Andy Reid, the Chiefs coach who must prove last season was the exception

Andy Reid

Photo: Tech. Sgt. Scott T. Sturkol / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 19, 1958 Los Angeles
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Super Bowl champion as head coach · Super Bowl champion as assistant coach · AP NFL Coach of the Year · Greasy Neale Award

Andy Reid spent most of his career hearing what he could not do. He could not win the big game in Philadelphia. He could not manage a clock. Then he moved to Kansas City, built a team around a quarterback the Chiefs traded up to draft, and won three Lombardi Trophies in five seasons. The doubts went quiet, and the man with the walrus moustache became the coach every rival measured itself against.

The question in front of him now is less comfortable. Last season the Chiefs lost more games than they won for the first time under Reid, missed the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade and lost Patrick Mahomes to a torn knee ligament in December. Reid said there was no scenario in which he would walk away. With Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh gone from their old jobs, he is now the longest-serving head coach in the league, and this autumn’s team, rebuilt around Mahomes’s repaired knee and running back Kenneth Walker III, opened with five straight wins before a fourth-quarter collapse in Denver cost it first place in the AFC West.

Los Angeles shaped him early. Reid, who was born there on March 19, 1958, sold concessions at Dodger Stadium as a teenager and was already so big at 13 that, when he appeared on Monday Night Football in a Punt, Pass and Kick competition, he wore the jersey of professional running back Les Josephson.

He played offensive tackle at Glendale Community College and then at Brigham Young, where he rarely saw the field but studied head coach LaVell Edwards and his offensive staff closely. Reid had thought about becoming a writer; Edwards pushed him toward coaching instead. After a year as a graduate assistant at BYU, on a staff that included Mike Holmgren, he spent nine seasons coaching offensive lines at San Francisco State, Northern Arizona, UTEP and Missouri.

Holmgren brought him to the Green Bay Packers in 1992, the year Brett Favre arrived. Reid won a ring as an assistant in Super Bowl XXXI and became quarterbacks coach in 1997. When the Philadelphia Eagles hired him in January 1999, he had never been a coordinator, and parts of the Philadelphia press said so. He had arrived at his interview with a binder five inches thick on how he would run the franchise.

With Donovan McNabb, whom he drafted second overall, Reid turned the Eagles into an annual contender: six division titles, four straight NFC Championship Games from 2001 to 2004 and the most wins in franchise history. The only Super Bowl of that era, Super Bowl XXXIX, ended in a 24-21 loss to the New England Patriots. The same years held the Terrell Owens saga, which ended with Reid deactivating the receiver midway through 2005, and the slide that left the 2012 team at 4-12. Owner Jeffrey Lurie let him go on the last day of that year.

Kansas City hired him four days later, on January 4, 2013, to take over a team that had just gone 2-14. He went 11-5 in his first season with Alex Smith at quarterback. The decisive move came in the 2017 draft. After a year as a backup, Mahomes won the MVP award in 2018, and the following season the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-20 in Super Bowl LIV, the franchise’s first Super Bowl win in 50 years. Two more titles followed: 38-35 over Reid’s old Eagles in Super Bowl LVII, and 25-22 in overtime against the 49ers in Super Bowl LVIII, which made Kansas City the first repeat champion since the Patriots two decades earlier. Along the way Reid became the only coach to win 100 games with two franchises, and assistants such as Doug Pederson and Matt Nagy left to run teams of their own.

The record is now so heavy that it hides how long Reid carried the opposite reputation. In Philadelphia he lost three conference finals in a row before reaching a Super Bowl, and then lost that too. His clock management became a running joke: in a divisional-round loss at New England after the 2015 season, his team spent more than five minutes on a late touchdown drive without calling a timeout, leaving just over a minute to tie the game. Kansas City outvoted that pattern rather than erasing it. Super Bowl LV ended 31-9 against Tampa Bay without a Chiefs touchdown, and Super Bowl LIX, in February 2025, was a 40-22 rout by the Eagles. Blowing an 11-point fourth-quarter lead in Denver this season brought the same criticism back.

The hardest chapters have been private ones that became public. His eldest son, Garrett, died of a heroin overdose in August 2012, during Reid’s last season with the Eagles. In February 2021 another son, Britt, then an assistant on his father’s Chiefs staff, caused a drunk-driving crash that left five-year-old Ariel Young with a fractured skull and 11 days in a coma. Britt Reid was sentenced to three years in prison; in early 2024 Missouri governor Mike Parson commuted the rest of the term to house arrest, a decision the Young family’s lawyer condemned. The Chiefs reached a confidential agreement with the family to pay for the girl’s medical care. Reid, who is married with five children and belongs to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is better known to casual fans for State Farm commercials and cheeseburgers, an image that sits uneasily beside those years.

Reid is in his 14th season with the Chiefs, under a five-year extension worth a reported $100 million that he signed in April 2024 and that runs through 2029. His 313 victories, counting the playoffs, place him fourth in NFL history behind Don Shula, Bill Belichick and George Halas. The 2026 roster pairs Travis Kelce, back for a 14th year, with Walker, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, and at the trade deadline the club added receiver Josh Downs from Indianapolis. The worries are familiar. Mahomes hurt his right elbow in the 35-12 win over the New York Jets on November 8 and is day-to-day, and Reid has declined to commit to kicker Harrison Butker after a seventh missed field goal this season. This month he also appeared in Terrell & T.O., the NFL Films documentary on Prime Video about the receiver he once deactivated.

The Chiefs are 6-2 and play in Atlanta on November 15, with a Thanksgiving-night game in Buffalo 11 days later. Whether last season was a detour or the first sign of an ending will be decided there and in January, not at a podium.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Patrick Mahomes, Philadelphia Eagles, Kansas City Chiefs, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce