Super Bowl Open Thread: the Legacy of Andy Reid Edition

Our podcast is here for those who missed it. Since I was actually in Vegas when the line opened I made an actual bet, and it was Chiefs +110 on the basis that in what is essentially a coin flip matchup I would take the vig. I think Aaron Schatz’s bottom line is correct:

This game is as close as you think it is, but if I have to make a pick, I have a slight lean towards taking the Chiefs. Here’s how I explained it for ESPN Chalk earlier this week. First of all, if all else is equal you would tend to side with the team with the better quarterback, and that’s the Chiefs. Second, as I explained in the intro, the extra week off seems to favor Andy Reid’s strengths over Nick Sirianni’s strengths. Third—and this one only applies if you’re looking for a pick against the spread—it’s really unlikely that this game comes down to a single point but if it does, I might as well go with the team that gets the extra point.

That being said, it won’t be a surprise if the Eagles win this game and take home the Lombardi Trophy. The surprise will be if one of these teams blows out the other one. As long as both Hurts and Mahomes are on the field, Super Bowl LVII should be a very good, very close contest.

For your Super Bowl reading, I strongly recommend this essay by Rany Jazayerli about Andy Reid, who has already established himself as one of the very greatest coaches in league history. As Jazayerli explains, after an excellent run in Philly Reid took over a smoking crater 2-14 team that was one of the worst post-merger teams and immediately turned it into one of the most competitive in the league, all before Mahomes arrived:

Yet even the most optimistic Chiefs fan understood that however good Reid and new GM John Dorsey—who was simultaneously hired away from the Packers to replace Pioli—were at their jobs, this would not be a quick fix. You don’t turn the worst team in the NFL into a contender overnight.

But Reid and Dorsey turned the Chiefs into a contender, seemingly overnight. They almost immediately traded for veteran quarterback Alex Smith and began rebuilding the roster: They used the no. 1 pick in the 2013 draft on left tackle Eric Fisher, who protected Mahomes’s blind side when the Chiefs won a Super Bowl seven years later, and a third-round pick on Travis Kelce, who in a decade in Kansas City has crafted a Hall of Fame résumé. (In subsequent years, the Chiefs would go on to draft elite players like defensive end Dee Ford, cornerback Marcus Peters, center Mitch Morse, and receiver Tyreek Hill; while none of those players remain on the Chiefs today, they helped fortify a depleted roster around Smith and had set the Chiefs up for success when Mahomes arrived.)

The Andy Reid era began in 2013 with nine straight wins on their way to an 11-5 record and a playoff appearance (which they lost, blowing a 28-point lead to the Colts, because they were still the Chiefs, and that would take time to overcome). The following year, the Chiefs went 9-7 and missed the playoffs by one game, and they started the 2015 season 1-5. Reid steadied the ship and made sure the season didn’t completely derail after the team lost star running back Jamaal Charles to a season-ending knee injury in mid-October. The Chiefs won their final 10 games of the season and then emphatically ended an eight-playoff-game losing streak—the longest in NFL history—by stomping the Houston Texans, 30-0, in the wild-card round. While they would lose to Brady and Belichick the next week, the Chiefs were clearly trending up. They went 12-4 in 2016—winning the AFC West for just the third time in 19 years—and then won the AFC West again in 2017, the beginning of a run of seven division titles (and counting). In the five seasons before Mahomes took over as the Chiefs starter, Reid led the team to a 53-27 record, four playoff berths, and two divisional titles. The Chiefs had won more than 53 games in a five-year stretch only once in their history, from 1993 to 1997. The Chiefs had never outscored their opponents by 70-plus points in five straight years—until they did so in their first five seasons under Reid; those first Reid Chiefs teams were very good and highly competitive. And then they gave the quarterback job to Mahomes, pairing a generational QB talent with the perfect coach to develop him, and got much, much better.

To bring things full circle for the Chiefs, one of my longest standing hobbyhorses is that Marty Schottenheimer was a genuinely great coach whose failure to win a Super Bowl was more bad luck than anything (unless you think he used his mind-meld to force Enrest Byner to fumble, Marlon McCree to fumble on a vanity interception return, etc. etc.) I think Reid’s story underlines that. There’s an alternate universe in which the Bears aren’t run by total numbnuts and take Mahomes rather than Mitch Trubisky with the #2 pick, and Reid keeps getting to the conference championship with ordinary-to-good QBs. In this scenario he is perceived as a pretty good coach who Can’t Win the Big One. But he was already great before he got Mahomes, and now he’s clearly one of the very greatest.

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