A vow from Mike Holmgren launched Chiefs coach Andy Reid from Mizzou to top of NFL

As a senior at Brigham Young in 1980, Andy Reid was considering a career as a sportswriter. If he had gone on that way and, say, later covered the Chiefs, he told me in 2017, “They’d be fun articles to read. You’d look forward to reading them. They’d be colorful.”

But fate had something else in mind after BYU coach LaVell Edwards urged him to try coaching as a graduate assistant. Reid reported to then-BYU assistant coach Mike Holmgren, who over the span of one season became taken with Reid’s intelligence, personality and trustworthiness — and came to see him as “the son I never had.”

“That’s where I first noticed what he was kind of made of and how he did things,” Holmgren said in a 2020 phone interview. “And I told him at the time, ‘If I ever get a chance to be a head coach anywhere, I’m phoning you first.’ We kind of laughed about those things.”

But he was serious. Days after he became the head coach of the Green Bay Packers a decade later, Holmgren made good on those words and subtly set in motion one of the most prosperous coaching careers in NFL history.

Reid’s burgeoning place in the game was further distinguished last week when he surpassed Hank Stram for most regular-season wins in Chiefs history (125), thus making him the first NFL coach to have the most wins for two franchises (130 with the Eagles).

Given that it’s his nature to cast light on others, Reid was at a loss for words when chairman and CEO Clark Hunt made those points in presenting “our special head coach” the game ball after the 31-17 win in Las Vegas on Sunday.

“Even to be listed with (Stram’s) name there,” Reid said Wednesday, shaking his head in apparent disbelief, “is crazy.”

All the more so when you consider the twists that made it possible.

At the time of Holmgren’s call, Reid was approaching his 34th birthday and coaching the offensive line at Mizzou — his fourth full-time collegiate coaching job starting with the one Holmgren helped him get at San Francisco State.

Close with so many on Bob Stull’s staff and Missouri players (to this day) and believing MU was soon to turn the corner, Reid was hesitant to leave for the job as an assistant line and tight ends coach with the Packers.

Back then, when I was covering Mizzou at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he told me he had felt rooted in Columbia and struggled with the decision.

Holmgren was persuasive, though, including an inducement that proved prophetic:

“I tell you what: ‘You’re going to learn the passing game by this,’” Holmgren remembered saying. “‘And that will be good long-term.’”

While that was the case for Reid even before Patrick Mahomes changed the parameters of everything, the synergy of the Reid-Mahomes era has lent new currency to Holmgren’s forecast — a point worth savoring anew as the Chiefs prepare to play on Sunday at Green Bay.

Only three men have won more NFL games than Reid’s 277 (including in the postseason), and only four have won more than the two Super Bowl victories Reid has guided in the last four seasons.

All enabled by that call from Holmgren, yes.

But all carried out by a unique figure who is at once innovative and steadfast, unyielding and empathetic, adaptable and stubborn, understated and charismatic and possessed of an uncanny ability to motivate by connecting.

“I think the biggest thing for me when you talk about Coach Reid is that he knows how to win with a lot of different players. That speaks to the person that he is,” Mahomes said Wednesday. “You always have to build a different culture. You always have to adapt your team to the players you have on your team. And he’s done a great job of that, not only here but in Philly. …

“It speaks to the person he is because he can relate to everybody, and he can go out and get the best out of every single person.”

Amplifying the point, Mahomes noted how every NFL locker room is full of people from all cultures and backgrounds. Which reminded me of what former Chief Frank Clark said last postseason when he was explaining why he had kissed Reid and told him he loved him on the field.

What he loves most, Clark said, is Reid’s will and grit and “understanding of his players. ... He understands the kid from South Central. He understands the kid from the ‘hood in Cleveland. He gets it.”

And Reid gets something else that not many see, but that those who know him best consistently tell you.

“He’s always going to do what he can (for others) even if he’s not benefiting from it,” former Chief Dee Ford told me when he was with the 49ers before Super Bowl LIV. “He doesn’t look at this as what he can gain.”

With that comes an abiding message that he wants his players to gain by getting the most out of themselves.

That’s why Travis Kelce has said any number of ways over the years that Reid helped him grow up and saved his career. And why on Wednesday Chris Jones called Reid a father figure whose perspective he has valued “just through the journey of life,” including after Jones’ return from his holdout earlier this season.

You could walk around the Chiefs’ locker room and surely hear similar sentiments about everywhere.

For that matter, you likely would have heard the same in Reid’s previous Chiefs or Eagles locker rooms. Which is the really remarkable thing.

The rarity of being able to create that kind of culture in two completely different environments can’t be overstated.

Each has its own inherent variables and challenges to begin with, and Reid inherited two franchises in distress: The Eagles were 3-13 the season before he left the Packers and took over there in 1999, and the Chiefs had been 2-14 before he came to Kansas City in 2013.

Some coaches fail at their first job and enjoy success elsewhere. Some enjoy early success but falter and never can replicate it.

Few are really good from the get-go and then get better at the next one.

“There’s a lot of pride in knowing he’s had success in two different organizations,” Kelce said after the Super Bowl LVII victory over the Eagles, “but this was the better one.”

A zillion different things had to happen to make it this way, starting with Reid’s innate temperament and his upbringing by a radiologist mother and Hollywood set designer father.

And that he attended John Marshall High School, which he likes to call a melting pot that included Black, Asian, Hispanic and Middle Eastern teammates and a Japanese head football coach.

He had plenty of talents and interests and could have been a lot of other things — including a great head college football coach — if not for a promise kept by a coach Reid figures did the job better than anybody.

“This is corny,” Reid said as he began to retell the story Wednesday. Then he smiled and said, “He was good on his promise.”

He added, “I was very fortunate to get into that situation.”

So are a lot of others Reid has taken on this journey with him.