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Chip Kelly is intriguing, but questions still remain

With Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner reportedly in Arizona waiting for their turn to bend a knee and kiss the visor of Oregon coach Chip Kelly, it seems like a good time to look at what Browns fans are in store for if the team makes Kelly the franchise’s sixth head coach since 1999.

So what do we know about Kelly?

He’s 45-7 in four seasons at Oregon, where the Ducks play a highly entertaining brand of offensive football at a high pace, averaging more than 50 points a game. By spreading the field, Oregon forces opposing defenses to defend the entire field – not just the area between the tackles.

The Ducks averaged 84.4 offensive plays a game this season; the average NFL team is at 66.8.

Kelly’s frenetic approach also applies to practice, allowing the Ducks to get in more repetitions than other teams in the same amount of time.

Several NFL teams, most notably New England, have adopted parts of Kelly’s offensive system – not the whole system, but parts of it (that’s a key point).

There’s one more thing – Kelly has never spent a single minute, in any capacity, in the NFL.

And that should be reason enough to give Browns fans pause before they go all-in on Kelly as the next coach.

We start to sort out the Chip Kelly question at The Cleveland Fan.