Why the Kansas City Chiefs need to fire their coaching staff — and why this isn’t an overreaction

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Sunday night was the lowest in a lifetime of low moments for the Kansas City Chiefs franchise.

Two years removed from the mountaintop, an 18-point lead against an inferior team who the Chiefs were favored to beat by 7 disappeared, stopping Kansas City from playing in its third Super Bowl in as many years.

Maybe that’s why it hurts more this time. This team over the last four years has been constructed around superstar Patrick Mahomes with one goal in mind: win the last game of the season.

They’ve now failed three of the last four years.

While it’s true that certain facets of the Chiefs system haven’t been the best in football over the last few years — see the defense this year and Mahomes’ first year as a starter, the offensive line last year, or a steep drop-off in wide receiver quality on this year’s team after Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce — there’s one reason that stands above all others as to why Kansas City isn’t playing to win its fourth Super Bowl in two weeks:

Andy Reid and his assistants.

I’ve thought about this with every painful loss since Mahomes took over as the starter. Reid is a historically great coach, but it is equally true that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in this game any longer. His teams play down to their opponents, his in-game play calling in crucial situations is abysmal, and his clock management has been appropriately maligned since he was with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Sure, winning an average of 11.5 games per season as Reid has done in Kansas City is considered successful in nearly every NFL circle. And while I’m not intending to diminish that fact, or the fact Reid has taken a historically mediocre franchise in the Chiefs to the playoffs in 8 of his 9 seasons, it’s just not enough anymore.

Patrick Mahomes, despite how poorly he played in Sunday’s second half, is a once in a lifetime talent. And right now, it’s being squandered by Andy Reid’s stubbornness, his desire to get cute with playcalling at the exact wrong times, and his inability to get his teams to do anything but play to the level of their opponent rather than what their talent should be capable of.

It’s time for a change.

It may sound insane to call for the firing of all coaches on a team that has made four straight AFC Championships and two straight Super Bowls. But that’s the unique place Kansas City’s ownership group needs to be in.

There is no excusable reason to lose to the Bengals in the manner Kansas City did yesterday. Joe Burrow is a great quarterback, Ja’Marr Chase is a phenomenal receiver, and the Bengals are going to be a team that challenges the Chiefs over the next 5–10 years. But that team was and is not Super Bowl-level. That should have been evident to everyone watching by the fact Kansas City jumped out to an 18 point lead in the first half.

The old adage says that everything that could go wrong, did. And while that may be true to a point with regards to the Chiefs yesterday, it’s a much truer statement that everything Andy Reid, Eric Bieniemy, and Steve Spagnuolo could do wrong, they did.

I don’t need to sit here and rattle off a bunch of statistics to prove the point of the bigger picture for the Kansas City Chiefs. In Mahomes, Hill and Kelce, they possess three of the best football players in at least the last 20 years. Yet the team has but one Super Bowl, in which they also trailed by double digits and only won due to a play which quite literally created the “Fuck it, Tyreek down there somewhere” meme afterwards.

The players are not to blame for this. But Andy Reid certainly is.

It’s time for him, and his assistants, to go so Kansas City doesn’t later become known as the team that squandered Patrick Mahomes’ talent.