Ryan Day's trust in Chip Kelly began decades ago in small-town New Hampshire
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Jake Trotter, ESPN Senior Writer
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS ago, Delaware was rolling over New Hampshire, leading 31-3 late in the third quarter. The second-ranked Blue Hens were a perennial Football Championship Subdivision power. But UNH had something Delaware didn’t: Ryan Day and Chip Kelly. Two of the game’s most innovative offensive minds, who, even then, had an inherent trust in each other, molded from their Manchester, New Hampshire, roots.
Long before he became Ohio State’s head coach, Day quarterbacked one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. Kelly, then UNH’s offensive coordinator, kept dialing up creative passing plays, and Day kept completing throws. Then, on a fourth-and-19, Kelly called “Charlotte Angle.” Day hit Brian Mallette on a slant, and Mallette flipped the ball to a receiver sprinting the opposite direction for a touchdown, tying the score. In overtime, Day found Mallette again on his school-record 65th passing attempt on a wheel route, giving the Wildcats a stunning 45-44 victory.
On the victory bus, Day called his buddies back home. They didn’t even realize UNH had won. They had turned the TV off by the third quarter.
Today, Day and Kelly are together again.
They reunited this offseason when Day relinquished playcalling and convinced Kelly to leave his post as UCLA’s head coach and become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.
On Saturday, in a Big Ten showdown, their second-ranked Buckeyes travel to No. 3 Oregon, where more than a decade ago, as Day put it, Kelly made his name “revolutionizing” offense.
Now on the same side again, they’re hoping to capture their elusive first national championship.
“We’ve been around each other for so long that we share a lot of the same views of how the game is supposed to look,” Kelly said. “That makes it so much easier. … It’s been great.”
Though he’s now the boss, Day is 15 years younger than Kelly. Still, the two have a unique bond forged by a shared history and shared experience growing up in Manchester, where they played sports for the same youth coaches, attended the same high school, played quarterback for the same college and later coached on the same staff there.
“Probably the biggest influence in my life in football,” Day said of Kelly. “From my hometown. … He was the first one to really get into college coaching and then he recruited me. I shared with him then that I wanted to be a coach and then he kind of took me under his wing. … Kind of gave me my start.”
That came in Manchester — New Hampshire’s biggest city, with a population just a bit larger than the capacity at the Horseshoe. It’s where Kelly and Day discovered a common calling coaching football.
AS A TEENAGER, Chip Kelly seemed to thrive in just about anything he tried. The Manchester High School Central Class of 1981 yearbook named Kelly its “most athletic” and “best looking” student.
The son of a local attorney, Kelly was quarterback captain of the football team, a star hockey player and a state champion in track, running the second leg of the 4×100-meter relay team. Frank Kelley, one of Kelly’s football teammates and who ran the first leg on that relay team, remembered taking Kelly water skiing for the first time on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire’s largest lake.
“Usually people who’ve never water-skied before, they’re not up there for very long,” Kelley said. “He’s water skiing and the guys are getting pissed off because he’s not falling. So we start throwing stuff at him, life preservers. … He was just a natural at a lot of the stuff he did.”
Kelly attended Central in its heyday, when enrollment was among the largest in New England. The public school blended students from all parts of Manchester, including the affluent north end, the middle class on the east side and the inner city.
“You had friends from all walks of life. … it was wonderful,” said Selma Naccach-Hoff, who has taught at Central for 40 years and had Kelly in a mythology class. “It’s a nurturing place.”
Kelly was a senior when Central’s most famous future alum — actor and comedian Adam Sandler — was a freshman. One of Frank Kelley’s sisters was Sandler’s bar mitzvah date when he turned 13. Sandler, Kelly and Day have all been inducted into the Central Hall of Fame. Sandler has given the Central commencement address several times over the years, especially when he has had a niece or nephew graduate.
Central, however, hadn’t had a winning football team in years until Kelly came through the program. Bob Leonard took over as Central’s head football coach, just before Kelly’s freshman year. As a sophomore, Kelly took over as starting quarterback.
“He was a coach when he was a kid,” said Leonard, who also coached Kelly in track. “He understood what we were doing, and he always wanted to know more about what we were doing.”
Kelly didn’t live far from Leonard, who was then in his 20s and lived with the other coaches. On Sunday afternoons, Kelly and some of his teammates would walk or bike to Leonard’s house to watch film in the living room. Leonard would hang a sheet over the fireplace, serving as the screen for the 16-millimeter projector.
If Leonard’s players were out on the town, he didn’t worry — as long as Kelly was with them.
“He was a good leader,” Leonard said, “and the group of kids he played with, they were good kids, they hung together and stuck together.”
Kelly led them on the field, too. Leonard gradually gave Kelly freedom to call the plays he wanted out of their I-formation, bootleg offense.
“If he looked at me and his eyes said, ‘I know what I want to do,'” Leonard recalled, “I’d tell him, ‘Go with it.'”
Kelly also played deep safety defensively, and, as Leonard noted, “was there to clean up the mess” if any of his teammates got beat.
“He didn’t scream and yell,” Leonard said. “He always had a big smile — ‘Let’s go and do this.'”
The Little Green won as many games as they lost, a big step forward from where they had been. Leonard noted that Kelly and his class “left a legacy” and a foundation for players who would come later, including Day and his younger brother, Tim, who would go on to play quarterback for UMass.
Leonard resigned from Central after Kelly’s final game to get married (Kelly attended the wedding) but later returned to coach defense under Jim Schubert, who remained Central’s head coach for 16 years through Day’s career.
After graduating from UNH, Kelly also came back to Central on Schubert’s staff, running the offense for a season. Kelly began experimenting with a fast-paced tempo that would later change football. That came with growing pains and, at times, exasperated his former coach.
“There’s a picture somewhere with my arms around his neck on the sideline,” Leonard said, laughing, “I say, ‘You go three-and-out again, I’m going to kill you right here because the defense can’t stand this anymore.’ But it was fun watching the offense. He had free reign. That’s where it all started. And we had a lot of fun that year.”
SELMA NACCACH-HOFF never had Ryan Day in class. But she had Day’s future wife, Nina Spirou, and her twin sister in world literature, an advanced placement course.
“So I did see a lot of Ryan,” Naccach-Hoff said. “They were a cute couple, really. His rosy cheeks distinguished him back then, and they still do now. It’s really quite fun to see.”
Naccach-Hoff remembered Day being sweet, “almost embarrassingly so,” to Spirou and his teachers and other classmates.
“You got a sense of Ryan’s character,” Naccach-Hoff said. “Supportive, kind, doing the right thing.”
Day has spoken out about his father, who died by suicide when Day was just 8 years old. He would say that loss gave him an “edge” on the field. But the family tragedy also put the onus on Day to help his mother raise his two younger brothers, Chris and Tim.
“He kind of became the father in a way to them,” said Mike Murphy, who coached Day in Pop Warner football. “He became a little more mature. And he played that way, too.”
Murphy’s son, Matt, one of Day’s friends growing up, remembered how Day always seemed older than other kids their age.
“A lot of things in some ways were beneath him,” said Matt, now a middle school teacher in Manchester. “Like, ‘You guys are going to go egging houses? That’s not really my thing.’ He was not interested. Like, ‘I’m not going to let people down. I’m going to do the right thing.'”
Following in Kelly’s footsteps, Day developed into a star athlete. He played point guard in basketball, was a standout catcher in baseball and became a three-year starting quarterback.
“Leadership was not in question when you talked about Ryan Day — he always stood out that way,” said Schubert, who had also played quarterback at Central. “I don’t think he ever criticized another player the entire time he played for me. His teammates followed him in every sport. Great character, great individual.”
The team had a motto going into Day’s junior year: “Believe and achieve.” The players wore that phrase on the back of their team T-shirts during offseason lifting and conditioning. Before the season, Day and Murphy found a piece of plywood and painted it green and white, the school’s colors. On it, they wrote, “If you believe, you will achieve today.” Mimicking the sign from Oklahoma and Notre Dame, “Play Like a Champion Today,” Day and Murphy hung up theirs on the wall right outside the Little Green locker room. The players would slap the sign before their home games while taking the field.
“Maybe it was kind of dorky,” Murphy said, “but we thought it was cool.”
That season, Central advanced all the way to the 1995 state championship game against Merrimack. The Little Green fell behind early.
“We were struggling,” Schubert said. “He brought the team together during a timeout. Ryan said, ‘Look, let’s get this together, men.'”
Led by Day’s arm, Central roared back to win by 17 points for its first state title in 25 years. Down the road as an assistant for UNH, Kelly was paying attention, salivating at the opportunity to recruit Day to the Wildcats.
SEAN McDONNELL WAS coaching receivers for Boston University in the 1980s when he received a call from a player he’d once coached against in Manchester.
Chip Kelly was still an assistant at Central but was hoping to move to college. He knew McDonnell was from Manchester and wondered whether he could come up to Boston and talk offense. McDonnell figured they’d chat for a few minutes. Instead, the two exchanged ideas on the chalkboard for several hours.
McDonnell was so impressed that when he ended up at Columbia, he told then-Lions head coach Ray Tellier that he should interview Kelly. After the interview, Tellier told McDonnell, “We’ve got to turn this interview into a recruiting session. He’s good, I really like him.”
Kelly joined the staff at Columbia, then followed McDonnell to UNH. In 1999, when McDonnell was promoted to head coach, Kelly became his offensive coordinator. One of their first moves was naming Ryan Day the starting quarterback.
“We were at the incubator stages of us starting to do some creative things on offense,” McDonnell said. “Then we had Ryan, just an unbelievable sponge with Chip. … And besides being a great player, his leadership abilities were tremendous. Those guys would run through a wall for Ryan. It was a pretty cool thing to see.”
McDonnell recalled even then Day and Kelly working well together executing game plans. And game-to-game those plans could change. One week, Kelly would implement the speed option and run the ball every down. The following week, the Wildcats would spread the field and pass it almost exclusively. McDonnell said the endless series of wrinkles kept practice fun while keeping opposing defenses guessing. But whatever the Wildcats did then, they went fast.
Day’s ability to lead and adapt made it all work.
“There was so much innovation happening then,” Mallette said. “And Ryan was the kind of leader, you just looked at him in the huddle and his eyes and just saw how determined he was going to be in whatever situation that was coming. … He was such a fierce competitor.”
That was on display in one of the biggest victories of Day’s career. In 2001, UNH trailed in-state rival Dartmouth 38-35 with under 2 minutes left. The Wildcats had blown a 21-point lead in the second half and seemed destined for a gut-wrenching loss. Mallette recalled the Ivy League students chanting “safety school” thinking the win was all but in the bag.
But then Day drove UNH down the field. With only a few seconds remaining, he rolled right. As he was about to get pummeled, Day lofted a pass toward Mallette at the back of the end zone for the winning 24-yard score.
“Ryan was the same [then] as he is now,” Kelly said. “Very well prepared, knew what he was facing. … You knew [then] that guy has it.”
As others had seen a future coaching star in Kelly coming up, Kelly saw the same potential in Day. Kelly brought Day on the offensive staff at UNH in 2002. Then in 2005, Kelly called another Manchester native in Dan Mullen, who was offensive coordinator at Florida under Urban Meyer. Mullen hired Day as a graduate assistant.
In 2017, after stints under Kelly with the Eagles and 49ers, Day joined Meyer’s staff at Ohio State.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be around great coaches and great mentors,” Day said. “And [Kelly] was obviously a big part of that.”
SEAN McDONNELL TRAVELED to Columbus last month to watch Ohio State defeat Marshall 49-14. He spent time with Ryan Day on Friday night, watching Day’s son play high school football. After the Buckeyes won Saturday, McDonnell hung out at Chip Kelly’s house with Day. While talking football like old times, they all watched Michigan knock off USC that evening together.
“It’s good to see both of those guys in a position where they feel very comfortable,” McDonnell said. “Chip’s having a ball coaching the offense. I think Ryan’s able to do some head-coaching things. … By not having to call the plays and be so involved in the offense, he’s in a very good place, from my observation.”
McDonnell came away from his visit believing this could be a special season for the Buckeyes. He noted the trust the two had at Manchester seems as strong as ever. Day used that same word this week when reflecting on his relationship with Kelly all these years later.
“When you have trust, you can get through a lot,” Day said. “Because you can be direct with somebody and know that you care about him, and no matter what is said, you can put your arm around each other afterwards.”
