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Catching up with the Eagles

After today's OTA, Chip Kelly and his players will be available to the media for first time in nearly a month.

Eagles coach Chip Kelly will talk to local reporters today for the first time in a month. (Associated Press)
Eagles coach Chip Kelly will talk to local reporters today for the first time in a month. (Associated Press)Read more

REPORTERS GET their first look today at the 2015 Eagles, when the team briefly opens up organized team activities, as mandated by NFL access rules.

Chip Kelly is scheduled to speak, for the first time since the draft wrapup, nearly four weeks ago. Then, reporters will watch workouts, and when the players come off the field this afternoon, everyone is slated to be available, more or less at once, something that will happen only three more times before training camp begins, at the end of July.

Sam Bradford. Tim Tebow. Mychal Kendricks. DeMarco Murray. Kiko Alonso. Byron Maxwell. All the rookies. Whichever safety seems to be lining up with Malcolm Jenkins on the first-team defense. Whichever offensive lineman seems to be lining up in Evan Mathis' left-guard spot, while Mathis continues his contract-related aversion to optional workouts.

Which receiver is in the slot? What's the pecking order behind Murray, among the running backs? How much is Bradford able to do as he continues his recovery from a second ACL surgery? What's up with DeMeco Ryans, nearly seven months out from Achilles' surgery? If Alonso is a full participant, rehabbing an ACL, is he taking any reps at outside linebacker, or is he just lining up inside? Who's the starting corner opposite Maxwell? Does Marcus Smith seem new and improved?

The past few weeks, reporters have been trying to write stories by desperately breathing life into tiny, dried morsels left over from the week after the draft, the last time we were able to speak with anyone. Today figures to be chaos, a starving horde descending on an all-you-can-eat buffet. (Yes, yes, many of us don't look like we're starving. Don't be so literal.)

We will get only the barest glimpse of what is happening on the field, and yet sweeping conclusions will be reached - players will be elevated, demoted, cut and traded, at least on Twitter, based on what can be gleaned from 50 yards away on one afternoon in May.

That is the way of the NFL in 2015, and it links directly to the carefully doled-out access. A few teams still function the way the Eagles did years ago, invite everybody in for every day of everything, have the coach talk frequently, but their ranks dwindle each year. More and more, the calculation is "if we can keep those people out of here for a while, let's do it."

In a frenzied market like this one, the attraction of that is not hard to grasp. This would be a good week to ask Ruben Amaro Jr. how beneficial it is to his organization for him to be constantly accessible.

It's hard to remember now, but a decade or more back, we used to chafe at having to stand out in the sun, day after day in the spring, watching a lot of nothing; the Eagles were an established, veteran team that went to the playoffs every year, you knew who the quarterback was and what he would have to say. After four or five days, there really was very little to write that hadn't been written, especially since it was all going to be rehashed again in training camp.

I remember once doing an OTA feature on an undrafted quarterback the Eagles had brought in, mildly interesting because he had a connection to Roger Staubach, who was willing to talk to me about him, and hey, who doesn't want to talk to Roger Staubach? I recall hustling to get the piece in the paper before the guy got cut, because it was obvious he really wasn't very good. Barely made it.

Since then, the focus has only grown tighter, as has the NFL's grip on our collective attention, but the reams of information we churn out are based on less and less daily access. (The 2011 CBA cut down OTA time, so even reporters covering teams that allow constant access get less of it.) We talk more, with less grasp of what we're talking about. You see Kelly quotes from last month or last year resurrected, buffed and polished, not because the reporters doing so are lazy, but because Kelly speaks so rarely in the offseason.

There is a Kelly piece in the current Sports Illustrated, written by an excellent reporter, Greg Bedard, who has worked at the Boston Globe, among other places. When a national media entity profiles your coach, a local beat writer starts reading the story with a sense of dread, fearing the subject might have unburdened himself of some deep, headline-worthy secret that had escaped you. (Chip has the Nike swoosh tattooed on his WHAT??!!)

There is nothing like that in Bedard's story. It contains some interesting Kelly parallels with Bill Walsh, and Bedard makes intelligent, thoughtful inferences. But no secrets are revealed, mostly because Kelly does an outstanding job of prohibiting that sort of thing.

"I've covered both [Bill] Belichick and Nick Saban, and I've had much easier times doing stories like this on them than Chip Kelly," Bedard told the WIP "Morning Show" yesterday. Bedard said that though Saban and Belichick might not be forthcoming when talking about themselves, "they don't put restrictions at all on other people."

Kelly, Bedard said, "is entirely different. I don't know if he orders them not to talk or what, but nobody is talking . . . It's everybody close to him. Like, I probably reached out to a half-dozen or so people that he's been close with for years . . . they didn't answer or were like, 'I can't talk.' "

That group included Kelly's father, a retired attorney Bedard said he'd chatted with informally on previous occasions.

Of course, Chip doesn't have to let anyone talk to his father, but he has to talk to us today, and he has to let us talk to his players. We'll only have to stretch those quotes from today until Monday, when the players are available again. Eight days after that, Kelly speaks once more. That will hold us until mandatory minicamp, June 16-18, when Kelly is scheduled to speak to us three days in a row, an orgy of access that must provide six weeks of sustenance.

Bon appetit.

Blog: ph.ly/Eagletarian