Written by Thomas Moore

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With Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner reportedly in Arizona waiting for their turn to bend a knee and kiss the visor of Oregon coach Chip Kelly, it seems like a good time to look at what Browns fans are in store for if the team makes Kelly the franchise’s sixth head coach since 1999.

So what do we know about Kelly?

He’s 45-7 in four seasons at Oregon, where the Ducks play a highly entertaining brand of offensive football at a high pace, averaging more than 50 points a game. By spreading the field, Oregon forces opposing defenses to defend the entire field – not just the area between the tackles.

“The offense is always taking advantage of space,” Stanford coach David Shaw told ESPN. “That’s the thing. You’ve got to match up personnel-wise. But at the same time, it’s still space. You have to game-plan for it. You've got to be ready for it.”

The Ducks averaged 84.4 offensive plays a game this season; the average NFL team is at 66.8.

Kelly’s frenetic approach also applies to practice, allowing the Ducks to get in more repetitions than other teams in the same amount of time.

Several NFL teams, most notably New England, have adopted parts of Kelly’s offensive system – not the whole system, but parts of it (that’s a key point).

There’s one more thing – Kelly has never spent a single minute, in any capacity, in the NFL.

And that should be reason enough to give Browns fans pause before they go all-in on Kelly as the next coach.

Simply put, the track record of college coaches succeeding on the NFL level makes Eric Mangini and Pat Shurmur look like Hall of Fame material. Virtually every single coach that has made the move from the college ranks to the NFL since Jimmy Johnson left Miami for Dallas has failed in a major way.

Jim Harbaugh is starting to reverse that trend in San Francisco – but he could just be the exception that proves the rule – and he has an NFL background as a player and briefly as a quarterback coach with Oakland.

It’s possible that the times are changing in the NFL and the Browns don’t have to be a slave to history, but at the same time there’s enough evidence that the question has to be raised.

Having said that, there is a lot about Kelly that is intriguing.

The first is the possibility that Kelly’s offense is less gimmick and more an evolutionary step in offensive football (think less Wildcat and more of the no-huddle has been around since the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals were using it in the early 1990s).

“What Oregon’s doing will take the evolution of football to a whole different level,” Brian Baldinger, a former player for several pro teams and now an analyst with the NFL Network, told The New York Times in a 2010 article. “Nobody in the whole history of football can snap off plays as quickly as this team does. Other teams can’t condition for it. It’s a great equalizer. If you’ve got a 350-pound guy, I don’t care how good he is, you’ve got to get him off the field. He can’t keep up. I think what everyone wants to know is, What’s the trick? How do they do it?”

On one level, Kelly makes it sound so simple.

“We spread the defense so they will declare their defensive look for the offensive linemen,” Kelly said in a recent Grantland article. “The more offensive personnel we put in the box, the more defenders the defense will put in there, and it becomes a cluttered mess.

“If there are two high safeties, mathematically there can only be five defenders in the box. With one high safety there can be six in the box. With two high safeties, we should run the ball most of the time. We have five blockers and they have five defenders.

“If there are seven defenders in the box, there are only four defenders to play the pass. It is difficult to play man-to-man without help all day long.”

The fact that it all sounds so basic raises the question of why more teams are not running the system. For some, the answer is just as easy – it won’t work on the NFL level because defenses are faster and they hit harder. And the pace of the game can tax the team’s own defensive players Oregon regularly plays 25 or more players on defense in a typical game; over the years the Browns have had enough trouble just finding 11 players who can play defense competently.

“If you start to manipulate the pace (of the game), you have to roll guys through,” college football analyst and former NFL player Matt Millen told ESPN. “In the NFL, you can’t do it. Defensively, it kills you. Where it kills you is, how do you practice? There’s more wear. Chip’s philosophy is we’re going to run as many plays as we can. We’ll correct it later on. A lot of times, you end up practicing mistakes. At the next level, mistakes are called death.”

“Can (it work)? Yes. (But in the NFL) they make you play to your weaknesses.”

The flipside to that is the toll that Kelly’s offense takes on opposing defenses.

The fast pace of the Ducks offense means the offensive linemen have to be in top shape as well as being NFL-sized. And all that conditioning work can have some good results on game day.

“(Opposing players) talk about throwing up on themselves,” Oregon lineman Ryan Clanton, a redshirt senior, told The Daily Emerald earlier this year. “That’s just kind of common, and it’s not like everyone’s not tired – everyone’s tired, we just know how to push through.”

We have to admit, the thought of seeing Pittsburgh’s Casey Hampton or Baltimore’s Haloti Ngata throwing up because they can’t keep pace with the Browns’ offense has a certain charm to it.

The biggest unknown with Kelly will be how willing he is to adapt his system – not only to the size and speed of the NFL but also to the talents of the players on the roster. Bill Parcells was successful in large part because he was willing to fit his system to his players, not the other way around, but many a coach has failed in that same area.

Can Kelly, whose identity is tied so close to this particular system, do the same?

“Every coach has to ask himself the same question: ‘what do you want to be,” Kelly told Grantland. “That is the great thing about football. You can be anything you want. You can be a spread team, I-formation team, power team, wing-T team, option team or wishbone team. You can be anything you want, but you have to define it.”

Kelly has certainly defined his brand of football at Oregon; the million dollar question is can he refine it for the NFL?

His proponents certainly believe so. (Of course, that is why they are his proponents in the first place, isn’t it?)

“Chip’s one of the brightest coaches I’ve ever spoken to, and that says a lot, because I’ve been around a lot of smart coaches,” Penn State coach Bill O’Brien (also in the rumor mix for Browns coach) told ESPN. “If he ends up in the NFL, he’ll adapt his system to the type of people he has.”

Before joining the Oregon program, Kelly worked on Sean McDonnell’s football staff at the University of New Hampshire and McDonnell says ego is not a problem.

“The thing that held (Chip) back is that he had not ego invested in (joining a major program),” McDonnell told The New York Times. “He would have been happy staying here forever. (Former Oregon coach Mike) Bellotti was the first guy who convinced Chipper that he’d really give him the autonomy to coach football the way he likes to coach it.”

If it is true that Kelly is willing to let go of what does not work, that would make us feel a lot better about seeing him on the Browns sideline next season. But this is going to be one of those times were we will have to first see it to believe it.

One aspect of Kelly’s game we can firmly get behind is the simplified nature of the play calling. On offense, the plays come in from the sidelines using hand signals and a series of cardboard signs, each with four pictures or words on them.

Compare that to the overly complicated play calling system used in the West Coast offense, where a typical play call would be something like I Weak Right X Fly Y Stop Z Curl Fullback Free and it had to come in through the quarterback’s headset, and it is easy to see the advantage to Kelly’s system.

Of course, speeding things up puts more pressure on the quarterback to make the right decision.

“There are offenses out there which require more reads/decisions to be made by the QB, but those offenses also give the QB more time in which to make those decisions,” former Oregon quarterback Nate Costa told CBSsports.com. “The tempo of the Oregon offense puts a strain on the defense, but decisions still need to be made by the QB on every play and it is paramount that these decisions be correct. If the QB is making incorrect decisions, the offense will fail. With the pace of play you’re not able to see some of the defensive subtleties, which may give away certain blitzes or coverages. You need to be able to make judgment calls based on limited information, and those decisions need to be correct.”

And guess who was successful at running an up-tempo no-huddle offense that relied on a system of hand signals to communicate the plays? None other the current Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden.

In some ways, as important as it may be for the Browns (or any NFL team) to hire Kelly it may be almost as important to find a way for Kelly to bring some of his assistant coaches with him – most notably offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich and offensive line coach Steve Greatwood.

“The biggest misconception (about Oregon’s offense) would have to be the involvement of Mark Helfrich,” Costa said. “This is CK’s system, people know this, so they automatically think Helfrich has little input on what happens on Saturdays. This is simply not true. Helfrich doesn't get half the credit he deserves. He is one of the smartest people in the college football world and has a great football mind. He has a large amount of involvement in the game-planning, scripting and coaching on a weekly basis. He may not call all the plays on game day, but he has a high amount of input in what plays are called and why they are called.”

Clanton feels the same way about the conditioning program under Greatwood, who has helped the Ducks to six consecutive rushing titles.

“Show respect and he shows respect back,” Clanton said. “You don’t want a guy who sugarcoats anything; you need criticism and he’ll give it to you.”

If the Browns do decide to hire Kelly, the biggest thing he will have going for him is time. This hire is going to be a major indictment of the decision-making ability of Haslam and Banner and they will give Kelly as much time as he needs to get it right.

And that is exactly what Kelly needs for his system to succeed, according to Shaw.

“It would take an organizational commitment,” the Stanford coach told ESPN. “Everybody from top to bottom, the GM, the owner, the personnel people, need to be on a mission to give that offense what it needs. You can’t waver from it. Everybody needs to be on the same page. It can’t be, ‘Well, let’s bring this receiver in.’ If he doesn’t fit their offense, they can’t bring him in. It’s so different than (what) most people are used to.”

After so many years of bad football, maybe something different isn’t all that bad.

As for Kelly himself, he says he doesn’t yet know if his system would work in the NFL (although we have a pretty good idea what he really believes).

“Don’t know, haven’t been there…” Kelly said in a press conference for Thursday’s Fiesta Bowl. “There's a lot of ways to play football ... Trends go one way and the other ... Any coach is going to learn from other people and see how they can implement it in their system. Anything you do has to be personnel driven. You have to adapt to the personnel you have. There’s a lot of great offenses out there, but does it fit with the personnel you have. The key is making sure what you’re doing is giving your people a chance to be successful.

“I don’t think anybody knows any answers until someone does it. (Washington) is doing a pretty good job. The kid at Carolina has done a pretty good job. But it depends. I’ve never coached in that league. I visited practices and talked to people about it. The one thing about that, about everything, you have to have good players. Sometimes the coaching aspect is way overrated. We don't play the game. I think college football is a personnel driven game, so is the NFL. Your job as a coach very simply is to put your players in positions to make plays, get out of the way and go make them.”

So while no one knows just what would happen if Kelly brings his offensive system to the NFL, we’re getting the feeling that we may soon find out.

Are you ready for the revolution, Browns fans? (Although Kelly may want to rethink the whole visor thing once winter hits Northeast Ohio).