Arrowhead Pride
We tend to think of Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid as a kind, grandfatherly figure. In ESPN’s “The Kingdom” series, we learn that Reid has a card displayed in his office that reads, “Don’t judge” — and that he tries to live by that idea when dealing with his young players.
“I’m not judging anybody in here,” he explained to a curious reporter in São Paulo before Friday night’s International Series game against the Los Angeles Chargers, “other than we’re all good folks and we’re shooting for the best for this game tomorrow for both teams; it should be a heck of a football game. But I always try to live by that… yes.”
But after the team’s flat performance led to a 10-0 deficit on Friday night — and ultimately, a rare 27-21 season-opening loss — Reid has been uncharacteristically terse about the team’s performance.
“I expect more than that,” he told reporters in Brazil after the game. “I need to make sure we come out with better emotion. It’s a nice, big stage for us against a good football team. They made a couple of plays early, got things going. And we weren’t able to do that. And I thought [the Chargers] did a better job in that area.”
While Reid did — as he always does — continue to accept the ultimate responsibility for having his players physically and emotionally prepared for game days, it was still possible to read his dissatisfaction between the lines.
“Listen, I’m on the sidelines,” he said on Friday night. “I expect there to be emotional support there. I also expect the players to fly around and do things that I’ve seen us do. Again, it’s my responsibility to get them in that frame of mind to do that, whether you have an injury [or] a turnover, whatever it is. You fight through that and you make yourself better, whatever situation you’re in.”
Reid even did something that was, for him, very unusual: call out position groups.
“I always expect more from ‘the bigs’ on both sides of the ball,” he said of his men in the trenches. “So we can do better in those two areas, for sure. That’s where it all starts, right? So we can do a better job. We will do a better job.”
After more than two full days to reflect upon Friday’s loss, Reid was a bit more of his old self when he did his customary Zoom call with reporters on Monday, as the team began its preparations to host the world champion Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.
“There were some good things mixed in there,” he said of Friday’s loss, “but there are some things we’ve got to fix. I think the players are aware of that — and the coaches are aware of it. So we’ll get busy on that. We’ve got a good Eagles team coming in here.”
Still, he spoke like a man who had just spent a couple of...
