SEVEN YEARS!

SEVEN YEARS!

Kent Babb of the Washington Post penned what appears to be an absolutely glorious profile of Chip Kelly today that rivals the piece written for Philly.com by Chip Kelly expert Mark Saltveit, who reported that Chip had previously been engaged to Karen “Kobi” Biagini, a sales rep for Nike. But Babb presents to us a whole new love interest:

Jennifer Jenkins hadn’t been to an NFL game since she was a little girl, football making so much noise during one part of her life that for a long time she tuned it out. But this day in September 2013 was different: Chip Kelly was coaching his first NFL game, his Philadelphia Eagles playing the Washington Redskins.

Kelly coaches football in a way that calls attention to himself, but he keeps much of his life off limits. Even the profiles that have been written give little sense of him away from the field, apart from the occasional mention of how he is a lifelong bachelor, seemingly married to the game.

Wearing neither team’s colors, Jenkins reached the stadium that afternoon and an old friend from her native New Hampshire pushed a ticket into her hand. She found her seat near the 50-yard line, behind the Philadelphia bench, surrounded by the hopeful, the jeering and the curious.

A while before the game, she pulled out her cellphone and sent a text message to the Eagles’ rookie head coach, the man who had been her husband for seven years.

In 2011, Jenkins read an article in the New York Times that described bachelor coaches and how, even in the image-conscious and political world of college football, Kelly had never been married.

“Why does everything say that you weren’t married?” Jenkins said a friend recently asked her. “I just roll my eyes.”

It used to hurt, she says, as if seven years of her life had been washed away. But now she finds the humor in it. Jenkins’s former coworkers knew the real story, and a friend joked about calling a sports radio show to reveal that the friend had been in Kelly’s wedding party. After enough strangers told Jenkins they didn’t believe her, she began carrying a wedding photograph on her iPhone. “Nobody talks about it,” she said. “But everybody knows.”

WHAT? I stopped there to conduct a full background check on Jenkins, but everyone says the piece is great and you should go read it. HOW DID WE MISS THIS? That big-balled son of a bitch– he did it again!

[Related: Chip’s current reported love interest.]