Perhaps we, too, are destined to have a chicken-and-egg debate about them someday. If you look back at NFL history, it seems inevitable. Can a coach be a quarterback? Can a quarterback be a coach? Can one exist in a vacuum without the other? And if given a truth-telling agent… would you want to try it?
That’s what Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes have right now. Their shared history has already resulted in two Super Bowl championships, and maybe a third by the end of business Sunday. Their partnership has already become one of the most fruitful in the history of the sport. In Las Vegas, they’ll be able to climb that list a little further.
“It’s been great to see him develop into a quarterback, and it’s an honor to work as closely with him as I have,” Reid said earlier this week, looking ahead to the 2024 Super Bowl. he said.
Earlier this year, Mahomes tried to pinpoint what impressed him most about working with Reid.
“He lets you be yourself,” Mahomes said in October. “He doesn’t try to make you the quarterback of this system or make you do what the offense wants you to do. He builds the offense around the quarterback and his own players. And everything he’s attached to. I think you can see us evolving each year along with our team.”
To date, Mahomes and Reid are the most successful QB/coach duo in history, with an 88-25 record (including playoffs) and a winning percentage of .779. That puts him just ahead of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady (.774) and Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr (.770).
The respect and love that Mahomes and Reid have for each other seems to be a lot like what Starr and Lombardi had. The situation was different. When Lombardi showed up in Green Bay, Starr was a third-team quarterback. And he always wondered where he would have been had the Packers not hired Lombardi from the Giants’ staff in 1959.
“We had a connection. There was no question about it,” Starr said in 1992. We had different backgrounds. If I thought about it too much, it could have been a disaster. But we seemed to work well together, like we were always supposed to work together. ”
It was great (or infuriating, depending on how you feel about the Patriots) that Brady Belichick kept his watch for nearly two decades, even if that particular alliance seemed to deteriorate over the years. — and Brady added to his alliance in Tampa Bay Belichick had nothing to do with it. Still, history is destined to look favorably on them.
The truth is, many of the best QB-coach co-ops weren’t exactly bromances. Terry Bradshaw criticized Chuck Noll for his turnover tendencies early in his career. In fact, Noll benched Bradshaw early in his first Super Bowl season, which bothered Bradshaw for years. Joe Montana and Bill Walsh weren’t always on the same page. It seemed like it took Tom Landry longer than anyone else on the planet to realize that Roger Staubach should be his QB1.
It was probably a great stroke of luck that Mahomes entered the NFL with Reid as his first coach, as Reid was already considered one of the signature offensive minds of his coaching generation. But Reid was really lucky that Mahomes got the Chiefs.
Reid won a lot of games with Donovan McNabb in Philadelphia, and when he arrived in Kansas City, he immediately turned the Chiefs around by leveraging the talents of Alex Smith as a game manager. But when a coach finds himself working with generational talent…well, it would be wise to listen to Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. He has already coached David Robinson and Tim Duncan for almost all of their careers and is currently on the ground floor for Victor Wembaneyama. :
“I just hope I don’t fail,” Popovich said dryly.
Reed isn’t messing this up. Mahomes isn’t there either. On Sunday, they hope to win a football game and make their third trip to the top of the sport. This is their best performance as a duo of any team in history.
