Oct. 17, 2013

By Frank Fitzpatrick, Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted: September 25, 2013

BALTIMORE - It was during the one season he worked with a coach nicknamed Tommy Edison that the lightbulb flashed on in Chip Kelly's head.

Kelly's epiphany occurred 20 years ago in a starless football universe light-years removed from the NFL. As a first-year defensive coordinator for Division III Johns Hopkins - the Baltimore school that has produced thousands of physicians but not a single regular-season NFL player - he earned less than $20,000, drove a borrowed car, and lived in the head coach's spare bedroom.

But it was a passion for statistical analysis born here in 1993 that set Kelly on the less-traveled road to the NFL, where, despite losses in his last two games, the rookie Eagles coach's innovations have created a nationwide buzz.

That season the baby-faced 29-year-old met Bob Babb, an inquisitive, baseball-mad Pennsylvanian who coached Hopkins' linebackers in the fall and its baseball team in the spring. Babb believed in the power of data. Ahead of his time, he prodigiously collected and consumed it. And with it, he helped satisfy his insatiable curiosity about the ways football was taught and played.

Click here to read the rest of Frank Fitzpatrick's story from the Philadelphia Inquirer.