How Chip Kelly's Scheme Affects 49ers' 2016 NFL Draft Plans

For the first time in over a decade, the San Francisco 49ers have an offensive play-caller as head coach. How will Chip Kelly alter the team’s 2016 NFL Draft plans?

How much impact should a head coach have on player acquisition? Bill Parcells once said “if I’m going to be asked to cook the meal, I’d like to be able to pick the groceries.”

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While the analogy is somewhat flawed—when was the last time you saw a five-star chef at the local supermarket?—the premise is sound. When a team makes decisions about acquiring players, it has to do so with the philosophy and skills of their head coach in mind.

For the San Francisco 49ers, that means Trent Baalke is shopping for Chip Kelly’s groceries. While the buck stops with Baalke, he has to keep Kelly’s style in mind while making his draft selections. To continue Parcells’ food metaphor, you wouldn’t buy the same ingredients for a Mexican restaurant and a Chinese restaurant. Yes, some of the staples are the same, but if you don’t customize your selection for your coach, you’ll end up with a suboptimal dining experience… metaphorically.

Obviously, switching from Jim Tomsula, a former defensive line coach, to Chip Kelly, an offensive guru, brings with it a rather radical change of philosophy. It goes back even a bit further than that, though—while Jim Harbaugh was a quarterback coach and more offensive minded than not, he let his offensive staff call the plays. The 49ers haven’t had a head coach who will be as hands-on with the offense since Dennis Erickson in 2003-04, and that likely shifts their priorities somewhat.

Now, this won’t change Baalke’s general philosophy of finding players at good values and not over-paying for talent, but it will affect the types of players he’ll be drafting, especially on offense.

While Kelly is on record saying that the 49ers’ offense has the talent he needs, he’s taking over a team that used its offensive players very differently in the Harbaugh and Tomsula eras.

According to Football Outsiders’ charting stats, Chip Kelly’s offenses in Philadelphia used single-back formations about 98 percent of the time, as opposed to San Francisco’s 57 percent of the time—the 49ers are one of those rare teams which still utilize a fullback in Bruce Miller. Kelly’s offenses have three or more wide receivers on the field about two-thirds of the time, compared to less than half for the 49ers. Kelly’s offenses work out of the shotgun or pistol formations more than 80 percent of the time, while San Francisco is in that formation less than half the time.

In short, the 49ers will simply have to line up differently under Kelly, first and foremost.

Oct 11, 2015; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Philadelphia Eagles head coach Chip Kelly during fourth quarter against the New Orleans Saints at Lincoln Financial Field. The Eagles defeated the Saints, 39-17. Mandatory Credit: Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports /

The increased reliance on the wide receiver position means they’ll need more receivers on the roster and more receiver talent in the wings. For most of last season, the 49ers only had five active wide receivers on the 53-man roster, while Kelly’s offense usually had at least six. The 49ers had three wide receivers active on at least a quarter of the team’s offensive snaps—Torrey Smith, Anquan Boldin and Quinton Patton. The Eagles had five—Jordan Matthews, Nelson Agholor, Riley Cooper, Josh Huff and Miles Austin. Kelly’s receiving corps had a first-round pick, a second-round pick and a third-round pick in regular usage, too.

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The 49ers have made one move this offseason to bolster the corps, signing CFL star Eric Rogers, but Kelly’s offense is used to using much more highly-regarded receivers.

While the 49ers might rightfully be a bit gunshy about using a high pick on a receiver after the A.J. Jenkins fiasco, but Kelly prizes large, physical receivers who can fend off man-to-man coverage. That’s good news for last year’s Baalke redshirt in DeAndre Smelter.

It might also make the 49ers more likely to draft a Michael Thomas or Braxton Miller from Ohio State rather than Oklahoma’s Sterling Shepard or South Carolina’s Pharoh Cooper; all things being equal, Kelly likes his receivers big and physical.

Talent, of course, overrides all this, but given two roughly equivalent players, it’s likely Kelly would pull for the bigger one.

Under Kelly, the Eagles drafted Nelson Agholor, a long and tall receiver. Mandatory Credit: Derik Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports /

On the offensive line, too, Kelly feels that size matters. While he has been clear in interviews that you need both size and athleticism to play the position, he shares Trent Baalke’s opinion that, all else being equal, size is key in the modern game.

“Our philosophy has always been ‘big people beat up little people,’” he said at the Scouting Combine, which brings added credence to rumors the 49ers are interesting in the 6’5”Ronnie Stanley as a potential offensive tackle, or the 6’7” DeForest Buckner at defensive tackle—with Buckner, in particular, being a Kelly recruit at Oregon.

At Oregon, Kelly would recruit the largest and longest players he could find, and determine positions for them later. While the same strategy won’t exactly work in the NFL, this is the sort of thing Kelly looks for when he’s evaluating players.

Offensive linemen other than Stanley that might particularly fit the Kelly mold include Texas A&M tackle Germain Ifedi, Auburn tackle Shon Coleman and Michigan State tackle Jack Conklin. By the same tokens, don’t be surprised if the 49ers are a little less high on Kansas State guard Cody Whitehair or centers Max Tuerk of Notre Dame and Even Boehm of Missouri—even for interior linemen, they came out of the combine with relatively shorter arms.

Taking that fixation on size down to a miniscule level, one of Kelly’s quarterback metrics is hand size. At the combine, he focused on the importance of the size of a quarterback’s mitts.

“You better have big hands,” he said. “Russell Wilson is 5-10 1/2 but he’s got 10 ¼ hands. You better have a big paw to manipulate the football. They’re measureables,” he said. “They’re guidelines. They’re not like: ‘He has nine-inch hands. He’s out.’”

This could be a strike against quarterback Jared Goff, one of the players most commonly mocked to the 49ers. With only nine-inch hands, Goff had the second-smallest result at the combine ahead only of Arkansas’ Brandon Allen and tied with Penn State’s Christian Hackenberg. While Kelly was clear that small hands doesn’t exclude someone entirely, it’s a black mark in his book.

So, who had the biggest hands? A couple of day three picks in Mississippi State’s Dak Prescott and USC’s Cody Kessler. If the 49ers do not go quarterback early, I would not be at all surprised if the 49ers grabbed Prescott or Kessler with one of their three picks in the fifth round of the draft.

The potential first-round player with the biggest hands was Memphis’ Paxton Lynch, a possible target if the 49ers trade back out of the seventh slot.

We’ll see on draft day how Kelly’s particular style effects the 49ers’ plans, but the bottom line is this—as long as Baalke gets him some quality ingredients, Kelly had better be prepared to cook one heck of a meal.

Next: A Round-By-Round Mock Draft

San Francisco’s draft strategy will be fascinating to watch–how much will it look like Baalke’s strategy from the past few years, and how much will it look like Chip Kelly’s one draft as GM?

How Chip Kelly’s Scheme Affects 49ers’ 2016 NFL Draft Plans

By Bryan Knowles | Apr 12, 2016

For the first time in over a decade, the San Francisco 49ers have an offensive play-caller as head coach. How will Chip Kelly alter the team’s 2016 NFL Draft plans?

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