ST. JOSEPH, Missouri — What more do the folks in Kansas City have to do to get the big gigs?
The Chiefs are the most consistent team in the NFL in the past half-decade: seven straight division titles, five straight AFC title-game appearances, three Super Bowl trips and two Lombardis. And yet, in this Super Bowl run they have seen just one person go on to be a head coach or general manager of another team.
Bears GM Ryan Poles is the lone former Chief who has gotten the call to lead a team as coach or GM since these Chiefs started going to the Super Bowl in 2019.
Yes, the Chiefs had Doug Pederson and Matt Nagy get head-coaching gigs, but that was before this early dynasty run. Since Mahomes has taken over, the NFL has watched the Chiefs run roughshod over mostly everyone and collectively said, “OK cool, we’ll hire someone not from there.”
In talking with folks around the league, two things may be the cause of this. First, the idea that Andy Reid and Mahomes are what make this team go. Indeed, having a Hall of Fame coach and the best player on the planet certainly help, but that hardly means everyone else involved in this process is a slappy. Plus, that hardly prevented other NFL teams from poaching from New England when Bill Belichick and Tom Brady sat on the throne.
Which leads to the second reason why things have been static in K.C. Maybe the league saw the (relative) failures of procuring talent from the Patriots over the last two decades and that has made teams gun-shy to take from the league’s best.
This is obviously ridiculous.
Longtime offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy’s inability to get a head-coaching gig has been well documented over the years, and he had to leave for Washington in the offseason to emerge from Andy Reid’s shadow. Defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who has been a head coach before, can’t even get an interview. Former Chiefs quarterbacks coach Mike Kafka went to the Giants last year and got no fewer than four head-coach interviews this past offseason.
The personnel side is just as confounding as GM Brett Veach’s group has been able to put together championship rosters year after year when that simply doesn’t happen in the salary-capped NFL.
Assistant GM Mike Borgonzi has been with the Chiefs for the past 15 years and didn’t get an interview this offseason. Brandt Tillis, VP of football operations who’s been with the Chiefs for 14 years, was the lead negotiator on the Mahomes’ contract that every team should be clawing to get. Chris Shea is the VP of football operations and the team counsel, with backgrounds in law, the collective bargaining agreement, coaching, scouting, the salary cap and instant replay.
Senior director of player personnel Mike Bradway won a Super Bowl with the Eagles before joining the Chiefs in 2018. Director of player personnel/pro scouting Tim Terry has 20 years of experience in the NFL (including a Super Bowl with the Packers) who advances Chiefs’ opponents along with his other pro duties. Ryne Nutt is now in Year 14 with Kansas City as the director of player personnel overseeing the college scouting department.
Hiring any one of those men won’t mean your team gets Reid or Mahomes. But geez, if my team was bad enough that it needed to hire a new head coach of GM, I’d probably invest some time and energy into plucking from Kansas City.
