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Kelly's admiration of SEALs offers insight into his coaching

"I look at it from the Navy SEALs' point of view: 'I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor do I seek recognition for my actions.' "

Eagles head coach Chip Kelly meets with the media before the last day of mini-camp June 18, 2015. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)
Eagles head coach Chip Kelly meets with the media before the last day of mini-camp June 18, 2015. (Clem Murray/Staff Photographer)Read more(CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer)

"I look at it from the Navy SEALs' point of view: 'I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor do I seek recognition for my actions.' "

- Chip Kelly

That quote, from a sit-down Kelly had earlier this summer with the reporters who regularly cover the Eagles, has been popping up a lot this week in profiles and season previews. It serves as a punchy explanation for why and how Kelly has kept his personal life as private as he has for as long as he has - how, for instance, the most intriguing man in the NFL managed to let everyone just sort of assume he'd been single his whole life, when in truth he was married for seven years.

But in deflecting a question about himself as a man, Kelly revealed something about himself as a coach. His evocation of the SEALs reconfirmed one of the rare certainties about him: his admiration for the military. It's one of the few things he hasn't hidden. He told reporters last year that he had observed SEAL training in California and Virginia, and the esteem in which he holds the special-operations force reflects both his awareness of America's cultural history and his willingness to break from conventional coaching traditions.

"A lot of mental toughness, you learn from [SEALs], and how they foster that - a lot of leadership qualities that they look for, a lot of cooperation within the group," Kelly said. "How does the group react in certain situations? Are they always looking for one guy to lead them, or are there multiple guys at certain times? When that situation is presented to them, how do they do it?

"You'd be amazed at how many times they train certain individual things before they go off and perform them. They're pretty meticulous in how they do it. I think how they debrief after missions is an intriguing aspect of what they did right, what they did wrong, and how do they improve that the next time they go out?"

What Kelly is tapping into is the 125-year connection between athletics, football in particular, and the U.S. military - a connection that has become so ingrained in our collective psyche and in football's jargon (e.g. "bomb," "blitz," "field general") that we give barely a thought to how it came to be made.

In 1890 - the same year that Army and Navy played their first football game against each other - Lt. C.D. Parkhurst published an influential series of essays called "The Practical Education of the Soldier" in which he suggested that exercise and participation in competitive sports would imbue soldiers with "quick and unblinking obedience to orders."

The notion that there was an organic link between athletics and military life gained such momentum over time that in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson wrote a formal proposal to make athletic participation compulsory in the Army. The Army adopted it. To be a soldier, then, you had to be an athlete, and the policy's implementation "sparked a wave of competitive team sports" across the country, historian Steven W. Pope wrote in 1995.

That history provides a necessary context for what Kelly has done and is trying to do with the Eagles. The easy and superficial theory is that Kelly views himself as the team's commanding officer, and he has trouble abiding the presence of any player, no matter how talented, who doesn't comply with his orders or conform to his culture. Already, he has jettisoned four players - DeSean Jackson, LeSean McCoy, Evan Mathis, and Cary Williams - whose reluctance or refusal to bend to his demands if nothing else contributed to their departures. You'll do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it, or you're outta here. If that were the whole story, Kelly wouldn't be much different from the average high school coach-cum-dictator who believes he can mold boys into men through the sheer force of his personality and power.

Remember, though: Kelly isn't trying to impart life lessons to teenagers, and he isn't trying to shape and harden just-conscripted everymen into combat machines. His goal isn't to build warriors. It's to create the most cohesive, successful NFL team he can. In effect, he's taking Wilson's proposal and inverting it, extracting the most effective philosophies and techniques from the military's elite, from those who volunteer to put themselves to the greatest of tests, and trying to apply them to football's elite.

To accomplish that, he has to identify and acquire players with the right attitudes, temperaments, and intelligence - players already equipped with the requisite self-discipline and appreciation for cooperation. He doesn't want unthinking drones, but he doesn't want mavericks or malcontents, either.

That distinction is vital. Without those intrinsic safeguards that Kelly's players must possess, he or any coach can lose control of his team (which means Riley Cooper must have done some serious penance in 2013), and not merely on the field. In such situations, at all levels of football, we often see the sport at its worst - its sacrifices and stakes conflated to those of actual warfare, its excesses unconstrained and fostering inappropriate behavior, even cruelty and misogyny.

Sometimes, teams still win in spite of those ugly developments. Kelly apparently wants to win by minimizing or eliminating them altogether - by turning the cliches about football and fighting on their heads. This is no small challenge he has taken on. It'll be fascinating to watch, though if it doesn't work, he'd probably keep that admission to himself.

@MikeSielski