No coachspeak from Eagles' Kelly, just the determination to move on

AS A GENERAL rule, I am not a fan of coachspeak.

It is normally just a bunch of clichés strung together, designed to not answer anything asked and remind both parties that this was a waste of time.

In fairness to Eagles coach Chip Kelly, he rarely lets his news conferences descend into coachspeak.

Don't get me wrong, because Kelly has a master's degree in message control and says only what he wants to put out there.

Still, he doesn't treat the obvious as if you're asking about state secrets by giving one-syllable answers, and he doesn't keep regurgitating a catch phrase.

About the only constant you can count on is that, win or lose, Kelly will put what is done behind him quickly and start looking at what is in front of the Eagles.

That is what Kelly re-emphasized yesterday regarding the 53-20 drubbing the Packers laid on the Eagles on Sunday.

Green Bay is done. Time to focus on correcting things to get ready for Sunday's game with the Tennessee Titans.

"I think it is the way we are wired," Kelly said. "It's about the next opportunity. You want to get a bad taste out of your mouth, you go and play again. That's what we do.

"I don't know and I don't think anybody, unless somebody can prove me wrong, where you can sit there and lament and feel bad about yourself, I don't see how that is going to make you any better.

"Our opportunity is to go out and play against the Tennessee Titans."

While it might be hard to accept for Eagles fans, who are programmed by a half-century of championship failure to believe that "the sky is falling" when an acorn hits them on the head, the Birds' season did not come crashing to a halt on Sunday.

In fact, except for some severely bruised egos, few of the circumstances that existed before the Eagles got lambasted have been drastically altered.

The Eagles are 7-3 and tied with Dallas for the lead in the NFC East. Had they won, they would have been a game ahead in the division - hardly in the realm of clinching, with six games remaining, including two with the Cowboys.

Instead of having the second-best record in the NFC and being a game behind the Arizona Cardinals (9-1), the Eagles are tied for the second-best record with Dallas, Detroit and Green Bay.

At this stage, that has little significance on the playoff race.

Except for capturing the top overall seed in the NFC playoffs, nothing that was within reach for the Eagles before Sunday in Wisconsin is much further out of reach today.

If the playoffs started today, the Eagles, based on tiebreakers, would be the third seed, behind Arizona and Detroit, which is where they were last week.

It is the nature of the NFL. So much in this league is established and re-established week by week.

Teams can, do and have played themselves out of the playoffs by the 10th game, but it takes an extremely rare convergence of circumstances for a team to comfortably play itself into playoff position after only 10 games.

The NFL playoff race is so unstable that Arizona, which has a three-game lead over San Francisco and Seattle in the NFC West, doesn't have that much greater of a chance of making the postseason than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (2-8), who are in last place in the NFC South, but not out of contention to win the division.

More than in any other professional league, the balance in the NFL makes "anything can happen in any game" not so much of a cliché.

In an exercise of degrees of separation, the Eagles lost by 33 points to the Packers (7-3), who lost by 21 to the Saints (4-6), who lost by 21 to the Cowboys (7-3), who lost by 11 to the Cardinals (9-1), who lost by 21 to the Broncos (7-3), who lost by 22 to the Patriots (8-2), who lost by 27 to the Chiefs (7-3), who lost by 16 to the Titans (2-8).

That doesn't really mean anything, but it illustrates that results that make little sense often happen in the NFL.

Certainly, the Packers were a measuring stick, and the Eagles came up short. That will be a legitimate, yet welcomed, concern if the Birds should get a rematch in the playoffs.

Right now, however, Sunday's was only a single loss that is no more damaging to the big picture than the Eagles' other two.

"A loss is a loss, whether it's a one-point loss or a 21-point loss," Kelly said. "Now, it's about the same mechanics of what we do. It's common sense that if you have a mistake, you've got to admit your mistake; you've got to fix your mistake and try not to repeat it. We keep the same formula in terms of what we're doing.

"To quantify a loss by too many points or a loss by one point and then differentiate between it, it's not the way we operate."

That's not coachspeak. That is a coach speaking.

Columns: ph.ly/Smallwood