Andy Reid: 8 Essential Facts About The Kansas City Chiefs’ Coach

Andy Reid came into the NFL with a splash. He was an unheard-of nobody until getting a shot to coach the Philadelphia Eagles right before the millennium. Since then, The Walrus, as he’s affectionately deemed, has been rocking fans as well as a mustache up and down the field, most recently as the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, the team set to face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV on February 7.

Reid is responsible for much of the team’s recent glory. Up until 2020, the guy didn’t have a Super Bowl ring to his name, but he still amassed a treasure trove of conference championships and brought teams back from the brink of complete failure. He’s a coaching heavyweight, to say the least.

In 1999, while Reid was only 40 years old, he was hired as the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, which, at that time, made him the second-youngest person in NFL history to become a head coach. According to CNBC, Reid wasn’t very well-known at the time either. He’d been a line coach and a quarterback coach for the Green Bay Packers for just shy of a decade, but coaching the Eagles was first time he’d be at the helm, and it’s a good thing he was, too. Reid has had a way of turning teams around throughout his NFL career, and the Eagles desperately needed it.

He became the second-youngest head coach in the NFL

According to USA Today, the team was coming off a 3-13 season under his predecessor, Ray Rhodes. It didn’t take long for Reid to whip the guys into proper shape. In 2002, the Eagles would play their first of three consecutive conference championships under their new coach, according to CBS. Since then, Reid has managed the same feat with the Chiefs, heading the team to championship games from 2018 to 2020. The Chiefs and the Eagles are the only two teams to host three consecutive conference championships to date.

Reid spent a whole lot of time at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He played tackle and guard for the school for two years and graduated with a bachelor’s in physical education, as well as a master’s, according to the Kansas City Chief’s official website. The future NFL coach began his coaching career at Brigham Young by working as a graduate assistant to the college’s head coach, which kicked off a head-spinning collegiate run where Reid was fiercely tossed between a handful of colleges.

After graduating, Reid was hired as the offensive line coach and offensive coordinator for the San Francisco State Gators, where he remained for a whopping two years before being punted to Northern Arizona to coach their offensive line. From there, he’d work with the offensive line at the University of Texas-El Paso. Then, at the University of Missouri, which would be his last job in the college sector, ending in 1991.

He spent a lot of time at Brigham Young University

Finally, Reid was off to the NFL to work with the Packers. The coach made his switch from the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2013 after being fired by Philadelphia. His last season was a bust. In fact, it was the worst season he’d coached with the team, as USA Today points out, and the Eagles couldn’t risk having a repeat, so Reid was let go. Being a head coach in the NFL is a cutthroat position that takes serious focus, a focus that Reid couldn’t muster after the death of his son.

Garrett Reid had been working with the Eagles’ strength and conditioning program at Lehigh University at the time of his death in August of 2012. According to ESPN, Garrett had suffered from a history of heroin addiction, and his father believed he had fallen into a relapse. Needles and a gym bag filled with mostly unopened syringes were found in his dorm room, along with a telltale heroin spoon. Toxicology reports revealed that Garrett Reid indeed had heroin in his system when he died, leading experts to believe his death was the fault of a self-administered heroin overdose. Garrett was only 29 years old.