Kansas City Chiefs News

Home

Quizzes

Watch

Newsletter

Kansas City Chiefs Andy Reid can cement HOF case with Super Bowl win

Kansas City's Andy Reid, celebrating Sunday's AFC championship, earned his second shot at winning a Super Bowl as a head coach. Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

Reid can lock up Hall of Fame case with Super Bowl win

By Chris Mueller | Last updated 1/19/20

Fifteen years after losing in the Super Bowl as Eagles coach, Kansas City’s Andy Reid gets another shot. A victory over San Francisco wouldn’t just make him a first-time Super Bowl champion as head coach; it would cement his case for the Hall of Fame.

Few coaching resumes match his:

One of eight NFL coaches with at least 200 regular-season wins. (Reid has 207 in just 21 seasons.)
A .618 winning percentage, fourth best among active coaches
Seventh coach to take two different teams to a Super Bowl and third to take a team from each conference.
Only three losing seasons, all of them with the Eagles.
At least 10 wins in six of his seven seasons in Kansas City, where he has never had a losing season.

Beyond those bonafides, Reid is regarded as one of the best offensive minds in the sport, and his offensive “scripts,” which usually consist of his team’s first 15 offensive plays, are regarded as arguably the best in the NFL. Reid is also an adept in-game play-caller, something that some other talented scripters –- new Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy comes to mind –- are not.

Despite his gaudy overall statistics and a superior reputation as an offensive tactician, Reid’s career has also been defined as much by his playoff failures and in-game shortcomings as it has all that success.

Kansas City’s win Sunday over the Titans evened Reid’s playoff record at 14-14. Six of those 14 playoffs losses have come at home. His Eagles teams routinely underachieved in the postseason, scoring a combined 13 points in back-to-back home NFC Championship Game losses to Tampa Bay in 2002 and Carolina in 2003.

Until this season, his time with the Chiefs has followed a similar script: regular-season excellence followed by playoff heartbreak. In his first season with Kansas City, the Chiefs went 11-5 in the regular season, then raced to a 38-10 third-quarter lead in Indianapolis in the wild-card round. K.C. lost, 45-44. Only the 1993 Houston Oilers have blown a bigger lead in the playoffs.

Reid’s Chiefs also lost at home to the Steelers in the 2016 playoffs, then did themselves one worse the following season when they blew a 21-3 third-quarter lead against the Titans and lost at home, 22-21. Last year’s soul-crushing loss in overtime to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game was another kick in the teeth. Every one of those painful losses featured either a sputtering offensive performance, questionable decision-making in big moments, brutal time management gaffes, or all three.

One more win can erase all of that, though, and grant Reid a spot alongside the sport’s immortals. Among coaches with 200 or more wins, only Reid and Marty Schottenheimer, who had a reputation for coming up short in the postseason, are without either an NFL championship or a Super Bowl title. It should come as no surprise that Schottenheimer is the only retired member of the 200 club not enshrined in Canton.

Winning a title has a way of papering over failures. It worked that way for the Steelers' Bill Cowher, who last week received news of his election to the Hall of Fame. The Jaw had four home AFC Championship Game losses on his ledger before finally breaking through with Ben Roethlisberger and winning Super Bowl XL.

Like Cowher with Roethlisberger, Reid finally has a quarterback good enough to put him over the top. Donovan McNabb at his peak was a good player for Reid in Philly, but Patrick Mahomes is transcendent. A win in Miami won’t just make Reid’s case for Canton air tight, it could also kick off a dynastic run in Kansas City.

Reid is just 61, and 24-year-old Mahomes seems to have breathed new life into the coach's career. Reid has always been ahead of the curve with offensive concepts, and now he has a quarterback who can execute anything he can dream up.

The totality of Reid’s career is hugely impressive, but the lack of a championship, coupled with those ugly playoff losses, has led some to brand him a choker and an underachiever. He’s 60 minutes away from wiping away those stains. If he pulls it off, he’ll finally command the respect he deserves, and his career will be capped with a gold jacket and a bronze bust.

More must-reads: