CULVER CITY, Calif. -- Rooting interest be damned, count Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich among those excited to see exactly what his former boss Chip Kelly's offense looks like with the Philadelphia Eagles.
"As a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan, it's hard, and I told him that. I'm now a 'Cow-gle' fan," Helfrich joked Friday at Pac-12 media day.
Helfrich was Kelly's offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach for four seasons, but that experience doesn't offer any special insight into what the Eagles will do.
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"Once the ball is snapped I think I'll know the play," Helfrich said. "I'm looking forward to it. I think they have got a really good match with their personnel and what Chip will do."
Oregon corner Ifo Ekpre-Olomu is not surprised that his former coach has done such a good job of keeping things quiet.
"With Chip, everything that he does is pretty much secretive," Ekpre-Olomu said. "You might think that he is doing something, but honestly, no one really knows. I'm sure we're not going to know until the first game of what they are really planning on doing."
The biggest difference during the initial "ongoing feeling-out period," as Helfrich termed it, will be managing the 53-man NFL roster. With the flexibility of having 85 players on scholarship at Oregon, Kelly had the depth to conduct grueling high-tempo practices.
"They can't practice like we practice, it's physically impossible and he is smart enough to know that," Helfrich said.
But Helfrich does believe Kelly, who won three Pac-10/12 championships and two BCS bowls in four seasons at Oregon, will ultimately succeed, simply because of the force of his personality.
"Chip would be great if he was an investment banker," Helfrich said. "He would be great with whatever else he chose to do."
Follow Dan Greenspan on Twitter @DanGreenspan.
