MIND GAMES
K.C.’s Reid, San Fran’s Shanahan are brilliant offensive coaches who took different roads to Super Bowl
Super Bowl LVIII marks a meeting of the minds between two of the NFL’s great offensive innovators.
Sunday’s NFL title bout in Las Vegas again pits Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid, the venerable two-time champion whose masterful trick plays and in-game adjustments stifle the stoutest of defenses, against San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, whose explosive, quarterback-friendly scheme can turn even pedestrian pocket passers into Pro Bowlers.
The Chiefs got the better of the Niners when these teams met in Super Bowl LIV four years ago, with San Francisco squandering a 10-point fourth-quarter lead in what remains one of several legacy-defining collapses for Shanahan.
That long-awaited first championship validated the veteran Reid in the same way a win Sunday would check the most elusive box on Shanahan’s otherwise illustrious résumé.
Despite their many similarities, Reid, 65, and Shanahan, 44, took very different paths to get back to the big game.
Reid’s football journey began in working-class Los Angeles, where he grew up the son of a Hollywood scenic artist and a radiologist. An early growth spurt made Reid a football natural. At age 13, he famously towered over the other children in a 1971 “Punt, Pass, and Kick” competition that aired years later on “Monday Night Football.”
Reid, who stands at 6-3, played offensive line at BYU from 197880. There, he displayed his high football IQ, frequently picking the brain of coach LaVelle Edwards, who encouraged him to pursue coaching rather than become a writer as he aspired.
Upon graduating, Reid spent nearly a decade coaching at different colleges until Mike Holmgren hired Reid to his Green Bay Packers staff in 1992. Reid held multiple offensive coaching roles with Green Bay, including becoming quarterbacks coach in 1997 for a position group led by Brett Favre.
In Reid’s first season as quarterbacks coach, Favre won his third consecutive MVP and led the NFL with 35 touchdown passes. The next year, Favre led the NFL with 4,212 passing yards.
“It’s simple,” Favre told ESPN of Reid in a 2020 feature. “He calls plays that expose the strengths of his players.”
In 1999, Reid became head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, taking over a wayward franchise fresh off a 3-13 season and a 6-9-1 campaign before that. Within two years, Reid turned Philly into a perennial power, winning at least 11 games five seasons in a row from 2000-04.
The Eagles made it to the NFC Championship in four consecutive seasons from 2001-04. They advanced to the Super Bowl in only the last of those seasons, however, and fell to Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the dynastic New England Patriots.
Reid went 130-93-1 over 14 seasons with the Eagles. Playmakers including Terrell Owens, Brian Westbrook and LeSean McCoy thrived in his system, earning firstteam All-Pro honors. Quarterback Donovan McNabb made six Pro Bowls under Reid and finished second in 2000 MVP voting.
But Reid earned a reputation for not being able to win the big one. The Eagles decided not to bring Reid back after a career-worst 4-12 season in 2012. The Chiefs hired him soon afterward.
Reid turned around the Chiefs even more quickly than he did the Eagles. Fresh off a 2-14 disaster, Kansas City went 11-5 in its first year under Reid and made the playoffs.
The Chiefs reached the playoffs in four of their first five seasons with Reid, but they took off even further in 2018, when Patrick Mahomes became the starting quarterback.
Mahomes, who excels at delivering off-script highlights as much as he does running an intricate offense, proved to be a perfect partner for the mad-football-scientist Reid. Mahomes passed for 5,097 yards and an NFL-high 50 touchdowns in his first season as a starter. He won the Super Bowl in his second, and made it back in his third.
Last season, after the Chiefs traded top weapon Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins, Mahomes and Reid elevated an average-at-best wide receiver group and carried them to their second Super Bowl championship.
“He listens and he understands what each QB is good at and what each QB needs to improve on,” Mahomes told ESPN in that same 2020 feature. “He doesn’t put the QB in a bad situation. No matter who the quarterback, no matter what his skill set is, he designs the offense around that. That’s different than what a lot of other coaches do. They run their offense and insert the quarterback into it.”
With a win Sunday, Reid would become the fifth head coach with three Super Bowl wins. Shanahan, meanwhile, is still searching for his first.
Shanahan was born into football, the son of Mike Shanahan, who won back-to-back Super Bowls as head coach of the Denver Broncos in the late 1990s.
The younger Shanahan became a staple of the Broncos’ sideline as a teenager, holding cords for his father during the 1997 Broncos’ Super Bowl run.
“I got made fun of a lot for it, but it was neat to be up front and personal with everything,” Shanahan recalled in 2018.
Shanahan, a college wide receiver for Duke and Texas, broke into the NFL as an offensive quality control coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 200405. He then joined the Houston Texans as wide receivers coach in 2006 before becoming the team’s quarterbacks coach a year later.
Shahanan quickly established himself as one of the top upand-coming coaches in the NFL. In 2008, the Texans made the 28-year-old Shanahan the league’s youngest offensive coordinator.
“I’ve worked side-by-side with him, and his knowledge of attacking coverages is beyond his years,” Texans head coach Gary Kubiak told the Houston Chronicle at the time. “I think he’s going to make an excellent play-caller, too.”
Indeed, he did. The Texans ranked third in the NFL by averaging 382.1 yards per game during Shanahan’s first season as coordinator. The next year, former third-round pick Matt Shaub led the NFL with 4,770 pass yards and made the Pro Bowl.
Shanahan then joined his father in Washington, serving as offensive coordinator there from 201013. Those teams, with a revolving door at quarterback, weren’t as successful, though Washington’s offense managed to finish fourth in scoring in 2012.
Shanahan spent another uneven season with the then-dysfunctional Cleveland Browns in 2014 before the Atlanta Falcons hired him as their offensive coordinator in 2015.
The Falcons soared under Shanahan, particularly in 2016, when he ran the NFL’s top-scoring offense and helped Matt Ryan win MVP during a career-best season. That season ended in heartbreak, however, as the Falcons
squandered a 28-3 lead in Super Bowl LI and lost to the Brady, Belichick and the Patriots.
During that epic collapse, which remains the biggest choke in Super Bowl history, Shanahan’s offense failed to score in the final 23 minutes and 31 seconds of regulation.
Shanahan landed his first NFL head coaching gig after that rough Super Bowl showing, taking over a spiraling San Francisco team that just went 2-14.
The 49ers went 6-10 in their first year under Shanahan but 5-0 in games started by quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, whom they acquired midseason from the Patriots. They slumped to 4-12 in 2018, with an ACL tear costing Garoppolo all but three games that season.
With Garoppolo finally healthy,
San Francisco surged in 2019, riding the NFL’s second-ranked offense to a 13-3 record. Garoppolo, a steady but unspectacular passer, threw for 3,978 and 27 touchdowns.
That season, too, ended in heartbreak, however, with the Chiefs engineering their double-digit comeback against the Niners in an eventual 31-20 Super Bowl victory. Shanahan’s offense went scoreless in the final 17 minutes and 35 seconds in that one.
San Francisco returned to the NFC Championship Game after the 2021 and 2022 seasons but failed to make it back to the Super Bowl. Like they did for so long with Reid, repeated failures to win the big one continue to hang over Shanahan.
This year represents perhaps Shanahan’s best shot. His Niners opened as 2.5-point favorites after cruising to the NFC’s top seed behind the NFL’s second-ranked scoring offense.
Seventh-round quarterback Brock Purdy ran Shanahan’s offense better than Garoppolo ever did, efficiently getting the ball to playmakers Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk and George Kittle with precise passes over the middle and letting them explode for yards after the catch.
But the Niners seemed shaky in their two playoff wins, needing second-half comebacks to survive upset attempts by the underdog Packers and Detroit Lions. The Chiefs, meanwhile, are peaking at the perfect time, rolling past the
Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills and Baltimore Ravens behind timely offense and shutdown defense.
The 2022 arrival of McCaffrey, who led the NFL with 2,023 scrimmage yards this season, added extra intrigue, considering the do-it-all running back’s father, former Broncos wide receiver Ed McCaffrey, won two Super Bowls with Mike Shanahan. Ed also won the 1995 Super Bowl with the Niners.
Both Reid and Shanahan boast impressive coaching trees. Sean McDermott, John Harbaugh, Doug Pederson, Todd Bowles and Ron Rivera are among those who coached under Reid, while Mike McDaniel, Robert Saleh, DeMeco Ryans, Matt LaFleur and Bobby Slowik worked with Shanahan.
There’s no denying Reid and Shanahan are among the NFL’s elite coaches. A win on Sunday will solidify one coach’s greatness even further.