Two hours after the final gun it became official Jed York and the 49ers are done with Trent Baalke and Chip Kelly. According to Baalke he received word of his firing on the Friday prior to the Seahawks game. In true Baalke sleeze fashion he leaked and then outright told the media he was fired and implied that Kelly going to be canned as well.
Chip Kelly’s fate, it is now known, was tied to Baalke since the time he as hired last January. And Kelly like a good soldier goose stepped to Baalke’s every move, no matter how much he disagreed. Kelly didn’t know his fate nor did he know that Trent was undermining him even after he (Baalke) was fired on Friday. But that is Trent, always looking out for himself and using the head coach as his personal scapegoat.
This not to say Chip Kelly shouldn’t have been fired. In fact Kelly should not have been hired after the lack of progressive results in Philadelphia and the fact that he was not able to adjust his offensive philosophy to be better suited the NFL style and rules. But in all likelihood Baalke hired Chip as a hedge if the 2016 season went bad so he argue to Jed that Chip’s the problem not him. In this instance Jed said in the press conference that Trent did not live up to the goals he set for him early last year. In other words Jed finally realized that Trent has no eye for talent and that he undermines the coach and the football performance with bad personal decisions, lack of communication and his back-stabbing leaks to the press.
Yet Chip given what he had to work with still under-performed expectations by any measure. His 2-14 record was worse that Jim Tomula’s 2015 record with just about the same roster if not lightly ungraded on offense. In addition Chip should have made some major adjustments at mid-season and at least tried Christian Ponder at QB when it was obvious that Colin Kaepernick was performing well enough to win games.
The bottom-line is there was no leadership on the field or upstairs. You have two men unsuited for the task at hand and who were fighting with each other for control. In the end they both lost and now its up to Jed to begin righting the ship. Jed’s record in this area is poor at best so far.
