Chip Kelly met with the assembled media at the owners meetings in Boca Raton this morning. [Insert hacky joke about Chip actually talking]. He explained just how terrible his relationship was with Howie Roseman, the guy negotiating the contracts for Chip’s chosen players. As best as I can tell, it was like that time Jim and Pam couldn’t talk to each other for a whole day in The Office, but only decidedly less cute and completely toxic to the work environment.

From Tim McManus:

Kelly said he never really saw Howie Roseman after the power shift that gave the head coach control and pushed Roseman out of the personnel department. Further, they did not talk directly, per Kelly, and instead used Ed Marynowitz as an intermediary.

Is that a way a front office should work? Shouldn’t there be communication between a cap guy and a personnel guy?

Kelly waited a beat and then replied, “Yeah, you would think.”

“We never came up with any parameters. I wouldn’t have paid anybody. I’m really frugal. I think some of the money that all these guys are getting…that’s a huge leap of faith with anybody,” he said. “We were given a statistic by the league that 97 percent of all free agents don’t make the Pro Bowl three years after signing the contract. Free agency in its own right is a huge gamble.”

So the Maxwell and Murray contracts were negotiated by Roseman?

“Oh yeah. I’ve never negotiated a contract in my life,” he said.

And from DAVE ZANGARO:

On Wednesday, Kelly revealed that after he was given personnel control in 2015 – control over the 90-man roster, as he says – he rarely spoke with Howie Roseman, who, while banished from personnel decisions, still orchestrated the Eagles’ salary cap.

That means two of the team’s top officials rarely communicated directly.

“I never really saw him, so I don’t know what he did on a daily basis,” Kelly said.

Kelly said it was a “weird situation” because Roseman was the general manager for the first two years, and then was stripped of that power and subsequently banished to the other side of the NovaCare Complex.

Kelly claimed their personal relationship didn’t play a role in the lack of communication. Rather it was the structure put into place by Lurie. Kelly and Roseman interacted through an intermediary, former vice president of personnel Ed Manowitz.

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Good lord. What a cluster of Fs. It’s becoming more and more clear that Jeffrey Lurie is partly to blame here (more on this later). I mean, you can fault Chip and Howie for having the maturity of a scorned teen rom com protagonist on a summer vacation, but that doesn’t absolve Lurie from “giving Chip all the power” and yet leaving Roseman in a position to complete his deals even though the two DIDN’T SPEAK.

What’s more, now we have Chip laying the worst contracts at Howie’s feet. Meanwhile, Howie just undid them. Who’s at fault? Did Lurie and Howie intentionally torpedo Chip, or is this just the worst series of front office decisions in the history of the league?