Kelly
After winning the transfer portal by convincing his next starting quarterback, three of Alabama’s best players and one of the best running backs in college football to come to Ohio State, Ryan Day had one more surprise to reveal.
And that surprise might have been even more unexpected than adding Will Howard, Caleb Downs, Seth McLaughlin, Julian Sayin and Quinshon Judkins to the Buckeyes’ roster.
As Day assessed what needed to change for the 2024 season after a third consecutive loss to Michigan and a ghastly performance against Missouri in the Cotton Bowl, one of the conclusions he came to was he needed to turn over some or all of the play calling duties to an offensive coordinator.
His first hire for that position, former Penn State and Houston Texans coach Bill O’Brien, left three weeks after the announcement he was joining Day’s staff when he became the head coach at Boston College.
But what initially looked like a negative became a positive with the surprising news that UCLA head coach Chip Kelly was leaving the Bruins to become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.
Kelly and Day have a relationship going back to when Day was a high school player with offers from Ivy League schools and Kelly was an assistant coach who recruited him to the University of New Hampshire.
Kelly earned a reputation as an offensive innovator and savant when in his first four years as a head coach at Oregon from 2009 to 2012 the Ducks won 46 of 53 games and averaged nearly 50 points a game and more than 500 yards of total offense the last three of those four seasons.
He left Oregon after the 2012 season to become the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. He had a 26-21 record with the Eagles in three seasons, then went 2-14 in one season as the San Francisco 49ers coach. He was 35-34 in six seasons at UCLA in his return to college football.
Ohio State is paying him $2 million to be its offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
So what kind of offense will Kelly be in charge of this season? What new ideas might he bring?
“It’s funny. Some people think I’m an air raid guy, some people think I’m a wing-T guy, some people think I want to run the ball every down. We’re going to do what’s best for Ohio State and that’s kind of what our game plan is now,” Kelly said during his first press conference at OSU.
Day and Kelly have said quarterback runs will be a bigger part of Ohio State’s offense this season. But that doesn’t mean starter Will Howard and the other quarterbacks will turn into running backs.
“His ability to help us in the run game is going to be a really big plus for us this year because he’s not a guy who is just going to hand it off,” Kelly said about Howard. “There’s not going to be a ton of quarterback runs where we’re snapping the ball to him like he’s Tim Tebow and just ramming him up in there. But there are certain packages we have for our quarterbacks to make sure we’re keeping defenses honest.”
Here’s a look at how Oregon used its quarterbacks when Kelly was its head coach for four years and its offensive coordinator for two seasons:
• Dennis Dixon (2007). Passed for 2,184 yards and 20 touchdowns. Rushed for 589 yards and 9 touchdowns. Had 15 carries for 141 yards against Houston, 17 carries for 76 yards against USC, 16 carries for 76 yards against Michigan, 12 carries for 99 yards against Washington, and 11 carries for 57 yards against Arizona State.
• Jeremiah Masoli (2008). Passed for 1,744 yards and 13 touchdowns. Rushed for 718 yards and 10 touchdowns. In the last seven games of the season he averaged 15 carries for 92 yards rushing, including going for 170 yards on 24 carries against UCLA and 106 yards on 16 carries against Oklahoma State in the Holiday Bowl.
•Jeremiah Masoli (2009). Passed for 2,147 yards and 15 touchdowns. Rushed for 668 yards and 13 touchdowns. He ran the ball 10 times or more in seven games, with the highest number of carries (16) coming against Arizona. He rushed for 84 yards on 14 carries against Purdue and 164 yards on 13 carries against USC.
In Ohio State’s 26-17 win over Oregon in the Rose Bowl, its defensive game plan was to take away Masoli’s runs. He was held to 9 yards rushing on 6 carries and was 9 of 20 passing for 81 yards.
• Darron Thomas (2010). Passed for 2,881 yards and 30 touchdowns. Rushed for 486 yards and 5 touchdowns. He ran the ball 10 times or more in only three games. His top games for carries were 16, 15 and 12, and his most productive game on the ground was 117 yards against Stanford.
• Darron Thomas (2011). Passed for 2,761 yards and 33 touchdowns. Rushed for 206 yards on 56 carries and scored 3 touchdowns. He ran the ball only 34 times in the final seven games of the season after suffering a knee injury in the sixth game of the season.
• Marcus Mariota (2012). Passed for 2,677 yards and 32 touchdowns and set the standard for rushing yards by a Chip Kelly quarterback with 752 yards. He had 15 carries for 96 yards against USC, 14 carries for 67 yards against Fresno State, 12 carries for 89 yards against Oregon State, and 1o carries against Arizona State.
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