KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At the end of his 21st season as an NFL head coach, Andy Reid finally led a team to the Super Bowl summit.
He rewarded himself with literally a few days of celebration.
“I have gotten a couple free meals,” Reid said to laughter. “That was nice.”
But Reid hasn’t lingered in the joy of the Kansas City Chiefs’ 31-20 victory against the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV.
“We took a little bit of time off after the game, after the parade and all that, but then we dove right back in and got busy,” Reid said of his staff’s approach to the 2020 offseason. “That won’t stop throughout training camp.”
If anything, Reid felt more pressure to get offseason preparations underway, because reaching the Super Bowl cost his staff two weeks of prep time for the NFL Scouting Combine.
But it’s obviously a trade-off he’s willing to make.
“Maybe someday when we get a little older we're out of the game, then we can sit back and go, ‘You know what, we did pretty good there,’” Reid said. “But right now, it’s buckling down and making sure we take care of business.”
It’s not that Reid doesn’t relish adding “Super Bowl champion head coach” to his Hall of Fame-worthy resume, it’s just that he really wants to do it again.
“It’s sunk in, but you only have a short time to enjoy that,” Reid said. “Then, you’ve got to move on.”
It’s something Reid’s staff, which returns intact for next season, also has embraced.
“We didn’t really lose a bunch of coaches, so we were able to keep everybody together and we’re hitting the ground running,” Reid said. “We took a couple days off then we hit it running.”
Led by General Manager Brett Veach, the Chiefs constructed a championship roster, but doing it again will be a challenge.
Kansas City has key pending free agents and salary-cap concerns. Plus, no NFL team is perfect, so there are roster holes to fill.
It’s a message — the only constant is change, and the 2019 Chiefs will never be together again — that Reid used to motivate the team during the run-up to the Super Bowl and reminded them of during player exit interviews.
“I talked to the team about you’re never the same,” Reid said.
As the reigning champs, Kansas City also will wear an even bigger target in 2020 as every team circles the Chiefs on the schedule and using that game as a measure of title-worthiness.
“They know that there’s a great challenge, because other teams you’re going to be their best game,” Reid said. “They’re going to be ready for you, and they're going to study you in the offseason. We’ve got to make sure we’re on our ‘A’ game as we come into the season.”
