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Has Chip Kelly's offensive scheme lost its luster?

Eagles, other teams featuring zone-blocking schemes are struggling to move the ball on the ground.

Eagles head coach Chip Kelly.
Eagles head coach Chip Kelly.Read more(Michael Bryant/Staff Photographer)

IT IS almost pointless to ask ourselves whether the NFL has figured out Chip Kelly, because figuring out things is what the NFL does. The players say that the letters on the shield offer an accurate appraisal of their job prospects - Not For Long - but reallly they sum up the entirety of the league.

Every team employs legions of minds whose sole job is to figure stuff out, and those minds do not sleep until they succeed, or until they are fired. The NFL is a fascinating study in survival of the fittest, one team's adaptations prompting another team's counteradaptations to create a sport whose equillibrium is hyperevolution. Adapt or die.

So, yes, the pure theory of the game suggests that we have reached a point at which Kelly's tempo and training and scheme are giving the Eagles far less of an advantage than they enjoyed in his first and second years as coach. The results of the first two weeks of the 2015 season offer plenty of concrete evidence to support this conclusion.

The Eagles' offensive struggles through the first two weeks of the season are ugly even when you move beyond the context of the bar Kelly has set for himself. They are one of only four teams since 2000 to combine for 70 or fewer rushing yards in their first two games, joining the 2012 Raiders (4-12), the 2012 Titans (6-10) and the 2006 Bucs (4-12) Since 1990, 21 teams have entered their third game with 100 or fewer rushing yards. Those teams were 3-39 in those games, and only three of them went on to qualify for the postseason.

Again, all of this is self-evidential. There is a chicken-and-egg component to it - teams run the ball more when they have the lead - but it is safe to say that teams that are incapable of running the ball will have very few leads. Kelly has not disputed any of this in the wake of a 20-10 loss to the Cowboys that was one of the most lackluster offensive performances you will ever see.

The real questions are:

1) What, exactly, have teams figured out?

2) Can Kelly adapt?

With regard to No. 1, you wonder whether NFL defensive coordinators have discovered some magic bullets that can disrupt the zone-blocking schemes that have infiltrated the game over the last decade.

Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak is regarded as the NFL patriarch of the zone-blocking technique, but Denver has failed to crack 70 rushing yards in either of its first two games.

Kubiak's acolyte, Falcons offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, has struggled to create running room with his zone-blocking scheme in Atlanta. Through two games, one of them against the Eagles, the Falcons are averaging only 2.8 yards per carry.

In fact, when you look at the bottom of the NFL's team rushing rankings, you'll find a preponderance of zone-based schemes. New Orleans, which began incorporating more zone technique a couple of years ago, is averaging only 3.4 yards per carry and under 80 yards per game. Sean Payton's acolyte, Detroit offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, has seen his offense gain 107 yards on 32 carries, an average of 3.3 per run.

The Seahawks, whose scheme is heavily based on zone blocking, saw Marshawn Lynch rush for only 41 yards on 15 carries against the Packers on Sunday. In Week 1, Seattle RBs had 24 carries for 93 yards.

And then there are the Dolphins, whose offense has looked every bit as dysfunctional as the Eagles' through two weeks. Miami managed only 42 yards on the ground in a loss to Jacksonville on Sunday, one week after an ugly win over Washington in which they gained only 74 yards on the ground and 256 yards total. The Dolphins' offensive coordinator is Bill Lazor, who was the Eagles' quarterbacks coach in Kelly's first season.

Rewatch the loss to the Cowboys and you'll see plenty of examples of Dallas defensive linemen shooting through gaps that you wouldn't ordinarily expect them to target. At times, it looked as if they were serving as lead blockers to disrupt the timing of the Eagles' blockers and prevent them from reaching their assignments in the second level.

Over the last few days, the company line has stressed a failure to execute. Yesterday, Jordan Matthews, Brent Celek and Andrew Gardner all spoke some variation on the same theme: If everybody does his job, it doesn't matter what the defense does.

The problem with such reasoning is that there is another locker room out there where a bunch of defensive players say the same thing. If each defender executes, it doesn't matter what the offense does.

Maybe the Eagles are less capable of executing than we thought. But at 0-2, with another tough defense on the slate, led by a third straight coach who beat them last year, they cannot afford to finish another Sunday talking about the need to execute. The coach needs to put his players in positions in which they are capable of executing, even if that means altering some of the most fundamental aspects of his scheme. In the NFL, there are two types of coaches: ones whom the NFL figures out, and ones who figure out the NFL.

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese