Chiefs coach Andy Reid, the NFL’s ultimate backhanded compliment and finally some luck
The hesitation in writing this column is that something similar could’ve been written this time last year, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before THAT, or, well, you get the idea.
But that’s also most of the point.
Chiefs coach Andy Reid is in the NFL playoffs, again. Looking to get beyond the conference championship game, again. Looking for his first Super Bowl championship, again.
Outside of Kansas City, the shorthand of Andy Reid’s reputation is as a coach who’s been exactly good enough to coach 21 seasons with just one Super Bowl appearance and zero Super Bowl wins.
This is the sixth time his teams have been good enough for a first-round bye, and a win next weekend would mark the sixth time he’s coached in a conference championship game. Only six men have won more games, and they are all legends — Shula, Halas, Belichick, Landry, Lambeau and Brown.
The three who coached all or most of their careers before the Super Bowl won a total of 19 league championships. The three who coached in the Super Bowl era won 10.
Which leaves Reid with sports’ ultimate backhanded compliment:
The best coach to never win it all.
Reid is 12-14 (.462 percentage) all-time in the playoffs, which is nearly identical to Super Bowl winner and Hall of Famer Tony Dungy (.474) and better than Hall of Famers Bud Grant and Sid Gillman, but well below his regular-season performance (.618) and 86th among the 169 coaches who’ve coached in the postseason.
Professional sports are usually about the players, and to be sure a Chiefs Super Bowl win would spark a million stories about Patrick Mahomes’ dominance of the next decade. He would be, for whatever it’s worth, the second-youngest quarterback to win a Super Bowl and the youngest in league history with both an MVP and championship.
But inside the Chiefs locker room and throughout the organization, the people who live for the team’s success will feel the most pride for Reid.
They will be grateful for his steadiness over these last seven seasons, his chops for improving the team’s game plans and his resilience and ambition for continuing to push against a wall of brutal disappointment.
Three of his former assistant coaches have won Super Bowls, and Reid was an assistant for the Green Bay Packers’ win after the 1997 season. But as a head coach, even through a remarkable run of success in which teams in his division have changed head coaches 17 times (not including interim coaches), Reid has become modern football’s Marv Levy — widely respected with a career always discussed with a verbal asterisk.
A pretty good shot
The Baltimore Ravens are the heavy and deserved favorite in the AFC, but Reid has rarely if ever had an opportunity like this: a superstar quarterback surrounded by world-class playmakers and supported by a recently stout defense.
This is, in other words, perhaps Reid’s most championship-worthy team.
That, of course, is another way of saying the stakes are higher, and the potential backlash from a loss more intense.
Reid first became a head coach shortly after turning 40, and before he’d ever called plays in the NFL. He has turned 50 in this job, then 60, along the way doing what few others have and what nobody else wants — a coaching career worthy of the Hall of Fame even without a Super Bowl championship.
A bizarre hemorrhage of clock at the end of the first half in Reid’s only Super Bowl appearance branded his reputation of whiffing on time management. The Eagles ran the clock from 43 seconds to 17 between second and third down, finally calling timeout with 10 seconds remaining. They went into halftime with two unused timeouts.
A late drive with the Eagles down 10 showed no urgency — “How many Philadelphia fans are screaming at the TV, saying ‘Hurry up!’” broadcaster Joe Buck said — and 12 years later Reid essentially did the same thing in a Chiefs divisional-round loss at New England.
But, for the most part, Reid’s clock management reputation is some combination of outdated and overstated.
He’s also run into a fair amount of awful luck, and micro-failures that happened at the worst times.
The Eagles led the Greatest Show on Turf St. Louis Rams in the second half, turned it over three times against the eventual-champion Tampa Bay Bucs after the 2002 season, turned it over four times against the Carolina Panthers the next year, and led Kurt Warner’s Arizona Cardinals late in the fourth quarter after the 2008 season.
And that’s just in conference championship games, and just his time in Philadelphia.
Woes in KC
In Kansas City, Reid’s teams have lost after leading by 28 in a game in which the Indianapolis Colts scored on their own fumble, lost at home without giving up a touchdown, blew a 21-3 lead at home in part because the Tennessee Titans’ quarterback threw a touchdown to himself, and of course lost last year after a game-cinching interception was wiped out by an offsides penalty against the Patriots.
Sometimes the Chiefs haven’t been able to move the ball. Sometimes they haven’t been able to hold onto the ball. Sometimes it’s a call that could’ve been reversed, from Eric Fisher’s hold on James Harrison to Derrick Johnson’s (actually, Jeff Triplette’s) forward progress to officials not warning Dee Ford about lining up offsides.
If a common thread exists, it’s been awful luck, and even with the understanding that good teams often make their own luck and only losers whine about bad breaks, it’s worth noting that the Chiefs have received an abnormal amount of good fortune already.
Patrick Mahomes’ knee injury could’ve been much worse. A roster ravaged by injuries much of the season is now (with the notable exception of rookie safety Juan Thornhill) healthy. Just as the Chiefs’ desperate need for a 4-3 defensive end peaked, Terrell Suggs was released by the Cardinals and, as team broadcaster Mitch Holthus has pointed out, the Chiefs’ waiver position would’ve been too low to select him if not for the Titans’ loss.
And even that loss didn’t keep the Chiefs from a first-round bye because the Miami Dolphins pulled off the biggest upset in 30 years by winning at New England in the last minute of the last game of the season.
Frank Clark had a stomach virus and other issues that left him 20 pounds lighter and wondering whether he would shut down his season. He’s now back at his preferred playing weight and says he’s fully healthy.
Think about this: The Chiefs pursued a trade for veteran safety Earl Thomas last year, but that fell through when he suffered a season-ending leg injury. If that trade had gone through, the Chiefs would not have had the draft capital to trade for Clark.
And if they had re-signed Thomas they would not have had the money for Tyrann Mathieu, who has been a force of nature both in his own playmaking and lifting one of the league’s worst secondaries a year ago to success this season.
None of this guarantees a thing, of course. Chiefs history has trained fans to expect a monster around every corner, often appearing in amazingly creative new ways.
But as the league’s most accomplished coach without a championship pushes forward for a franchise that last won 50 years ago, maybe it means something that fortune has been with them instead of against.
This story was originally published January 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.