How Andy Reid became one of the NFL's best coaches ever

In 1982, Mike Holmgren’s responsibilities as an assistant football coach at Brigham Young University included keeping the staff’s six young graduate assistants in line. 

He quickly grew to like one in particular: a 24-year-old former BYU offensive lineman from Southern California named Andy Reid. Reid took copious amounts of notes and was a good listener, and his mix of self-effacement and football curiosity made him someone Holmgren, who was a decade older, liked hanging around.

“We became friends,” Holmgren said. “He would come over for lunch in my house. He helped me install a playground in the backyard for my kids. They were little at the time, and it was really fun.”

More than four decades later, Holmgren laughed as he retold the story recently, because the qualities he quickly noticed in Reid during his first year in coaching have helped Reid build something far grander — a case to be considered among the greatest coaches in NFL history. 

Entering Sunday’s Super Bowl between Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans, Reid has won 301 games, including the postseason, to rank fourth all time behind George Halas (324), Bill Belichick (333) and Don Shula (347). Reid is the only coach to win 100 games with two different franchises. His 44 playoff games match Belichick’s for most in NFL history, and his 28 playoff victories are behind only Belichick’s 33. 

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are; what matters is how you can convey the information to get the player to perform,” Holmgren said. “And all those quarterbacks, all the players I ever had, I don’t think two of them are exactly the same, and how they listen, how they learn, how you get them to do the right stuff. I think that’s a gift. And Andy, he’s gifted that way.” 

No franchise had ever played in five Super Bowls in six years until Kansas City this season. And more history is on the line: The Chiefs can become the first team in the Super Bowl era to win three consecutive championships. 

“It’s astonishing what he’s done,” former NFL head coach Jon Gruden, who coached with Reid in Green Bay in the early 1990s, told NBC News. “I hope he wins again.”

No single formula exists to predict success or longevity in NFL coaching, but family pedigree and a fast track into the profession don’t hurt. 

Reid had neither, making his ascension among the NFL’s all-time greats all the more remarkable and unlikely. 

“There aren’t enough superlatives,” said Brad Childress, who became the Minnesota Vikings’ head coach in 2006 after having been Reid’s offensive coordinator in Philadelphia and worked for Reid again in Kansas City from 2013 to 2017. “He wasn’t born on third base.”

Childress and Reid met in 1986 as assistant coaches at Northern Arizona University, where Reid drove around Flagstaff in a Volkswagen van from the 1960s with a stick shift and weathered brown paint. From there, Reid coached the offensive line at Texas-El Paso and Missouri until 1992. He had been coaching for nine years before he broke into the NFL.

A former high school teacher, Holmgren liked to hire fellow teachers as coaches, convinced they could better communicate complex concepts. Reid wasn’t a teacher, but to Holmgren his note-taking and listening were hallmarks of a great student with an open mind.

Speaking with reporters in late January, Reid said he had “taken a lot” from his former boss; then he echoed him.

“I like to teach,” Reid said. “I think if you’re going to be a coach, you have to be a teacher first. There is a lot that goes into that. It’s not just knowing your stuff, but how it’s presented.”

After Reid’s stint as a graduate assistant ended at BYU, Holmgren helped him get his first full-time coaching job at San Francisco State and made a promise that if he ever became an NFL head coach, he would try to hire him. 

When Green Bay hired Holmgren in 1992, he made good on that promise — with a twist. Holmgren wanted Reid to assist with the offensive line but also to go outside of his area of expertise and coach tight ends, too.

Holmgren's idea was to broaden Reid's understanding of the passing game. 

“He was mad at me, but he accepted the challenge, and I really do think you don’t see many — I believe it — you don’t see many line coaches, which is what essentially he was, that call the game,” Holmgren said. “They’re great in the running game, but the idea of incorporating the total offensive picture in the passing game, you don’t see many of those guys.”

Gruden was an offensive quality control assistant in Green Bay, where the coaches competed to get to the team’s offices the earliest. Gruden, who commuted by bicycle for a time, claims his pre-3 a.m. arrivals still hold the record. Once they were in the office, they competed once again to sneak plays into that week’s game plan. 

“I don’t know if he’ll tell you this, but I think one of the things that really turns [Reid] on and fires him up is when he comes up with a crazy play that no one’s ever seen or practiced against and he runs it and it works,” Gruden said. “I really think he loves and relishes being on the cutting edge of offensive football. I think he’s nuts that way, and I would be like that, but not to the extreme levels he is.”

Reid was so valuable to Holmgren that when San Francisco hired another former Packers assistant, Steve Mariucci, as its head coach in 1997, Holmgren blocked Mariucci from poaching Reid. Reid went into Holmgren’s office, upset, but Holmgren explained: He would pay him like a coordinator and do whatever he could to help him become a head coach. The following season, with Reid acting as quarterbacks coach, Packers quarterback Brett Favre was named the NFL’s most valuable player for a third consecutive season. Holmgren saw a coach who earned the trust of players, including Favre, by often taking the blame for their mistakes, even though Holmgren saw through it.

In 1999, one of Holmgren’s first calls after he left to coach Seattle was to the owner of the Eagles, Jeffrey Lurie, to explain why he would no longer be interviewing with them, too. But he didn’t call empty-handed.

“I said, ‘I got the guy for you: Andy Reid. Hire him,’” Holmgren said. “He hadn’t been a coordinator, but Jeffrey was smart enough to hire him, and the rest is history.”

Last season, Childress was attending Kansas City’s preseason training camp when offensive coordinator Matt Nagy showed him the “script” of that session’s play calls. The concepts and verbiage were completely different from what Kansas City had used only a few years before, Childress said.

That “constant evolution,” as Childress called it, didn’t entirely surprise him. Reid wasn’t rigidly protective of his offensive playbook’s philosophy. 

“He’s advanced with the times,” Childress said. “He may look like a dinosaur, he may talk like a dinosaur, but he’s not a dinosaur, believe me. He’s up on trends. He’s up on what works.” 

Childress recalled studying game tape with Reid in the lead-up to the 2016 NFL draft. Ostensibly, they were evaluating a quarterback, Carson Wentz, from North Dakota State. But Reid also was jotting down plays and formations that North Dakota State used that he liked and how the Chiefs might tailor them for their own use, never too proud of his ideas to rule out seeking outside inspiration. In Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory over San Francisco in 2020, the Chiefs set up their first touchdown by unearthing a play last seen in the 1948 Rose Bowl. 

Remaining flexible with his playbook has helped Reid win playoff games with four quarterbacks and engineer top-10 scoring offenses in 16 of his 26 seasons around quarterbacks as varied as Donovan McNabb and Jeff Garcia in Philadelphia to Alex Smith and Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City. Adapting to the times has helped Reid transform from a coach who won everything but a Super Bowl in Philadelphia to one who engineered the Chiefs’ current dynastic run. 

“I know I’m more patient than when I was a younger head coach,” Reid said last week.

Though Mahomes and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce are singular talents, Kansas City has won 17 consecutive one-score games even as the linemen and playmakers around them regularly change via free agency and trades. 

Invited to spend a week around the Chiefs during training camp last summer, Gruden was struck as he watched Reid handle the myriad responsibilities of being a head coach. Reid has hired “the best coaching staff in the NFL,” Gruden said, adding that in a league in which division is common within a team’s coaching staff or between a team’s owner and its general manager or its GM and its coach, the trust in Reid and Chiefs GM Brett Veach’s working relationship is unique. 

Yet just like when he was a graduate assistant in Provo, Reid also remains involved in the granular details, taking notes and taking in ideas. During five seasons in Kansas City before he retired in 2018, Childress said, he watched Reid install virtually every play the Chiefs ran during game weeks. 

“He’s adapted better than anybody,” Gruden said. “It was refreshing to see a head coach still doing it. I look around the league — a lot of head coaches, I don’t know what they do on game day. No disrespect to them, but I know what Andy Reid is doing.”

More often than not, Reid is winning. And it has brought him to places his former college boss can only laugh about. 

“He’s still like my adopted son, because people do confuse us,” Holmgren said. “Every once in a while, I can be in an airport or someplace, and they’ll go, ‘Man, you’ve won Super Bowls!’ And they think I’m Andy. Then Andy will phone me up and say: ‘You know, I just signed your name to a couple autograph seekers. I hope you don’t mind.’”