Chiefs’ ‘unprecedented’ success now began with Andy Reid’s total makeover 10 years ago

Welcome to Chiefs training camp 2023 at Missouri Western State University, the proving ground and would-be springboard for the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl run in five seasons, its pursuit of a third triumph in that span and quest for what would be the NFL’s first back-to-back titles in nearly two decades.

Depending on how you define the term “dynasty,” maybe they need one more now to be considered that. Or maybe they already merit the label. But you can definitely call it this:

It’s all unprecedented in Chiefs annals, as team president Mark Donovan put it on Friday. And in more ways than one — all a reminder of the complete reset of what it is to be a Chiefs fan in the Andy Reid era.

While the Chiefs of yesteryear played in two of the first four Super Bowls, winning the latter in 1970 with a host of future Pro Football Hall of Famers, a 50-year title drought ensued.

“You really look back on the history of this franchise, you’ve never had this success,” Donovan said. “We’ve had superstars, clearly. But as the world has changed, and as it’s gotten smaller and smaller, our superstars are now worldwide superstars.”

No one more so than interstellar superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes, anecdotally known even in such improbable far-flung realms as Iraq, Nigeria and Qatar and surely a driving force in the clamor for the Chiefs game in Frankfurt, Germany, set for November.

Tickets for the game against the Dolphins at Deutsche Park Stadium (capacity 51,500) sold out in 15 minutes amid reports that more than one million people were logged into the Ticketmaster queue.

The Chiefs’ popularity in Germany, Donovan noted, included being enough of a draw to sell out a team-hosted “schedule release party” in Frankfurt … two weeks after the schedule was released.

The pending game and other international endeavors (including previous games in London and Mexico City) are “a huge opportunity for us; it fits perfectly into our strategy” to grow the brand internationally.

“We’re in places we’ve never been,” Donovan said. “We’ve seen results we’ve never had.”

Because, he pointed out, “it’s all related.”

All: From Mahomes to Travis Kelce to Chris Jones (specifically mentioned by Donovan even as it remained to be seen whether he’d be here for the first day of camp Sunday as negotiations for a new contract are ongoing) to the team at large, from the stadium game-day experience to the “Hall of Fame coach.”

But it’s all related largely because of the coach who has made himself a Pro Football Hall of Fame certainty a decade since his first training camp here.

Consider that before Reid the Chiefs had won 11-plus games five times since the NFL expanded to a 16-game schedule in 1978.

Over the last decade, the Chiefs have won 11-plus games eight times.

Much has changed since Mahomes arrived, of course, but it bears mention that the Chiefs were 53-27 under Reid before Mahomes replaced Alex Smith.

More strikingly, the franchise that has played host to five straight AFC Championship Games figures to contend for the title for the foreseeable future with a healthy Mahomes and Reid and the astute front office led by general manager Brett Veach.

It’s all so glowing that maybe it’s easy to forget where the franchise was when Reid was hired: coming off the ghastly 2012 season punctuated by a 2-14 record and chaos and turmoil in the front office.

At the time, you may recall, the Chiefs hadn’t won a postseason game since Jan. 16, 1994 — a stretch that would continue until Jan. 9, 2016, when Reid’s third team beat the Texans 30-0.

Now the Chiefs have won as many postseason games (10) in the last four seasons as they had in the rest of their history combined.

Everything has changed for the Chiefs and Reid since his arrival, in other words, a shift neatly underscored by the Chiefs edging Reid’s former employer, the Eagles, 38-35 in Super Bowl LVII.

As Donovan reflected Friday on the span between then and now, he smiled and thought back to the fateful interview process in a Philadelphia-area airport.

At the time, Reid also was being pursued by others, particularly Arizona and the Chargers.

But during what became a mind-melding nine-hour interview, the plane Arizona sent to Philly for Reid left without him on it and he canceled on the Chargers.

Days later at his introductory news conference in Kansas City, Reid would say he felt “a certain energy” with chairman and CEO Clark Hunt and the Chiefs’ entourage that just made it feel right.

For all the other senses of connection, there was also something substantially compelling about the union of a man who had tragically lost a son months earlier and an organization seeking to heal from the murder of Kasi Perkins and subsequent suicide committed by linebacker Jovan Belcher.

“I think a lot of what Andy had been through from his own standpoint, both with the Eagles and then with his family, made him an ideal candidate,” Hunt said in 2020 before Super Bowl LIV.

In his office 10 years ago, Hunt said, “You can say the stars aligned.”

No one could have known how true that would be.

“He’s done what we expected him to do — and more,” Donovan said Friday. “He’s a process-oriented, proven winner. And he brought process, he brought stability, he brought experience.

“And he clearly brought results.”

With a jolt from Mahomes, to be sure, results that rebooted the entire meaning of what it is to be a Chiefs fan from out of decades of futility and excruciating postseason losses and feeling cursed.

To the unprecedented … with ample reason to believe there’s plenty more ahead.

Not to be taken for granted but certainly to be appreciated just 10 years removed from Reid’s first camp here.