Chip Kelly shocked the football world on Friday, leaving UCLA to accept an offensive coordinator position at Ohio State. It’s a move that Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke called “cowardly.”
Plaschke believes Kelly “flipped off” UCLA by leaving the program without a head coach in the middle of February.
“For the final play of his sorry UCLA tenure, Chip Kelly finally ran something that fooled somebody,” Plaschke wrote. “A cowardly reverse. Less than three months after the UCLA administration publicly embraced him, he flipped them off.”
Later in his column, Plaschke said he begged UCLA to fire Kelly at the end of the 2023 season. Clearly, there’s no love lost here.
“He should have been fired long before he could pull this selfish stunt, long before his lame opportunism turned the program into steaming wreckage, long before now,” Plaschke continued.
What makes this situation so bizarre is that Kelly willingly accepted a demotion from a team in the same conference as UCLA.
Column: In leaving UCLA, Chip Kelly runs a selfish sneak https://t.co/8b77wstoJU
— Bill Plaschke (@BillPlaschke) February 10, 2024
Kelly, who went 35-34 at UCLA, has not yet commented on his latest career move.
Make no mistake about it, UCLA fans will not be happy with anything Kelly says in the coming days.