The decision to hire Chip Kelly was arguably the Raiders’ worst decision of the 2025 offseason and based on the NFLPA report card leaked to ESPN last month, the players in the building would mostly agree.
Kelly’s tenure in Las Vegas only lasted 11 games, but his failures began long before the start of the regular season.
It was Kelly who reportedly forced Ashton Jeanty to change his stance in the backfield, although he said in May that he never told Jeanty to adjust his stance. At the time, Kelly said any coaching decisions on Jeanty’s stance would have come from Jeanty’s position coach.
But according Jeanty last week, it was Kelly who told him to change his stance and the conversation happened on the first day of OTAs.
“It was crazy because it was literally the first day, I had got out to practice, like literally getting out to OTAs. Chip Kelly come over to me talking that talk, but he just basically said ‘You can’t stand like that because how quick and how fast the NFL pace is and every step, every move matters,'” Jeanty said on the I AM ATHLETE podcast
“But obviously I showed that don’t really matter. I can be effective and efficient in that stance. I had to [go back to it].”
For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time Jeanty has pointed to the conversation around his stance with Kelly.
On the Up & Adams Show in May, Jeanty said Kelly used the analogy of guarding someone… on a basketball court… to explain why his stance wouldn’t translate well to the NFL.
“You know, sometimes you have to, you know, go with the flow,” Jeanty said prior to the 2025 season. “What’s crazy is, Chip Kelly comes to me first day of rookie minicamp, and he’s like ‘You ever play basketball?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I play basketball, you know I can dunk and all that.’ He’s like, ‘OK, show me how you would guard me,’ and he’s acting like he’s holding the ball.”
“And then he’s like, ‘That’s exactly why you have to be down in your running back stance,'” Jeanty continued. “He won for now. I’m going to try and persuade him one day,” he said. “I have to earn my stripes and make some plays first, but I don’t think it’s going to be the end [of the stance].”
x: @raidersbeat
The raider organization is a complete shi7 show. 50 million people and nobody even knows what each one of their job duties are. There’s no way in hell that you can have any kind of continuity when all that’s going on. Jim Gray Tom Brady Guerrero character, Davises incompetence,Spytek’s Brady connection, Pete, and his son, and even Graham crackers failure to identify adjustments during the game in personnel. Or maybe he just has rocks in his head and refused to put anyone else on the field. Even after said players are roasted time and time and time again.