Chip Kelly, Ryan Day and the early days of an American football revolution
DURHAM, N.H. — The Downeaster train whooshes northward on a fall afternoon, past lily-covered ponds, over rusted bridges and through the reds and yellows of the New England woods. Halfway between Boston and Portland, Maine, the train horn blasts, and the conductor hurries down the aisle, keys jangling at his hip. “Durham stop,” he calls out. “Durham.” The brakes squeal, and a college town comes into view.
The railway cuts a path through the University of New Hampshire’s athletic campus. To the right, there’s an arena they call “The Whitt,” the crown jewel for a hockey school. Look out the window to the left, and the last thing you see before the train ducks beneath an underpass and stops in front of a small station are the goalposts and grandstands of the Wildcats’ football stadium.
It feels a long way from big-time college football. But it was here where, a quarter century ago, two great offensive minds came together. Chip Kelly was a first-year offensive coordinator. Ryan Day was his first quarterback.
Back then, before Kelly’s ingenuity made him one of the most coveted play-callers in the country, he was an anonymous figure in the football universe: a 35-year-old former New Hampshire defensive back working at his alma mater. “He was just a name in the media guide,” said Mike Zhe, who covered the team for the Portsmouth Herald. “Page 40, offensive coordinator: Charles ‘Chip’ Kelly.”
Inside the football facility, however, Kelly was revered.
“He was like a mad scientist,” former New Hampshire tailback Stephan Lewis said.
The football field was Kelly’s laboratory. He tinkered, experimented and often pleaded with players to go faster. More motion. More concepts. More disguises. Kelly wanted to snap the ball as frequently as possible and deliver it to playmakers in space, spreading out defenses and wearing them down.
“Basketball on grass,” Lewis said.
But Kelly’s concepts were nothing without a quarterback to run them.
Kelly and Day are both from Manchester, N.H. “Same elementary school, same high school, same junior high, same college,” Kelly said this spring. They knew all the same people back home. But it wasn’t until seeing Day at a camp in high school that Kelly knew he could handle the complexity of a college offense. That day, Kelly raised a play card in the air and watched Day drop back and make a clean throw to the sideline in a 7-on-7 drill. He lifted another card. The calls grew increasingly complicated. Again and again, Day directed traffic with ease and found an open receiver.
Sean McDonnell, the former New Hampshire head coach, recalls sharing a look with Kelly.
“We were sitting there going, holy s—,” McDonnell said.
Last winter, at the low point of his head-coaching career, Day phoned Kelly.
Ohio State had again fallen short of its championship expectations. Even worse, Michigan hadn’t.
Most places, Day’s head-coaching resume would be a smashing success: a 61-8 record, a College Football Playoff title game appearance, 12 first-round NFL draft picks, a perennial top-10 ranking and just three Big Ten losses over five seasons. But because those conference losses were all to Michigan, each of the past three Novembers, those were considered lost seasons in Columbus.
After the Buckeyes scored three points in the Cotton Bowl, Day met with then-athletic director Gene Smith. A lot was discussed, but part of it was Smith’s willingness to go all-in on football and give Day the resources he needed to right the ship, including a larger salary pool for assistants.
“I wanted to make sure that we did everything we could to make sure football has a real chance next year,” said Smith, who retired June 30 after a 19-year tenure. “When I think about my legacy, I think about that. I hate to leave Ohio State when football is not back to winning Big Ten championships.”
Day, who had run the offense since 2018, was planning on giving up play-calling duties. The job of a Power 4 head coach has grown to encompass so many responsibilities it’s often compared to being a CEO. Day needed a coach fully focused on unlocking the tremendous potential of the Ohio State offense. There were very few he trusted to do that.
The first time Day called, Kelly listened. They’d had these conversations before. When Day got his first coaching job as tight ends coach at New Hampshire. When Kelly tried hiring Day at Oregon. When Day joined Kelly’s staff with the Philadelphia Eagles, then the San Francisco 49ers. But now the roles were reversed. Initially, Kelly wasn’t ready to leave UCLA, where he was head coach. Day hired Bill O’Brien. But when O’Brien left after three weeks to become Boston College’s head coach, Day tried Kelly again.
This time, Kelly jumped.
“When you’re at square one and when your back is against the wall, you tend to lean on those you trust,” college football analyst Joel Klatt said on his podcast. “There is not a person in this business that Ryan Day trusts more than Chip Kelly.”
That trust has been built over 25 years, and it’s the same word Day used when explaining why he wanted Kelly in charge of Ohio State’s offense. Kelly is more than Day’s mentor, and they have much more in common than just a hometown. They lived down the street from each other in Rye, N.H., during the pandemic. Their wives are close friends. Day’s children consider Kelly an uncle. “That matters,” Day said, “when you’re talking about trust.”
On Saturday, No. 2 Ohio State will be in Eugene, Ore., for its first real test of the season. For Day and the Buckeyes, it’s a five-hour flight to face No. 3 Oregon in a potential Big Ten championship game preview.
For Kelly, it’s a chance to bring one of the highest-scoring offenses in college football to the place where he rose to prominence. He became a household name running the high-flying Ducks offense from 2007 to 2012. But his offensive identity was forged long before that, on the other side of the country.
In 1990, Columbia head coach Ray Tellier needed help filling out the freshman team’s coaching staff. McDonnell, then a Columbia assistant, recommended Kelly, whom he’d first met playing pickup hoops in Manchester. Kelly was back home coaching high-school ball. The closest he’d come to running a college offense was drawing up plays in the dirt during New Hampshire’s alumni games. “I guess it was the start of him being the offensive guru that he is,” longtime athletic trainer Jon Dana said.
Kelly bussed to New York for an interview.
“He knocked it dead,” McDonnell said.
Worried Kelly might turn down the offer, Tellier had McDonnell take Kelly out for drinks with a few other coaches. They stayed out so late that he missed his bus back.
That’s how Kelly landed his first college coaching gig.
Nine years later, after they both had returned to New Hampshire, McDonnell took over as Wildcats head coach and promoted Kelly to offensive coordinator. In his first meeting with the offense, Kelly said he wanted to run 80 plays per game — but 100 would be even better. “The more plays we run,” he said, “the more chances to score.”
To Day, a redshirt sophomore competing for the starting job, that equation made intuitive sense, but it ran counter to how the Wildcats had always operated. Unable to pull in top-tier quarterbacks and receivers, they recruited big offensive linemen and bruising backs to play smash-mouth football. Jerry Azumah had just rewritten every school rushing record, collecting 2,195 rushing yards and 22 touchdowns in 1998 before being drafted by the Chicago Bears. Kelly had future NFLers Dan Curran and Dan Kreider ready to pound the rock but insisted upon diversifying.
“It was like things changed overnight,” receiver Brian Mallette said. “It was this spread offense with crossing routes going everywhere.”
Kelly had a different game plan for each opponent. He ran a diamond formation against Villanova. He used the Wildcat against Massachusetts, with Day out wide and Curran in shotgun. Kelly would have Day run speed option for a whole game, then ignore it for the next three. Kelly spent his vacations traveling to campuses nationwide, learning from other coaches. He’d come back with new formations to try — some borrowed, some new — and tell McDonnell each time: “It’s going to work.”
He was usually right.
And he was always fast. McDonnell would occasionally speak on behalf of the exhausted defense: “Chip, would you f—ing slow down?”
McDonnell remembers his defensive coordinator complaining after Kelly ran a particularly confounding play during practice: “Ain’t seen that before. He tell you he put that in?”
“He might have,” McDonnell said, with a laugh. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Ahead of a road game against ranked South Florida in 1999, Kelly walked into McDonnell’s office and said, “We can’t block these guys.” He had an idea. He wanted to run the Wing T.
Kelly installed more traps, sweeps, play actions and bootlegs in practice. He and Day watched old game footage and discussed the art of deception. Down seven and driving in the fourth quarter, with Kreider injured and lead receiver Jermaine Washington shaken up, Kelly asked Mallette to run Washington’s route on a receiver reverse pass. Mallette took the handoff in the red zone and floated a pass back to Day, who fought his way down to the goal line, then scored on the next play.
New Hampshire had almost 500 yards of offense but lost in double overtime, 42-41, when Day’s pass to the kicker on a fake extra point fell incomplete.
“Chip wasn’t afraid,” Curran said. “He wasn’t afraid to innovate, to be creative. We all knew what we had, and what he was capable of.
“The rest of the world was getting ready to find out.”
A town or two over from Durham, McDonnell sits down in a diner where the coffee is hot and the condiment bottles on the table are perfect for diagramming the defining play of New Hampshire’s Day-and-Kelly era.
It was fourth-and-19.
But before we get there …
The Wildcats were on the road Nov. 4, 2000, against Delaware — undefeated, second-ranked Delaware led by star quarterback Matt Nagy and receivers Brett Veach and Jamin Elliott. (Nagy is now the Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator, and Veach their general manager.) The Blue Hens led 31-3 in the last minute of the third quarter.
Lewis, New Hampshire’s leading rusher, had exited with a sprained ankle. He listened to the game on the radio in the trainer’s room, waiting for an X-ray, as Kelly tried conjuring a miracle. Third-string tailback Ime Ekong scored before the end of the third quarter, then again 18 seconds later after a Delaware fumble. Lewis told the trainer, “Screw the X-ray. Take me back out to the field.”
Lewis leaned on crutches as Day hit Ekong for another touchdown to pull within seven. After another Delaware fumble, Day converted one fourth down and then faced another.
Fourth-and-19.
The call was “Charlotte Angle,” a hook-and-ladder play, with Lewis pitching to receiver Kamau Peterson, that Kelly often ran at the end of practice. It rarely worked; the scout team knew the formation. Now Lewis was out, backup Imion Powell was at home, and Ekong had never run the play. Kelly approached Mallette again and asked, “Can you run the angle route?”
Mallette lined up behind Day, slanted toward the sideline, cut back to the middle and made the catch. Peterson streaked past, took Mallette’s flip and sprinted up the sideline for the tying touchdown.
“The stones to call that,” Peterson said.
“He trusted his players to make plays,” Mallette said.
Kelly’s offense scored five times in the last 16 minutes of regulation. In overtime, Delaware clanked an extra point off the upright and Day found Mallette in the corner of the end zone for a 45-44 win. Day still calls that comeback his favorite memory from his college playing days.
“It was unbelievable,” McDonnell says, smiling as he sets a ketchup bottle aside. It was the greatest comeback of his 30 years as New Hampshire head coach. “We were getting our asses kicked.”
Day was not a dual-threat quarterback like those who would later lead Kelly’s spread offense. Day stood 6 feet 2 and sturdily built. He could move a little, but, well, it was good that Kelly rated mind over mobility.
As Kelly rewired the Wildcats offense, he appreciated Day’s ability to process quickly and adapt on the fly. Day commanded the huddle — or, more often, the no-huddle. He had the toughness of a team captain, the composure of a veteran and the vision of a coach. He knew the right time to deliver a message. Day took a shot to the chin during fall camp as a freshman. He threw a perfect pass on the next play, but the receiver dropped it. Recruiting coordinator Bob Callahan recalled Day chasing down the receiver and yelling, “If I’m going to sit back there and take hits for this team, catch the damn ball when I get it to you.”
“He was there to prove something,” said Mallette, Day’s roommate.
When a shoulder injury forced Day to the sideline, he pulled aside Lewis before a halftime Hail Mary against Massachusetts and instructed the 5-foot-9 running back not to jump for the pass: “Wait on the goal line. They’re going to tip it back to you.” A pack of defenders leaped in the end zone to bat the ball down.
“It fell right into my hands,” Lewis said.
Kelly says he always knew Day was destined to be a coach. That’s easy to say now, 25 years later, but they all knew it back then.
By the time Day walked off the field for the last time, in tears, he owned nine New Hampshire passing records — from total offense to touchdown passes to completion percentage — and had an offer to join the coaching staff. After one year coaching alongside Kelly, Day moved back and forth climbing the college coaching ladder: three stops at Boston College, two at Temple, one at Florida.
Kelly’s path looked nothing like that. From 1994 to 2006, he remained in New Hampshire. He wanted autonomy, and head coaches at major programs rarely offered that. Every time Kelly got a job offer, he asked himself, “Is it a better job than I’m in right now?” He convinced himself it wasn’t. He turned down a quality control coach position on Tom Coughlin’s New York Giants staff. He declined an offer from UConn head coach Randy Edsall. Coaches were coming to Durham to learn from him now.
“He never believed in chasing,” said Curran, now Holy Cross’ head coach. “He always thought, be where your feet are, do a great job, and when it’s time you’ll know.”
Then, in February 2007, Kelly walked into McDonnell’s office.
“I think we’ve got a problem, Mac,” he said.
Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti was handing Kelly full control of the Ducks offense and a much larger paycheck. It was the opportunity he’d waited for. At Oregon, Kelly burst into the national spotlight with an offense that led the conference in scoring in 2007 and 2008.
When Kelly was named Oregon head coach in 2009, he needed a new offensive coordinator. He called Day, who accepted as quickly as he had when Kelly had called him in high school to offer a half scholarship. That weekend, while celebrating with family in Manchester, Day realized he wasn’t ready to make his wife, Nina, and their 1-year-old son, RJ, move away.
“I looked at Nina, and she was ready to go,” Day said. “I broke down crying, and I said, ‘We can’t do this. I am not moving all the way to Oregon.’ Chip said, ‘That’s why I love you, because you love your family.’”
But Kelly also said he wasn’t going to stop trying to hire Day. True to his word, Kelly later hired Day as quarterbacks coach with the Eagles and 49ers.
In 2018, Day found himself in an unfamiliar role: head coach. He hadn’t been a head coach at any level. He’d reunited with Urban Meyer at Ohio State when Kelly’s NFL run fizzled, and when Meyer was suspended for three games Day was named interim head coach. (He’d replace Meyer at season’s end.) As he began one of the biggest jobs in all of football, Day got a text from Kelly: You were built for this.
Ohio State’s Ryan Day is 61-8 as head coach. (Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
Last November, McDonnell flew to Los Angeles to visit Kelly and attend UCLA’s rivalry road game against USC. The retired coach was struck by the responsibilities of a Power 4 head coach — schmoozing with boosters, managing the transfer portal, navigating name, image and likeness conversations. Everything, it seemed, but coaching football. Which is why Kelly jumped at a chance to coach UCLA’s quarterbacks when one of his coaches departed prior to the LA Bowl against Boise State.
“His wife, Jill, said, ‘I hadn’t seen him smile like that in a long time,’” McDonnell said.
The headlines about Kelly’s pay cut to come to Ohio State — his $2 million salary is $4 million less than he’d have made at UCLA this year — only made McDonnell chuckle. “He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about money,” McDonnell said. “If you ever saw the cars he was driving in Durham …”
Ohio State is undefeated through five games. So far, Kelly’s offense has delivered. With Kelly calling plays and transfer quarterback Will Howard executing them, the Buckeyes rank fourth in points per game (46.0) and ninth in total offense (510.2 yards). Kelly has added versatility to a talented Ohio State offense. He has a wealth of future NFL talent to scheme around, including running backs Quinshon Judkins and TreVeyon Henderson and receivers Emeka Egbuka and Jeremiah Smith.
Though his offense has changed since he was at Oregon, especially the tempo, the concepts are the same. The Buckeyes are spreading out defenses, fooling them with different formations and motions, then running the ball down their throats. Kelly is famous for forcing defenses to look in multiple areas before going elsewhere. Iowa came to Columbus last weekend with a top-five defense. Ohio State scored 35 points and ran for 203 yards. Iowa never caught on to Kelly’s tendencies. Because he doesn’t have any.
“He’s got every play call in the book that he wants to call,” Iowa linebacker Jay Higgins said. “Defensively, we saw a lot, probably the most we’ve had to defend.”
Like in his New Hampshire days, Kelly’s offense still shape-shifts slightly from week to week as he homes in on what works best for his players against a specific defense. Against Michigan State, he utilized Egbuka as a blocker multiple times, even pulling him through a gap to pick up a linebacker. Against Iowa, Egbuka had three touchdowns. Kelly calls that “job swapping.” If a receiver or a running back can make explosive plays in space but also learn to lay a block, it further opens the playbook.
“The more weapons you have, the more defenses have to defend. And the more they have to defend the field, the better off we’re going to be,” Kelly said.
Last winter, when former New Hampshire players congratulated Kelly for joining Day’s staff at Ohio State, Kelly replied, “I just want to coach football.” Peterson, who played 11 years in the Canadian Football League, said it’s an ideal fit for Kelly. He gets to coach ball and chase a championship with one of his closest friends in the business.
“The mad scientist that he is,” Peterson said, “he can just cook.”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: University of New Hampshire; Rey Del Rio / Getty Images)
