Chip Kelly Has Northwestern Playing Its Best Offense in a Decade

Northwestern averaged 21.3 points per game from 2015 to 2025, which ranked 132nd in the country. Chip Kelly took over the offense this season, and the Wildcats now rank second nationally behind Miami, with 27.4% of their plays going for 10 yards or more.

Kelly called his first play as the Northwestern offensive coordinator against South Dakota State, a crossfield throw from quarterback Aidan Chiles to Griffin Wilde that went for 71 yards. Seven games later, the Wildcats are 6-1, ranked No. 20 and headed to Oregon, where Kelly built his national reputation.

Clips of his formations have gone viral all season. “I don’t think of coaching as being creative,” Kelly said. “As a coach, your job is to be a problem solver. What’s the problem that’s presented to you, and how do you solve the problem? That’s it.”

Why Northwestern went after Chip Kelly

Northwestern topped 22 points just once in Big Ten play last season, and the Wildcats ranked 129th nationally in red zone touchdown rate at 45.8% while kicking 21 red zone field goals, second-most in the country. David Braun, the Northwestern head coach, made a coordinator change after the season.

“We couldn’t just make a change to make a change,” Braun said in January. “Let’s make an aggressive, transformational change.”

The Las Vegas Raiders had fired Kelly in November 2025 after 11 games as their offensive coordinator, even though he was the highest-paid coordinator in the NFL. Mark Jackson, the Northwestern athletic director who had known Kelly for decades, offered him a job with very few strings attached.

“Just coach football, and [don’t] worry about anything else,” Jackson said.

Put simply, Northwestern handed its offense to a coach who won a national title as the Ohio State offensive coordinator and then stayed out of his way.

The Wing-T came out of the archives

Kelly kept things fairly normal during spring practice, then showed his players film of Tubby Raymond’s Delaware teams from the 1980s over the summer. The Wing-T, a run-heavy scheme built on misdirection and versatile wingbacks, was born at Delaware in 1950 and rarely shows up at the top level of football outside the service academies.

Joseph Himon II, a fifth-year running back, had never played in a wing-T before. “Everybody was just like, ‘Man, like, what are we doing?” Himon said. “There are just so many moving parts that we weren’t used to.”

Sure enough, Northwestern opened the $875 million Ryan Field by beating Penn State 34-13 and running for 413 yards, and Himon is averaging 9.8 yards per carry under Kelly.

Chip Kelly thinks the wing-T buzz is a little overblown. “We’ve run it 17% of the season,” Kelly said. “It’s not the main course.” 

In other words, the old plays are a side dish that forces defensive coordinators to dig through 1980s tape every week, and the rest of the menu works fine. The Wildcats rank seventh nationally with 19% of their runs going for 10 yards or more, and they have topped 500 yards against multiple Big Ten opponents for the first time since 2007. Chiles, whom Kelly recruited at UCLA, has 12 touchdown passes and nine rushing touchdowns this season.

Kelly returns to Oregon at an interesting time

Northwestern’s only loss came 29-23 at Indiana, the defending national champion, in September. Now the Wildcats visit an Oregon team whose offense has become a problem for Dan Lanning, and the Ducks fired offensive coordinator Drew Mehringer after a 21-10 loss at Illinois dropped them to 4-3.

Oregon will need a new play-caller, and Chip Kelly, whose Raiders contract runs through 2027, should have options of his own after the season. Naturally, Northwestern wants to keep him, and Jackson said holding on to Kelly is incredibly important to the school.

“[Braun] and I are in lockstep with that, I’m in lockstep with our president on that, to make sure that we’re doing all the right things to hold this in place,” Jackson said.

The schedule gets harder after Eugene. Iowa and Ohio State both rank in the top seven nationally in fewest explosive plays allowed, and Polymarket’s October 27 snapshot gave Northwestern a 14% chance to make the playoff.

Asked whether he is having fun with all of it, Kelly pointed straight at the scoreboard.

“I don’t derive fun from trying things,” Kelly said. “You derive fun from being successful. You can try a lot of things, and if the final score is 35-7 and you’re losing, that ain’t a lot of fun.”