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Chip Kelly only has to make sense to Chip Kelly

The Eagles coach doesn't care whether nobody else understands what he does.

Eagles coach Chip Kelly talks with new Eagles quarterback Tim Tebow during the Eagles Organized Team Activity (OTA) May 28, 2015. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)
Eagles coach Chip Kelly talks with new Eagles quarterback Tim Tebow during the Eagles Organized Team Activity (OTA) May 28, 2015. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)Read more

ELEVEN WORDS. Copy them, paste them, Photoshop them onto a picture of a wave crashing against a rocky cliff. The kids call it a meme, I believe. Now, hang your meme someplace conspicuous, and the next time you find yourself in the throes of existential dread, or suffocated with thoughts of your lot in this cruel, empty world, or if you simply want to know why the hell the Eagles just traded your favorite player, look at it, and repeat the 11 words that Chip Kelly spoketh 7 minutes into his news conference yesterday afternoon.

"I'm not governed by the fear of what other people say."

There it is. Verbatim. He followed it up some more Next Level stuff - "Events don't elicit feelings. I think beliefs elicit feelings" - but I spent way too long in the sun to even attempt to ascertain what that means. All I know is that when he walked out of the tent, Joaquin Phoenix was following him. (That's a joke. If you've never seen "The Master," you probably won't get it. Even if you have, you probably won't laugh.)

So let's talk about those first 11 words, because they pretty much sum it all up. Perhaps not with regard to life in its entirety, but certainly with regard to the slice of it that causes people to fret about things like Nick Foles being traded and Tim Tebow being signed and LeSean McCoy leveling barely veiled accusations of racism after being traded.

Kelly happened to be speaking on the topic of the latter matter when he offered his reading from the Tao of Chip. While everybody seems to understand that jilted lovers like McCoy aren't always the best source for a rational summation of where things went wrong, somebody did ask a quite legitimate question about the potential for comments like McCoy's to create a negative perception of Kelly throughout the NFL. (The former Eagles running back, you'll recall, suggested in an interview with ESPN The Magazine that his old coach got rid of "all the good black players.")

But that's the thing about Kelly. It isn't that perceptions are irrelevant, but that feelings about perceptions are irrelevant, because perceptions will always exist, because other people will always exist, and perceiving is what other people do, and they do it by observing your reality and interpreting it in a way that offers them the greatest level of cognitive ease. It is much better for an ex-employee's self-esteem to believe that his boss bought him a one-way ticket to Buffalo for some reason other than a belief that he wasn't the best fit. But if you factor other people's perceptions into your decisions, you end up with a reality constructed by committee, which is great if your goal in life is to offend as few people as possible, but counterproductive if you actually want to accomplish something.

Success, after all, is offensive to those who are unable or unwilling to create it for themselves. Doing something one's own way is a suggestion that everybody else's way is inferior. After all, if you don't believe your way is better, then why are you doing it?

Kelly believes in his Way. That Way requires players who believe in it. That belief requires a strict adherence. And that strict adherence, or lack thereof, can trump a lot of the other tools an athlete possesses. If you don't have it, you can't play here.

"If there are people who don't agree with the culture and don't want to take part in it, then that's their choice and they can just not be here," safety Malcolm Jenkins said.

Again, here's one of those in-football-as-in-life crossovers: If you want people to believe in whatever Way you are peddling, your own belief better be unflinching. And that's the answer to all of your questions about the method behind Kelly's madness: He doesn't care what you believe, he cares what he believes, whether you are a player who believes he needs extra time to get back to the huddle after running a deep route or a reporter who believes you need to know the identity of the quarterback you would start in a hypothetical regular-season NFL game in late May ("Either Mark, Matt or Tim," Kelly said yesterday, narrowing his candidates to the only three healthy quarterbacks at this week's OTAs). He doesn't care what you think about Sam Bradford's first four years in the NFL, or his injury history, or Foles, or Marcus Mariota, or Mychal Kendricks, or unproven wide receivers.

"The reason it comes up is everyone is looking for a reason for all the moves that Chip has made, nobody can understand it," Jenkins said. "So they are trying to figure out: Is it personality? Is it race? Is it he thinks his scheme is better than the players? I don't think it's any of that. I think he has reasons and motives for why he makes decisions, he's very open about how we're being evaluated and what he wants, and although some of the moves seem crazy outside of this building, I think most guys can understand them."

That's partially because most of the guys who might not have understood them are now gone. Maybe that strikes you as cultish. But every now and then, a cult becomes a religion.

On Twitter: @ByDavidMurphy

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese