Chip Kelly Will Not Let The Ashton Jeanty Stance Thing Go

Chip Kelly Will Not Let The Ashton Jeanty Stance Thing Go

Maybe Chip Kelly didn’t want Ashton Jeanty? The new Raiders offensive coordinator is already publically on record for hating on Jeanty’s stance. Now he’s doing it again to make sure people heard him the first time.

Kelly doesn’t just hate Jeanty’s stance. He despises it and went into an important rant talking about knee bend.

Kelly had this to say in a recent press conference:

“Let’s get that clarified,” Kelly said, via transcript from the team. “Deland McCullough, our running back coach, is in charge of stances, steps, alignments, assignments, and techniques. So he talked to him about that. I gave him an analogy of an athlete being in a bent-knee position to make a play, and that kind of got blown into. I haven’t told anybody on this team to be in any stances because I don’t coach a position. But it’s a bent-knee game.

“[I]f you look at the before the ball snapped in baseball, or the pitcher throwing the baseball, everybody’s got their knees bent. In any athletic sport you’re playing, you’ve got to bend your knees. And if you’ve got to run a flat route on Fred Warner, you’d better be in a position to run, because that dude can fly. So, all we’re trying to do is put guys in positions to make plays.”

“So, I really don’t think it’s that big a deal,” Kelly said. “But he’s awesome, and he’s such a coachable guy that you can do a lot of things with him. I think he can play in the slot, he can play in the backfield, he can do a lot of different things. So, he’s special.”

“His ability to sustain runs after contact, his contact balance is kind of a really rare quality,” Kelly said. “He’s got a low center of gravity, and I think it’s tough to get him down, and normally the first guy doesn’t.

“I think sometimes you get caught up in just looking at the numbers, but I think it was like 35 missed tackles he created in the Penn State game. Now, Penn State’s defense, we played against them [at Ohio State], they’re outstanding. That was a little bit different league for Boise at that time, but not for Ashton in terms of what he did. So, excited to see him.”

I Asked ChatGPT If I Was Being Unreasonable About Ashton Jeanty

No disagreements from me. Knee bend is incredibly important, and all of the conversation about Jeanty’s stance was talked about in his profile. If you’ve spent any amount of time reading through our draft coverage, you already know the importance I stress on knee bend.

Here’s the bottom line, and this part is becoming more and more obvious. This was not Kelly’s call to draft Jeanty at six. Forget about the call. It’s looking more obvious that Kelly was an active voice to veto the decision. He’s putting it out there without saying the obvious. My guess is he advocated for the two guys he just coached at Ohio State (Judkins / Henderson).

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