Eagles receiver Josh Huff told reporters on Tuesday that he could, at times, hear the Cowboys yelling out Philadelphia's plays from the sideline before the snap.
But on Wednesday, Kelly asked Huff directly if he thought the Cowboys had their signals. Here is how Kelly relayed their conversation:
"I just asked him about that, he didn't say that to us," Kelly said. "I just asked Josh, 'do you think they knew our signals?' and he said no. I said, Josh do you think they're picking up on things and he said no."
Hmm.
Kelly was then asked about the larger notion of predictability. After all, this was not the first time that an accusation like that arose from a Kelly opponent.
"I think there's certain things that everybody does that's predictable from a tendency standpoint," he said. "When you lineup in this formation 75 percent of the time you do this, 25 percent of the time you do this, but there's nothing I don't think anybody does offensively or defensively that's 100 percent of the time.
"The team you're playing is 80 percent man coverage in this look but that doesn't mean you're gonna get man coverage every time. That's just, everybody kind of does what they do, there's a certain percentage that everybody does what they do but not always 50/50, you know what I mean?"
Simplicity in NFL play calling is often rewarded. Ask Peyton Manning, who has been running a version of his offense for almost two decades. It would be interesting, though, to see exactly how many of Kelly's "predictable" calls were just harder to stop when he had his offense running full throttle at a breakneck speed. No one will dispute the fact that Sam Bradford has slowed the Eagles down a bit (the team is averaging 61.5 snaps per game but finished the 2014 season at just over 70) and perhaps that is a contributing factor.
In the meantime, Kelly had better figure out if Huff was mistaken or not when he was addressing reporters on Tuesday. A record of 0-3 is hard to come back from.
UPDATE:On Wednesday, Huff walked back the claims he made to reporters the previous day:
