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Eagles coach Chip Kelly says his recent roster moves are simply a matter of managing the salary cap.

Asked why the Eagles would trade away LeSean McCoy, Kelly said he wishes he could have kept McCoy, but the Eagles had to devote McCoy’s cap space to players at other positions.

“The money that was freed up — we looked at it as we got Kiko Alonso and Byron Maxwell for LeSean McCoy,” Kelly said. “The bottom line is almost every decision you have to make is governed by money. We’d love to keep everybody if we could pay everybody but it’s not baseball. We’re all limited by a cap number. You’ve got to give something up to get something. Did we want to lose LeSean? Certainly not.”

Kelly said he had no problems with McCoy and considered him the best running back he’s coached, but he simply felt that improving the defense was more important.

“The biggest factor in LeSean was the money, and what could that get us, and we feel like we got two quality players in return,” he said.

Kelly has made some dramatic moves since gaining full control of the Eagles’ personnel department at the start of the offseason. Whether those moves pan out or not will shape whether we one day perceive Kelly as a genius — or as a guy who never should have left college.