You can’t always sense the exact moment the world begins to shift. A butterfly flaps its wings, and everything you thought you knew has been irrevocably altered. But you never would have seen the butterfly, and even if you had, you never would have connected the two events. Former Kansas City Royals great Dan Quisenberry once said, “I have seen the future and it is much like the present, only longer,” but it’s hard enough to understand the past, and almost impossible to analyze the present as it’s whizzing by. So how on earth are we supposed to imagine the future? Simply how are we supposed to know when the shorthand breaks down, and a tedious, tenaciously mediocre today is about to give way to a glorious tomorrow?
These moments are at the origin of the modern NFL’s greatest dynasties. In September 1981, after the 49ers—led by a first-time head coach who had gone 8-24 in his first two seasons and a 25-year-old quarterback who had barely started his first two seasons—began the season 1-2, who could have seen that a 21-14 win over the Saints in Week 4 would kick off a run of 15 wins in their next 16 games and a Super Bowl championship? Did someone—anyone—know that their coach was Bill Walsh and that their quarterback was Joe Montana? One of the great dynasties in NFL history had just launched, and no one saw it coming.
Sometimes, the exact moment when the winds shift can be pinpointed, but only in retrospect. When the officiating crew ruled off an apparent fumble that would have iced a playoff game for the Oakland Raiders on January 19, 2002, I remember being absolutely delighted that misfortune had befallen the Silver and Black and that Al Davis (like any good Midwesterner, I was raised to believe he was Lucifer’s personal vicegerent on earth) had deservedly gotten screwed. I do not remember thinking that the Tuck Rule would shake the very foundations of football, that the young quarterback who had just gotten a temporary reprieve would earn universal acclamation as the GOAT, and that the New England Patriots—the Patriots!—were about to start the greatest run of success in NFL history.
But every now and then, you can almost feel the sports landscape shift in real time. On October 12, 1989, when the Dallas Cowboys—who had lost 16 of their previous 17 games and were about to lose 10 of their next 11—traded Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for three first-round picks and three second-rounders (with other picks and players thrown in on both sides), the Cowboys laid the foundation of a new dynasty. It was a deal so monumental that 33 years later, “Herschel Walker trade” would be an established idiom in the English language meaning “a completely lopsided transaction.” Even then, I knew that the Vikings had done something astoundingly stupid.
And so it goes for the Kansas City Chiefs, who are about to play in their third Super Bowl in four seasons. They just hosted their fifth AFC championship game in a row, an unprecedented accomplishment that not even Brady’s Patriots ever achieved. They are a model professional sports organization, the standard to which good NFL teams compare themselves and what bad teams aspire to become. The Chiefs are such a well-oiled machine that they can trade away one of the game’s best wide receivers, roster 11 rookies, and get better. And you can pinpoint the exact moment when the tide began to turn for the franchise, which was floundering in the early aughts. Incredibly, you could even sense it happening at the time.
Even more incredibly—check my archive!—this is not an article about Patrick Mahomes. The arrival of the Quarterback That Was Promised was the capstone on the Chiefs renaissance, but the rebirth of the franchise predated him by years. Mahomes is a manifestation of the Chiefs’ greatness even more than its source. Should the Chiefs become the NFL’s next great dynasty, we’ll look back on January 7, 2013, as the moment it all began.
It was on that date that they welcomed Andy Reid as their new head coach. And nothing has been the same since.
It is not hyperbole to say that the lowest time in the history of the Chiefs was the moment before they hired Reid. From 1989, when owner Lamar Hunt hired Marty Schottenheimer as head coach, through 2006, the Chiefs were a consistently competitive, if snakebitten, organization: They had only four losing records in 18 years and reached the playoffs nine times. (They also lost six straight playoff games starting in 1993, including home losses following a first-round bye in 1995, 1997, and 2003.) But then the bottom fell out: From 2007 through 2012, the Chiefs lost 12 or more games four times in six seasons. It wasn’t for lack of trying: After the 2007-8 Chiefs went a combined 6-26, Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson resigned after 20 years on the job, and Clark Hunt—who had succeeded his father as team owner after Lamar passed away in 2006—went looking for the best personnel man in the sport to rebuild his franchise from the ground up. He believed he found that man in New England. His name was Scott Pioli, he was Bill Belichick’s right-hand man, and he had already presided over three Super Bowl–winning rosters.
In Hunt’s defense, it was 2009, so it wasn’t yet clear that Belichick had seemingly put a curse on everyone who had worked for the Patriots the moment they walked out the door. Pioli was an utter disaster as the Chiefs GM, and by his fourth season the organization was a mess. The season opened with an exposé in The Kansas City Star that laid bare the dysfunction, and it ended with a 2-14 record after the Chiefs were outscored by an unfathomable 214 points. (No team in the NFL has been outscored by more points in a season since.) In the months between, linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend (who was the mother of his newborn daughter) and then died by suicide in the Chiefs parking lot, yards away from where Pioli and head coach Romeo Crennel were trying to talk him down. It was an unthinkable tragedy in the middle of the worst season in franchise history, the type of event that would rock the foundation of even the most solid organizations.
FiveThirtyEight has a system known as “Elo rating” to evaluate a team’s overall quality at any given moment. While it is an admittedly crude measure, it is telling that the lowest score the Chiefs have ever merited by this system followed their final game of the 2012 season. The franchise was broken, and it felt cursed. It was into the void of this gaping maw that Andy Reid was asked to enter.
Reid had just completed an enormously successful 14-year run as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles; after going 5-11 in 1999, his first season, his Eagles won 11 or more games in each of the next five years, went to four straight NFC championship games from 2001 to 2004, and finally reached (and lost) the Super Bowl after the 2004 season. The Eagles went to the playoffs nine times in 11 years, but in 2011 they fell to .500, and in 2012 Reid had his own annus horribilis. His son Garrett, who had struggled with drug addiction for years, was found dead of a heroin overdose in his dorm room at Eagles training camp. The Eagles would finish that season 4-12, and Reid was fired hours after the season ended.
It is to Clark Hunt’s immense credit that he was immediately relentless in his pursuit of Reid. Hunt flew to Philadelphia to offer Reid the job and refused to let Reid, who was also reportedly being pursued by the Arizona Cardinals, off his plane until he got a “yes.” As a Chiefs fan, I had long been confused and frustrated by the dichotomy between the apparent quality of ownership (high) and the team’s ability to reach the Super Bowl (low)—Lamar Hunt was never able to win the AFC championship trophy after it was literally named after him in 1983. The Hunts were NFL royalty, and yet their team too often played like a bunch of serfs. But by going all in to hire Reid, Clark Hunt finally proved the adage that the foundation of any championship organization is an owner who cares more about the next win than the next dollar.
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.
In each of the five seasons of the Mahomes-Reid partnership, the Chiefs have won at least 12 games and outscored their opponents by at least 110 points; in these last five years, they’ve hosted five straight home AFC championship games, reached three Super Bowls, and won the first Super Bowl of Reid’s career.
Put it all together, and from the moment the Chiefs hired Reid until today—10 seasons—the Chiefs have had a regular-season record of 117-45. Only three other franchises in NFL history have won even 110 games in any 10-year span. If overlapping years are eliminated, here are the winningest decades in NFL history:
Most Regular-Season Wins in a 10-Season Span in NFL History
Reid took over a franchise that had gone 29-67 over the previous six seasons and had tied for worst record in the NFL the year before he started, and the franchise immediately began the third-winningest decade in the history of the National Football League. That isn’t coaching; that’s wizardry. It wouldn’t surprise me if we find out Reid is a playable character in Hogwarts: Legacy.
From October 25, 2015, through the end of the 2022 season, the Chiefs have gone on a 96-28 run. Just four other teams in the Super Bowl era have won 96 games in any 124-game stretch:
Most Regular-Season Wins in a 124-Game Stretch in NFL History
The Patriots’ two streaks technically overlap by about four months, but they’ve earned the right to be listed twice. From October 5, 2003, through September 9, 2018, the Patriots went 188-49 (.793) in the regular season. Seems good.
The other teams on this list are three of the greatest dynasties of all time (and also the Minnesota Vikings). They were each captained by one of the greatest quarterbacks who ever lived—Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Joe Montana, or Steve Young—for their entire streaks, and there’s also the Minnesota Vikings. (I kid about the Vikings, who did have Fran Tarkenton for the second half of their streak, but more important, the Purple People Eaters have a case for being the most dominant defense ever assembled. From 1969 to 1976, the Vikings ranked first, first, first, 11th, second, third, third, and second in the NFL in points allowed.) While the Chiefs have had Mahomes for the second half of that streak, they are the only team on that list who spent a good chunk of time with neither an all-time QB nor an all-time defense. They did, however, have Reid.
And even Belichick, who inherited an 8-8 Patriots squad when he took over in 2000, struggled through a 5-11 introductory season in New England before beginning the greatest run of successes the league has ever seen. For as dominant as the Patriots have been under Belichick, with a 262-108 record (.708 winning percentage), it is a simple fact that in his previous stint as head coach of the Browns from 1991 to 1995, Belichick was under .500 (36-44) and made the playoffs just once in five seasons. Reid has a better winning percentage as head coach of the Chiefs than Belichick has with the Patriots (.722 to .708) and had a better record with the Eagles than Belichick had with the Browns (.583 to .450). Regarding Belichick, there is also the delicate question—and many have pondered it ad nauseam in recent years—of how much of his success was the result of having Brady as his quarterback. With the GOAT starting at QB, Belichick was 219-64 (.774). With any QB other than Brady, from Bernie Kosar to Drew Bledsoe to Mac Jones, Belichick has been 79-88 (.473).
Reid is 64-16 (.800) with Mahomes at quarterback … and 183-122-1 (.600) without him. He was a coaching legend before he ever set foot in Kansas City, and then he tacked on one of the most successful decades any coach has ever had. He went to four NFC title games with Donovan McNabb and went 50-26 with Alex Smith. Since joining the Chiefs, he’s won big with Dorsey as the general manager and won even more since Brett Veach took over the job. He’s won division titles with four different offensive coordinators. He went to the playoffs with running back Jamaal Charles as the focal point of his offense and has made three Super Bowls with Mahomes while running the NFL’s most potent passing attack. In a sport in which change is the only certainty, Reid has been the one constant in Kansas City.
The secret of Reid’s success isn’t really a secret. He melds the two most important skills any NFL head coach can have: a genius for the x’s and o’s of play design and the charisma to inspire, cajole, or even coerce everyone around him in the organization to work their hardest and give their best. Among his current and former players (including a handful of longtime Eagles whom Reid drafted during his tenure in Philadelphia) and his colleagues within both of these Super Bowl teams, Reid is both revered and respected, spoken about in language reserved for the game’s greats.
In that description he resembles Belichick, except that the two seem to be almost mirror images of each other, the yin to the other’s yang: Reid has a reputation as an offensive genius, while Belichick is the defensive mastermind; Reid’s disposition leans toward sunshine and rainbows and double cheeseburgers, while Belichick is attracted by the dark side of the force, all hoodies and one-word answers and spy games. You can’t argue with success, and Belichick’s methods have certainly borne more fruit so far, but the positivity and uplift embedded in Reid’s approach make him seem like the coach you would rather work for. Reid isn’t simply a coach; he’s a teacher, and he’s generous with imparting wisdom to his assistants and empowering them to impart that wisdom to the players under their charge. The evidence for this is in the coaches who have worked under Reid and then gone on to have success as head coaches themselves, from Sean McDermott to John Harbaugh to Ron Rivera to Doug Pederson. (One Reid protégé, Matt Nagy, is back in Kansas City after an unsuccessful head-coaching stint in Chicago; another, Mike Kafka, is reportedly a finalist to become the next head coach in Arizona.) The Bill Belichick Coaching Tree, meanwhile, features such luminaries as Josh McDaniels, Matt Patricia, and Joe Judge, along with Romeo Crennel, who presided over the disastrous 2-14 2012 Chiefs season that Reid inherited in the first place.
Reid is fallible and human and has endured tragedies and challenges in his family life that have intersected with his football career in complicated ways. He lost his son Garrett to addiction even as Garrett attended Eagles training camp alongside him. And his son Britt, who had a long-documented history of struggles with alcohol and drugs, was an assistant on Reid’s staff in Kansas City when, days before the Chiefs were scheduled to play the Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV, he crashed into a parked vehicle on the side of the highway and permanently disabled a 5-year-old girl. Britt Reid later admitted in court that he had been drinking at the team facility before the crash and pleaded guilty to a felony DWI charge; last year he was sentenced to three years in prison. The Chiefs reached an out-of-court settlement with the girl’s family and will pay for her ongoing medical expenses. These are weighty and complicated issues, but a full accounting of Reid’s story in Philadelphia and Kansas City must acknowledge them.
Reid’s regular-season success is almost without peer: He is 109 games over .500 in his career, and among coaches who began their careers in the Super Bowl era, Belichick is the only other one who is even 75 games over .500. Despite that, Reid is not considered to be in Belichick’s class as a head coach for one obvious reason: the rings. Reid was the winningest coach in NFL history to not win a title until he won the Super Bowl three years ago, and at least until this Sunday, he remains the winningest coach in NFL history to not win multiple titles. That distinction has followed him for a long time, and it is why the result of Sunday’s game will affect Reid’s legacy more than that of anyone else, even Mahomes.
It is also a distinction that is becoming increasingly unfair. For one thing, Reid may be the winningest coach with only one title, but he’s awfully close to being the winningest coach, period. Reid has won 247 regular-season games as a head coach, the fifth most of all time and just 51 wins behind Belichick. Given that Reid is 64 and Belichick is 70, health permitting, Reid may very well pass Belichick on the all-time wins list by the time both lay down their whistles for the last time—particularly since Reid has Mahomes at the present and Belichick, um, does not. Reid is just 81 wins away from Don Shula, the all-time winningest coach, which means that if the Chiefs keep winning at anywhere close to their current pace, in seven or eight years, Reid could pass Shula to become the winningest NFL coach ever.
Reid has already moved past Shula and Tom Landry into second place on the all-time list of postseason wins, with 21. Only 18 NFL head coaches have ever won 10 postseason games—Reid has won 10 games with both the Eagles and the Chiefs. He is about to coach in his fourth Super Bowl—only Landry (five), Shula (six), and Belichick (nine) have been to more. If he tacks a second championship on to his list of accomplishments, his case for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame will be even more of a slam dunk than it already is.
And to be clear: Reid is already a no-doubt Hall of Famer—that was assured the moment he won Super Bowl LIV. While a lack of any titles may be enough to keep a coach out—the four winningest coaches to never win a title are Marty Schottenheimer, Dan Reeves, Chuck Knox, and Jeff Fisher, and none of them is in—the winningest coaches with exactly one championship have almost all been inducted. Not counting active coaches, six men have won at least 120 regular-season games and exactly one title: Bill Cowher, Tony Dungy, Sid Gillman, Mike Ditka, and Dick Vermeil are all Hall of Famers; Mike Holmgren is the only one who hasn’t found his way to Canton yet, but he was a finalist in the Coach/Contributor category this year. Bud Grant and Marv Levy are both Hall of Famers without winning any titles because both made it to (and lost) four Super Bowls. Even if Reid loses on Sunday, he will have a Super Bowl win, the title that eluded both of them, and roughly 100 additional regular-season wins.
So the real question may be whether Reid belongs on the Mount Rushmore of NFL head coaches, ranked clearly among the top four or five of all time. That question won’t be definitively answered on Sunday, but a win will make it a question worth asking. Give Reid another half decade with Mahomes, push him past 300 regular-season wins, and tack on another title or two, and the only question worth asking then will be whether Reid is the second-greatest NFL head coach of all time … or the first.