Chip Kelly’s All-Time Ranking Among San Francisco 49ers Head Coaches
The San Francisco 49ers are hoping Chip Kelly will be their best head coach in some time. Will he live up to those expectations?
Chip Kelly will be the 19th head coach in San Francisco 49ers history, and he’s already above average.
Because the 49ers’ glory days were so dominated by a few coaches—Bill Walsh and George Seifert held the reigns from 1979 through 1996—there have been more bad coaches in 49ers history than good ones. Bad coaches come and go quickly, cycled in and out as general managers scramble to find some consistency. When you find a good coach, you hold on to them for all you’ve got through thick and thin—at least, normally.
Where will Kelly rank among the 49ers head coaches when all is said and done? Obviously, we don’t know. At the moment, I have him as the ninth-best head coach in 49ers history before he takes a snap—the guy’s undefeated, which helps keep him above all of the coaches with losing career records, but he’s also yet to win a game, which helps keep him below all of the coaches with winning career records. It’s funny how that works—Kelly’s kind of in a weird hyperfine position of both having yet to disappoint any fans but also having yet to achieve anything.
The first season is very critical—it gives us a starting point to actual analyze the coach in relation to his historic predecessors, without relying on speculation and projection. Because the 49ers have a new head coach—and because it’s May and not much is going down on the field at the moment—I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at how the 49ers’ historic coaches ranked, and what Kelly would have to do in his first season as the 49ers’ skip to pass some of the greats ahead of him—or fall below some of the lesser-lights below him.
We’re taking into account both the historic success of past coaches and the projections for how good the 2016 49ers will be when trying to figure out what Kelly would have to do to pass coaches on this list. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
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