How Chiefs coach Andy Reid’s life was altered by Mike Holmgren’s promise kept
Half his lifetime and an entire sure-fire Pro Football Hall of Fame career ago, Andy Reid was a 33-year-old offensive line coach at the University of Missouri.
Most likely you know that.
But most likely the rest of the story, his essential pivot point from then to now, isn’t as familiar.
And befitting this time of year, what happened then was something of an inside-out “It’s A Wonderful Life” story that illustrates how one person can make such ripples in the lives of so many.
Following stints at San Francisco State, Northern Arizona and Texas-El Paso, each of which he recalls fondly and vividly, Reid at the time was on an apparent trajectory toward a collegiate head coaching job.
He also was basking in the task at hand. He believed Mizzou was on the verge of a turnaround under coach Bob Stull and loved life in Columbia — where he was immersed and deeply admired by his linemen and other Tigers with whom he sustained meaningful relationships.
While typically staid in public today as the Chiefs’ head coach, Reid then was more inclined to live the advice he gives players to let their personalities show.
That showed up with his players, who still relish telling tales about his colorful ways — including once pretending to be furious and smashing a chair over a table before breaking up laughing. And it showed up in a considerable sense of humor Reid downplays now but exuded then.
When I asked him in 1992 about his time at MU, he drew on a well-known commercial of the era.
With a laugh, he said, it was like being in “a roach motel. You get in, and in my case, you don’t want to get out.”
Then Mike Holmgren made good on a decade-old promise by making Reid among the first, if not the first, people he called when Holmgren was hired to coach the Green Bay Packers in January 1992.
If not for that truly fateful call, perhaps Reid would have stayed on that track instead of flourishing into one of the most accomplished coaches in NFL history: He has compiled three Super Bowl victories and 295 total wins, behind only Don Shula (347), Bill Belichick (333) and George Halas (324).
If not for the call that will put him in Canton one day alongside Holmgren, who earlier this week was nominated to the Hall of Fame and almost certainly will be voted in this year or imminently, Reid may still be in the college game.
“Yeah, I probably would,” Reid said with a grin on Wednesday. “I’d probably be coaching the offensive line.
“Made me get out of the box.”
Now, Reid surely could have otherwise entered the NFL if that had later become his fixation.
Still, no one knew him like Holmgren. And few could have had the same influence as the man for whom Reid worked while he led the Packers to a Super Bowl XXXI win over the Patriots and later also guided Seattle to a Super Bowl berth.
“The best I’ve ever been around …” Reid said. “I thought he was great at the college level, (and) I thought in the NFL he was phenomenal. I’ve been a head coach now for a couple years, and I still look back and go, ‘I don’t think anybody’s done it better than what he’s done.’ …
“He just had a great way about him with people. He was tough enough, he’s a brilliant guy, so he just had a great handle on things.”
‘You’re going to learn the passing game by this’
In hindsight, it might seem that Reid had little choice but to say yes to Holmgren.
But in every version of the story he’s told publicly over the years, including to me back then, the choice hardly was an automatic.
Because he was so invested in Mizzou, close with many on the staff and his players and at least slightly skeptical about starting an NFL career as he approached his 34th birthday, Reid initially hesitated.
He also wasn’t sure about the specific first job he was being offered: coaching tight ends as well as being the assistant offensive line coach.
Then Holmgren said something that proved both persuasive and prophetic and helped convince Reid to join an initial staff featuring four other future NFL head coaches: Jon Gruden, Dick Jauron, Steve Mariucci and Ray Rhodes.
“I tell you what: ‘You’re going to learn the passing game by this,’” Holmgren remembered saying when I spoke with him in 2020. “‘And that will be good long-term.’”
Was it ever.
Reid, who later became assistant head coach and quarterback coach to Brett Favre, has become widely regarded as an offensive genius. And his uncanny collaborative relationship with Patrick Mahomes already stands as one of the most brilliant dynamic duos in NFL history.
(The extension of the creativity Holmgren observed early on is so beyond what he stressed that he once playfully jabbed Reid, with whom he remains close, about abandoning everything he taught him. To which he recalled Reid responding, “No, no, no, just watch it carefully: It’s the same stuff. We’re just kind of disguising it a little bit. Same principles.”)
While Reid was in Green Bay, Holmgren also made good on another key commitment to Reid after frustrating him by blocking his chance to become Mariucci’s offensive coordinator in San Francisco.
“That time he was mad at me,” Holmgren called it with a laugh when we spoke.
It was just too much to lose at one time, Holmgren figured. But he promised to push for Reid to get a head coaching job when the time was right.
That was soon.
Two years later, just seven years after Reid left MU and 25 years ago, Holmgren helped engineer the 40-year-old Reid’s path to taking over in Philadelphia as one of the youngest head coaches in the league.
From 1999-2008, Reid whisked the Eagles to five NFC Championship games, including four in a row, and one Super Bowl appearance.
But the Eagles didn’t win another postseason game the next four seasons and fell to 4-12 in 2012, leading to Reid’s demise there ... and instant revitalization of the Chiefs.
Today, he’s orchestrated a dynasty seeking to become the first team to win three straight Super Bowls.
From budding sportswriter to coaching
The prelude to it all started in 1980 at Brigham Young, where during Reid’s senior year he was writing a weekly column for the Provo Daily Herald and considering a career as a sportswriter — quite a story in itself.
But BYU coach LaVell Edwards convinced Reid to instead try coaching as a graduate assistant, and in 1982 he reported to the new quarterback coach: Mike Holmgren.
Perhaps not unlike the way decades later Brett Veach made an indelible impression on Reid while working as his personal assistant — ultimately leading to Veach becoming general manager of the Chiefs — Reid somewhat dazzled Holmgren.
Holmgren was struck by Reid’s intelligence, personality and trustworthiness, he told me in 2020, and promptly came to see him as “the son I never had.”
“That’s where I first noticed what he was kind of made of and how he did things,” Holmgren added. “And I told him at the time, ‘If I ever get a chance to be a head coach anywhere, I’m phoning you first.’
“We kind of laughed about those things.”
A year later, Reid was hired by San Francisco State — from where Edwards had hired Holmgren — and started his coaching career in earnest.
“It was a trade,” Reid joked Wednesday.
And the next step toward a promise honored that helped change everything about the Chiefs.