Another Former Eagle Claims Chip Kelly Isn't Down With The Black Players

Brandon Boykin today has become the latest black Eagle to be ousted by Chip Kelly and allege some kind of racial angle to the head coach’s personnel decisions. According to texts Boykin sent Comcast SportsNet’s Derrick Gun, the defensive back thinks Kelly is “uncomfortable around grown men of our culture.”

From CSN Philly, here is the recently traded Boykin going into more detail on his comments:

“He can’t relate and that makes him uncomfortable,” Boykin added in the text message. “He likes total control of everything, and he don’t like to be uncomfortable. Players excel when you let them naturally be who they are, and in my experience that hasn’t been important to him, but you guys have heard this before me.”

There’s a lot going on here, just as there has been through the “Chip Kelly Might Be A Racist” saga. Boykin touches on Kelly’s insistence on control, a common refrain when dealing with coaches making the leap from college to the pros. That combined with Kelly’s system-first philosophy, the implications of his strange approach to roster building that he believes the individual players at many positions to be expendable, plus this growing race talk, and you can’t help but cock your head to the side and wonder if there really is something to all of this.

At the very least, Kelly has for one reason or another alienated a number of his former players, and if the growing evidence filling up his Hmmmm File isn’t indicative of something, then nothing is.

Update: Per Pro Football Talk, Kelly has expressed concern about where Boykin’s comments are coming from:

“I don’t know. In talking to him last night I think he was stunned, he was disappointed. He really liked it here,” Kelly said.

Kelly said that when he informed Boykin he had been traded, Boykin took it like a pro and didn’t express any hard feelings.

“When he left here last night he shook my hand and gave me a hug, didn’t say anything,” he said. “I like Brandon. I just don’t know. I really don’t know.”

[ CSN Philly]