Chiefs’ Andy Reid reveals conversation with official about ‘Rose Parade’ at Super Bowl
Rich Eisen had quite the introduction for Chiefs coach Andy Reid on Thursday.
“Joining me now here on ‘The Rich Eisen Show’ is the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Super Bowl-winning coach, Andy Reid,” Eisen said. “First time I ever introduced you that way. It’s been a long time coming.”
Reid and Eisen talked quite a bit about Super Bowl LIV, and Reid gave some insight on two plays in particular: “Jet Chip Wasp” and “Shift The Rose Parade Right.”
Reid explained how “Shift The Rose Parade Right” ended up in the Chiefs’ playbook.
“It’s crazy how that works,” Reid said. “Somehow in my file of tape I got that tape a while back, and I looked at it and I’m going, ‘This is unbelievable, some of the stuff they were doing.’ And then by chance this summer I went to a function with my old high school coaches back in Los Angeles.
“The offensive coordinator that we had in high school hands me a tape and he goes, ‘This is the ‘48 Rose Bowl (I had the ‘49 one) ... Coach, Dean Dill was the quarterback for (USC) in this game.’ I go, ‘Oh wow, that’s pretty amazing.’ So I went through it and looked at it, and it was the same plays, so I go, ‘This is going in, we have to put a couple of these plays in, these are incredible plays.’”
The Chiefs practiced “Shift The Rose Parade Right” during the season and waited for just the right time to use it.
But before Super Bowl LIV, an official actually gave Reid a heads-up about the play.
“I reminded the officials all year: ‘Listen, we’re going to line up the quarterback here, we’re going to spin around, but it’s going to be a dive. That’s what the play is going to end up being. We’re legal.’ And then of all the games to forget to tell them, I didn’t tell them in the Super Bowl. I didn’t have the chance before they were heading for the door.
“And one of the officials goes, ‘Listen, I’ve done your last three or four games, are you still running that play from the Rose Bowl?’ I go, ‘Oh, absolutely. We’re running it today.’ He goes, ‘You still haven’t run that?’ I said, ‘No, we haven’t run it, so it’s coming.’”
As for “Wasp,” which has become a fan favorite, Reid said the Chiefs had talked about the play during the fourth quarter. It wasn’t something quarterback Patrick Mahomes simply asked offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy about running.
Reid also mentioned there is a companion play to “Wasp.”
“It’s funny, because we’d been talking about that a few series before that, really all the second half,” Reid said. “It was, ‘Listen, if we get an opportunity where we felt protection was good enough’ — you heard Patrick actually say, ‘Do we have enough time to throw the thing?’ — and so we were kind of working in that realm. We had talked about it. We had just talked about it before we went on the field, and so between Eric, myself, Pat and Mike Kafka, we were all on the same page; we were all kind of thinking the same thing.
“So we called it, and his biggest worry was just that he had enough time. He talked to Tyreek (Hill) and just said, ‘hey, make sure you keep running on this thing, because it’s going to be there.’ We had run a play that we called the Bolt a little bit before that in the game and so this is just a complementary play to that and it ended up working.”
Near the end of the conversation, Reid joked about the Stair Master that was visible in his basement in photos shared before the NFL Draft.
“It talks to me. We have a relationship that thing,” Reid said.
Eisen asked: “What does it say to you?”
Reid said: “It’s like the last 15 minutes, it’s not good. It really talks dirty to me and it’s terrible.”
Here is their Reid’s visit:
