Before Chiefs coach Andy Reid created dynasty in KC, he had to navigate season on brink
The Before Times might seem a distant memory for the Chiefs and their fans. The team now is so envied and such the “it” team that “Chiefs fatigue” and absurd narratives about conspiracies favoring them have become a thing.
But as they seek on Sunday in Super Bowl LIX against the Philadelphia Eagles to stamp an exclamation point on this dynasty by becoming the first to win three of these in a row, it’s instructive to remember the bridge to all this recent glory was enabled by a crucial pivot from a precarious spot a mere decade ago.
Out of a stage when they were an afterthought even in Kansas City behind the far more compelling Royals en route to winning the World Series for the first time in 30 years.
While it’s true that the arrival of Andy Reid in 2013 set in motion everything that’s come to fruition now, none of this seemed inevitable then for a long-tormented franchise.
At least from the outside looking in, nearly halfway through Reid’s third season in Kansas City his tenure was trending more toward being in jeopardy than scaling the Mt. Rushmore of NFL coaching with 300-plus wins.
“I remember being asked in the middle of that (2015) season by someone at this table whether we’re going to let Andy Reid go,” Chiefs chairman and CEO Clark Hunt said with a smile Wednesday as he spoke with a small group of local writers at the team hotel.
No names, but … Hunt laughed when we all looked toward ESPN’s Adam Teicher, who grinned and noted Hunt’s long memory.
But the question was more logical than preposterous.
And it helps explain why long-snapper James Winchester, who along with Travis Kelce is the only remaining player from that team, still has a keepsake from what would become an inflection point in franchise — and NFL — history.
As Winchester recalls it, the week after the 2015 Chiefs tumbled to 1-5 with a 16-10 loss at Minnesota, players found in their lockers key chains with miniature levelers attached.
Written on each was “Raise The Level,” a symbolic reiteration of what Reid had themed the season and a point that Winchester said resonated.
He still relishes the trinket, he said, as a visual reminder of “kind of where we started to where we are now.”
‘No teams climb out of that’
Now they occupy a place where perhaps only Reid could have coaxed them to from out of that predicament — a distressing and “miserable” situation that then-Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith says he often shares with “people going through something.”
“I always go back to Andy in that moment,” Smith, who has been through a few things himself, said Thursday at the Sirius XM set in New Orleans. “It’s a lot of pressure on the head coach — a lot of pressure. When pressure gets too much, head coaches do funny things, right? They do uncharacteristic things. We see it every year. Guys aren’t prepared for that.
“It’s a hot seat, right? When it gets hot, they start to do stuff. People get fired … Happens all the time.”
He added, “The only reason that we ever got out of that was because it’s like he was just built for that. He was just so unfazed.”
With much to be fazed by.
Unfathomable as it may seem now after seven straight AFC Championship Game appearances, five Super Bowl berths in the last six seasons and a 17-3 postseason record since Patrick Mahomes became QB1 in 2018, the 2015 Chiefs after the loss at Minnesota had won just 12 of their last 30 games.
And the chance to meaningfully reset any time soon seemed out of reach; not since the 1970 Bengals had a team started 1-5 and made the playoffs.
Or as Smith put it: “No teams climb out of that.”
‘Which way does it go?’
Accentuating their plight, and how radically times have changed, that loss to the Vikings was marked by the sort of slapstick stuff that always seems to go their way today but absolutely never did then:
As the Chiefs drove with a chance to take the lead in the fourth quarter, Charcandrick West lost a fumble when left tackle Donald Stephenson inadvertently plowed into the unsuspecting running back.
In the immediate aftermath, The Star’s late, great Terez Paylor set up his camera for the postgame Facebook Live around a Dumpster in the press box to create the “little bit of background ambiance” for a season that seemed to be spiraling toward the precipice of no return.
“Bad season,” Terez matter-of-factly put it. “It’s gone to hell.”
While allowing as how a season can turn and that the Chiefs still controlled their path, that discussion revolved around evaluating who deserves to be back in 2016, “business decisions” ahead and even a thought about possibly being in line to draft quarterback Jared Goff — who was selected No. 1 overall by the Los Angeles Rams.
However much faith Hunt and Co. had in Reid, then-general manager John Dorsey and their staffs, however much they all believed in themselves and the process, a certain reality was apparent.
“You’re at a point where you’ll get to a point where you can’t overcome it,” said assistant coach Tom Melvin, who has worked for Reid since he took over the Eagles in 1999.
Melvin meant in terms of the season itself. But his words had a broader application, too.
Since Reid’s first Chiefs team had started 9-0, they finished off that regular season 2-5 and capped it by suffering the devastating 45-44 playoff loss at Indianapolis after botching a 38-10 second-half lead.
Then they failed to make the playoffs with a 9-7 record in 2014.
Including his last years in Philadelphia, Reid’s teams to that point hadn’t won a playoff game since 2008 and he stood just 10-10 in his postseason career.
For weeks, the wobbly 2015 edition appeared quite unlikely to even have a chance to end that streak.
Or, most to the point, put a stop to the Chiefs’ two-decade plus postseason drought.
As they sputtered out, they allowed three teams in a row to score more than 30 points.
They scored two offensive touchdowns in a three-game span (while Cairo Santos was kicking seven field goals in a 36-21 loss at Cincinnati).
They lost to Denver on a rare fumble by Jamaal Charles that was returned for a Broncos touchdown in the last minute ... after Reid opted to try to run out the clock and take the 24-24 game into overtime.
Paired with the West-Stephenson bumble-rooski, that was another of the quirky twists that has nearly always unfurled favorably for them recently but that had condemned them for years — and threatened to undermine the Reid era early.
“It can take you to places where you start wondering, ‘OK, are we doing the right things, and do we need to make changes?’ ” said offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, then the quarterbacks coach.
As for what would have happened if they couldn’t reset soon?
“You never know,” Nagy said. “I think that’s the million dollar question. Which way does it go? And do you get to this point?”
When the Chiefs were an afterthought
Punctuating the uphill way back, the prevailing trend and what now feels like a historical quirk, Charles suffered a season-ending knee injury in the second half of the 18-17 home loss to the Bears a week before the defeat at Minnesota.
But with Game 3 of the American League Division Series between the Royals and Astros starting in the second half that afternoon, many fans had left Arrowhead Stadium well before the Chiefs blew a 17-3 lead on two Jay Cutler touchdown passes in the final 3 minutes 5 seconds.
That apathetic dynamic only became more pronounced in the days to come.
In the wake of the loss to the Vikings, most of the local media was consumed with Royals fever.
It was one thing for most of the Kansas City media to not be at the Chiefs’ practices or interview sessions when the Royals were in Toronto most of that week for the AL Championship Series.
But it was another to be largely absent even when the Royals returned to Kauffman Stadium that Thursday for off-day access and Game 6 on Friday.
Pete Sweeney, now editor-in-chief of Arrowhead Pride, at the time had just become a reporter for Chiefs.com.
“I don’t know if there was a better sign of the city giving up on the Chiefs than one particular press conference (that week), when the Royals were holding press at a similar time …,” he wrote in an email. “I remember looking around and seeing one or two in-house staff members, our late friend Terez Paylor — and that was it.
“Nowadays, when there’s a big Chiefs game, we run out of seats (in the media room).”
He added, “Knowing what was to come, the whole thing is surreal to think about in hindsight. The same organization that couldn’t (draw coverage) because all the attention was on baseball is arguably the greatest attraction in all sports.
“Just another one of many reminders that this whole thing is fleeting.”
As it happens, it was those grim days that were fleeting.
‘There’s no magic, right?’
Starting with the utterly unanticipated 11-game winning streak to come, which included the franchise’s first postseason victory in 22 years (a 30-0 win in Houston) before losing 27-20 at New England in the AFC Divisional Round.
And continuing with all that’s happened after the 1-5 funk:
Since then, the Chiefs are 122-36 in the regular season and 140-42 overall. The arc is even more pronounced since the advent of Mahomes as the starter; the Chiefs have averaged 15-plus overall wins in that time.
But the point here is what allowed that to even come to pass. And emerging through 2015 was the portal, or at least one of them, to a dimension where the Chiefs could keep building brick by brick and drafting Mahomes, etc.
You could point to everyone, well, raising the level, somehow or another.
To, say, a shored-up defense that forced three turnovers in a 23-13 victory over the Steelers.
That was the first of four straight games in which the Chiefs held teams to 13 points or fewer. And it was the start of a broader shift in which they’d allow more than 20 points just three times in what would become 12 more games.
You could attribute it to fine-tuning and tweaking an offense that in the next six games averaged 32 points — the season-high for this year’s Chiefs.
“And then, once you start having success, it just really explodes, you know?” said special teams coordinator Dave Toub, who has worked with Reid for most of the last few decades. “It just builds on itself.”
But most of all, you could point to how and why: Reid’s constancy and ability to keep the team focused forward and a culture beginning to take root even if that largely was intangible for outsiders.
Smith thought about Reid’s ability to avoid rash decisions and understand the difference between stubbornness and staying the course and to look “a bunch of men in the face” and quiet all the noise.
And he remembered how Reid got the point across in a team meeting the week after the Vikings game.
“‘Listen, there’s no magic, right?’” he remembered Reid saying. “‘There’s no magic to get us out of this.’ I just specifically remember (him saying), ‘If we all do our job just a little bit better, we will win a football game.’
“And really boiling it down to that sense of urgency of really just kind of living week to week, and we’ve got to win a football game.”
‘This, too, shall pass’
No doubt it helped build the thriving organizational harmony we see today that Hunt and the Chiefs administration conveyed they were all-in on Reid (though Dorsey would be fired in 2017).
President Mark Donovan remembers visiting Reid in his office during those weeks, asking him what he needed and how they might help.
“We talk a lot about respect and trust and support and what makes this culture so successful,” Donovan said. “I think the down times are the tests, right?”
No doubt that test was easier to pass because of Reid’s long-term pedigree. Donovan, who was working with Reid in Philadelphia when he took the Eagles to the Super Bowl in 2004, knew how Reid works and connects with his teams and recalls believing in the moment that 1-5 record was “a blip.”
And, he added, that “this, too, shall pass.”
Before the Chiefs blasted the Lions 45-10 in London a week after beating the Steelers, a game perhaps obscured by the Royals winning the World Series on the same date, Hunt told the few media members there that he had “full confidence” in Reid even if the season resulted in them being among the five worst teams in the league.
Over the years, general manager Brett Veach said last week as he reflected on that time, one of Reid’s approaches to dealing with the ups and downs of seasons has been to remind his teams that they’re nearly always a two-game winning streak away from resetting.
It’s a term he uses so often, Veach said, that he hears that concept all over the league now.
Maybe it was never more applicable than the London game.
That victory in particular, Hunt said this week, was when “momentum started to shift back the other way. So really, that was a catalyst to a lot of good things happening from that moment forward.”
To a level beyond anything anyone could have foreseen.
“If it goes a different way (then),” Nagy said with a smile, “who knows where you’re at now?”
This story was originally published February 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM.