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Possibly we’re destined to have a chicken-or-the egg dialog about them someday, too. It appears inevitable, if return throughout the annals of the NFL. Does the coach make the quarterback? Does the quarterback make the coach? Can one exist in a vacuum with out the opposite? And if given reality serum … would both even need to strive?
That’s the place we’re with Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes now. Their shared historical past already has yielded two Tremendous Bowl championships, and by the shut of enterprise Sunday, there could be a 3rd. Theirs already has been one of the vital fruitful partnerships within the sport’s historical past. They’ll climb that record a little bit bit extra in Las Vegas.
“It’s been a pleasure watching him change into the quarterback he’s change into,” Reid stated earlier this week within the lead-up to Tremendous Bowl 2024. “And it’s privilege to have the ability to work with him as carefully as I’ve.”
Earlier this yr, Mahomes tried to pinpoint what impresses him most about working with Reid.
“He enables you to be you,” Mahomes stated in October. “He doesn’t attempt to make you be this technique quarterback or make you do what his offense desires to do. He makes the offense across the quarterback and across the gamers that he has. And I feel you see that as he evolves with each group that he has each single yr.”
The Mahomes-Reid pairing, as of this second, is probably the most profitable QB-coach duo of all time, with an 88-25 file (playoffs included), for a profitable proportion of .779. That places them simply forward of Invoice Belichick and Tom Brady (.774), and Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr (.770).
The mutual respect and affection that Mahomes and Reid have for one another appears to carefully resemble what Starr and Lombardi had. The circumstances had been totally different — Starr was a third-string quarterback when Lombardi confirmed up in Inexperienced Bay, and he all the time puzzled aloud what may need change into of him if the Packers hadn’t employed Lombardi off the Giants’ workers in 1959.
“We had a connection, there was no query about that,” Starr stated in 1992. “How do you clarify it? We had been from totally different backgrounds. It might have been a catastrophe, if you consider it an excessive amount of. However we simply appeared to work effectively collectively, as if we had been all the time alleged to work collectively.”
Brady-Belichick was superb (or, relying on how you are feeling concerning the Patriots, infuriating) to observe for rattling close to 20 years, even when that individual alliance appeared to bitter because it obtained older — after which Brady added an additional one at Tampa Bay that Belichick had nothing to do with. Nonetheless, historical past is destined to look favorably on them.
In fact, plenty of one of the best QB-coach cooperatives haven’t precisely been bromances. Terry Bradshaw used to rankle Chuck Noll together with his early-career propensity for turnovers, and Noll truly benched Bradshaw early of their first Tremendous Bowl season, which bothered Bradshaw for years. Joe Montana and Invoice Walsh weren’t all the time on the identical web page. It appeared to take Tom Landry longer than simply about anybody else on Earth to understand Roger Staubach must be his QB1.
It was in all probability a stroke of nice success for Mahomes that he landed within the NFL with Reid as his first coach, since Reid was already thought-about one of many defining offensive minds of his teaching technology. However it was actually a masterstroke of luck for Reid that Mahomes wound up a Chief.
Reid had gained loads of video games with Donovan McNabb in Philadelphia, and when he arrived in Kansas Metropolis, he turned the Chiefs round instantly by tapping into Alex Smith’s abilities as a recreation supervisor. However when a coach finds himself working with a generational expertise … effectively, it’s sensible to hearken to the phrases of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who’s already coached virtually all of David Robinson’s and Tim Duncan’s careers, and is now on the bottom ground for Victor Wembanyama:
“You simply hope,” Popovich stated dryly, “that you just don’t screw it up.”
Reid hasn’t screwed this up. Neither has Mahomes. Sunday, they hope to take a 3rd journey to the very best peak within the sport by profitable a soccer recreation, one thing they’ve achieved as a twosome higher than another in historical past.
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