohio State in 2024, said college football provides a different platform for playcallers.

"I don't want to say there is a resistance in the NFL to trying different things, but there are certain things in the NFL that have worked for so long," Binckes said. "You see offenses like [Kyle] Shanahan and [Sean] McVay and it's a hot thing and very successful. When you have a guy like Chip in the NFL, imagine if he tried to line up the receiver 10 yards deep. It's not that people don't try things in the NFL, but it's just two different games."

At Northwestern, Kelly is unleashed and uninhibited.

Jackson said that "autonomy" would be crucial to a coach of Kelly's stature to have success at Northwestern and that Braun, who is "essentially egoless," has given Kelly exactly that. Kelly brought three position coaches to Northwestern -- Bicknell, Neuheisel and offensive line coach Tim Drevno -- who had been with him at previous stops.

"I think [Chip] feels very empowered just to go do what he's best at," Braun said. "[He] also knows that I'm going to be curious about it and make sure that I'm aligned, but never feeling like I'm questioning what he's doing. That's what we hired him to do. And it's been really fun to see. I honestly think this is some of the best work."

Added Chiles: "I don't think we'd be in the wing-T if [Braun] didn't allow that [creativity]."

The Raiders situation seemed more complicated. At this time last season, Raiders coach Pete Carroll was getting more involved in Kelly's playcalling on game days as the offense struggled, according to a coach on the staff. The coach said Carroll became more opinionated on game days and asked Kelly to call more play-action passes.

"We don't want to ever rely on the quarterback having to do the whole show and sitting in a shotgun, throw the football. I never coached that way," Carroll told reporters in October 2025. "... We got to make sure that we're calling all the best stuff in the situations."

Despite being the NFL's highest-paid offensive coordinator, Kelly was fired after 11 games. The Raiders fired Carroll after the team posted a 3-14 record, the worst in the NFL. The offensive line surrendered an NFL-high 55 sacks, part of broader offensive issues with the team.

"In Vegas last year, I don't want to say too much, but we were not as talented," said Bicknell, who was a senior offensive assistant on Kelly's staff in Vegas. "We had some opportunities and just didn't have enough time with the players that we had."

Even with the abrupt ending, Kelly wasn't critical of his time in Las Vegas.

"I've been fortunate in every stop in my career," he said. "I've never had a bad stop. I've always had an opportunity to work with great people, and that's where maybe that's a misconception, 'Well, it was really bad there.' I didn't think it was bad there."

Who's having fun?

Last week, Jackson had former Northwestern quarterback Zak Kustok in his office. In 2000, Kustok was the face of Northwestern's last offensive renaissance, which resulted in the team's most recent Big Ten championship. Before that season, Northwestern installed a spread offense it had studied at Clemson, where Rich Rodriguez was the coordinator. Northwestern vaulted from 110th nationally in scoring in 1999 (12.8 ppg) to No. 9 in 2000 (38.5 ppg).

Jackson took Kustok to see Kelly, who was watching film with the offensive staff.

"Chip immediately lit up, like, 'Oh, Zak! I remember you on that 2000 team and doing this and you were the first ones introducing the spread,'" Jackson said. "Zak was like, 'Oh my god.'"

Those who know Kelly say his ability to recall offense, apply it to personnel and teach schemes sets him apart. Neuheisel, who has been around football his entire life through his father, Rick, and coached under Kelly at UCLA, called Kelly "the best teacher I've ever seen."

This fall, Kelly is dusting off plays from bygone eras and applying them to the modern game, at a school that hasn't experienced a truly exciting offense for a while. His scheme designs set off weekly social media celebrations.

He must be having a blast, right?

"I don't derive fun from trying things," Kelly said. "You derive fun from being successful. You can try a lot of things, and if the final score is 35-7 and you're losing, that ain't a lot of fun."

Northwestern hasn't been losing much. The Wildcats have a 20% chance at making their first College Football Playoff appearance, according to the Allstate Playoff Predictor, but their toughest stretch looms.

After facing a disappointing yet talented Oregon team, Northwestern takes on two defenses (Iowa and Ohio State) ranked in the top 7 nationally in fewest explosive plays allowed. Kelly will need to be at his best in the coming weeks.

"There's so much more that we can do as an offense," said Chiles, the only player in the FBS with multiple games of three or more passing touchdowns and two or more rushing scores this season.

Northwestern wants its partnership with Kelly to grow well into the future. His Raiders deal runs through 2027 (offset by a competitive Big Ten coordinator's salary from Northwestern, according to sources). Kelly and his wife enjoy Northwestern and have a home near campus, but he should have opportunities to coach elsewhere next season, possibly even at Oregon, which will need a new offensive coordinator.

Jackson said it's "incredibly important" to keep Kelly.

"[Braun] and I are in lockstep with that, I'm in lockstep with our president on that, to make sure that we're doing all the right things to hold this in place," Jackson said.

Beyond playcalls in the present, Kelly has been involved in mapping out Northwestern's future. He assisted in the recruitment of 2027 quarterback commit RJ Day, the son of Ohio State coach Ryan Day, Kelly's star protege back in New Hampshire. Ryan Day told ESPN that while he hasn't yet scouted Kelly's offense, RJ is tracking the wing-T and other distinct elements.

Ryan Day said of Kelly, "He's always been willing to try new things, always an innovator, a great offensive mind."

Chiles said it's "nerve-wracking" at times to be in a room with Kelly, especially when Kelly is standing behind him as his film is coming up. The quarterback said that when Kelly introduces a play, he doesn't always explain the origin.

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