Grotz: New Eagles offense is guaranteed to shock

Eagles head coach Chip Kelly.

PHILADELPHIA -- There's science behind the earsplitting music, the protein shakes and the warp speed pace at Eagles practices.

Head coach Chip Kelly isn't in a hurry to share it because what worked for him on the college level at Oregon isn't guaranteed to work in the NFL.

For now, Kelly and "new" are in with the Eagles. And from what little we've seen there is a method to his operation.

Think of football as your Internet.

Former Eagles head coach Andy Reid was cable. At first you couldn't notice any difference in the speed or quality of the Eagles' play. Basically they operated just like everyone else only with better components, not the least of which were Donovan McNabb, Terrell Owens and Brian Westbrook.

Now we're in the fiber optics stage of football. Fast isn't nearly good enough. On the college level, Kelly's Ducks not only ran plays every 18 or 19 seconds, but ran them without messing up.

Focus, maximum fitness and a basic offense full of runs and misdirection turn game days into a grueling event that makes Army basic training seem like a Caribbean getaway. The system already works in the NFL.

"I know playing in Houston the hardest team we ever played against was the Patriots when they went into that no-huddle, up-tempo," said outside linebacker Connor Barwin, a former Texan. "We lost to them twice last year and the year before. And it was that no-huddle that really hurt us or gave us the most trouble. That's why I see a lot of teams switching over to do that. It wears you down. And then you start to think slower."

Up-tempo, no-huddle offenses give defenses little time to make pre-snap adjustments. Even if you do recognize formations the Eagles are going to use all kinds of motion to make the heads of defenders swim.

Already we've seen the hand signals used to augment the helmet radio to signal plays. Good luck trying to read the hand signals. The Eagles' sideline is going to have a small army of personnel sending coded signals and dummy signals, just as at Oregon.

All of this is happening at a pace so fast it's going to be difficult for the opposition to substitute ... and easy to blow a substitution package.

Chaotic as the early Eagles practices look, what with wide receivers and running backs backpedaling to get back to the line of scrimmage for the next play, it's going to be at least as unnerving for defenses. There are going to be opportunities for big plays. Big, big plays. And we all know that big plays lead to more big plays, a game of catch-up and still more big plays.

"You really need to recognize so many things before a snap to know what they're doing," Barwin said. "You recognize formations and then you limit down what they can do. When they speed it up you're just catching the formation ... maybe. And then if you line up wrong you're in trouble. You don't have time to switch. Whereas if they huddle you've got time to move around. When they don't huddle you just don't have time to think about what plays they might run out of that formation."

Dizzying just explaining it, eh?

The quarterback is going to play a huge role in finding the holes, the seams, the lanes and the weaknesses the Kelly offense creates.

It's a lot to ask of veteran Michael Vick, second-year quarterback Nick Foles, rookie pocket passer Matt Barkley or Dennis Dixon, the Oregon product who seems to have the best grasp of the system.

Then again, there's at least a chance Kelly could run different packages in some sort of rotating quarterback system.

There's a long way to go. Culture changes certainly don't happen overnight. But it's still football. The Eagles will go as far as their quarterbacks take them.

When the Eagles signed nose tackle Isaac Sopoaga, who had just been to the Super Bowl with the runner-up San Francisco 49ers, Sopoaga said the Eagles would "shock the world."

The media looked at each other quizzically.

One way or another the Eagles will do just that.

To contact Bob Grotz, email bgrotz Follow him on Twitter @BobGrotz

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