CBS Sports' Pete Prisco Ranks Chip Kelly 12th Among Head Coaches
By Ray Boyd
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- NFL Columnist Pete Prisco released his rankings of the NFL head coaches on Wednesday. While Chip Kelly has established himself as one of the more intriguing coaches in the league, Prisco did not rank the Eagles head man in the top-10 in the league.
According to Prisco's rankings, Kelly comes in at number 12 among NFL coaches.
Prisco's top-five included Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, Mike McCarthy, Tom Coughlin and John Harbaugh. It's hard to argue with that as a top-five. All of those coaches have won Super Bowls and have established success within their franchises.
There are no newcomers among the top-five. Those are sound choices across the board.
The next five are Mike Tomlin, Sean Payton, Bruce Arians, Andy Reid and Chuck Pagano.
Tomlin and Payton fit the mold of the top-five coaches with sustained success for their teams and Super Bowl wins. Reid obviously has a long track record of successful teams, but does not have a Super Bowl.
Arians and Pagano are two head coaches beginning to build their NFL legacies and who can be compared to Kelly a little more favorably in terms of years of service.
Arians has been the head coach for the Cardinals for two seasons after taking over the Colts in the absence of Pagano in 2012. In two seasons, the Cardinals have 21 wins under Arians, one more than Kelly's 20. One could argue that the Cardinals would have been ever better in 2014 had they not dealt with a ton of injuries to the quarterback position.
Pagano has spent three seasons as an NFL head coach. In his first season leading the Colts, Pagano missed 12 games as he battled cancer. The team won 11 games that season followed by the same total in 2013 and 2014.
Kelly was not the next man up after Pagano. Prisco selected Texans head coach Bill O'Brien as the 11th best head coach in football.
O'Brien took over the Texans in 2014 after two seasons as the head coach at Penn State and after a season as the offensive coordinator for the Patriots. The Texans finished the season 9-7 under O'Brien and were on the brink of making the playoffs.
The improvement was a serious one considering the two wins the Texans registered in 2013.
Next on the list at 12 was Kelly. Was O'Brien's one season in the league as the head of the Texans more impressive than the two seasons Kelly has registered with the Eagles?
Kelly led the Eagles to consecutive 10 win seasons after the team won just four the year before. He also has established his "college" offense and turned it into one of the most prolific in the NFL.
Kelly's uptempo style has spread throughout the league as other teams are working to figure out how to get more plays into a shorter period of time.
Has Kelly been the perfect coach? No, but he has help to produce career years for a number of offensive players and convinced his bosses that he also deserves to have control of the team's personnel department.
With the 2015 season ahead, Kelly will have his first opportunity to compete with a team on the field that he built to run his system. It will be interesting to see how that impacts Kelly's standing among NFL head coaches.
