NEW ORLEANS -- Super Bowl LIX matches two of the most dominant teams of the last dozen years of the NFL. Only one of them has also dominated hiring cycles.
Since Andy Reid joined the Kansas City Chiefs in 2013, they have the highest winning percentage, including the playoffs, of any team: 72.9 percent. They have missed the playoffs just once with Reid, have won three Super Bowls, might win a fourth on Sunday to complete a historic three-peat, and played in a fifth. It's not especially hard to figure why. Reid has long been one of the NFL's best coaches, and for his first five years in Kansas City, he had an outstanding quarterback (Alex Smith). For the last seven years, he's had an otherworldly one (Patrick Mahomes).
Since Reid left Philadelphia at the end of the 2012 season, the Eagles have the NFL's fifth-highest winning percentage, again including playoffs: 60 percent. This one, though, is a little harder to explain.
The Eagles have had that kind of success despite employing three different full-time head coaches and one interim and using an astonishing nine different starting quarterbacks in that span. That sort of turnover usually sinks a franchise, signals one that has lost its way or suggests a completely incompetent owner. None of that applies to the Eagles.
In fact, there might be only one task at which the Eagles can match their propensity for turning over head coaches since Reid left: finding the next good one. Each of the three full-time coaches hired by the Eagles after Reid left has at least made the playoffs with the team. Chip Kelly -- whom owner Jeffrey Lurie said he wanted to replace with a coach who "" -- had two 10-win seasons and won six in his third before being dumped with one regular-season game left in the 2015 campaign. Doug Pederson went to the playoffs in three of his five seasons, won the franchise's first Super Bowl and is immortalized in bronze, visor included. Nick Sirianni hasn't missed the playoffs yet and will coach in his second Super Bowl on Sunday -- and he's only been there four years.
That the Chiefs and Eagles also met in the Super Bowl just two years ago should not be a surprise, given their consistent winning. It's that element -- the consistent winning -- that should be a surprise in a league that is engineered to thwart sustained success. How to explain this? It starts, fittingly, with Reid.
"I believe it's a cultural thing," said Pederson, who saw both franchises up close, working for Reid in Philadelphia and Kansas City before becoming the Eagles head coach in 2016. "Those teams have figured out how to win. That's an innate gift. It's bred into the fabric of Kansas City and Philadelphia. They know how to win regardless of who is at the helm."
Lurie is so passionate about culture that he doesn't even want to discuss the particulars of his. It's worth noting that other than Kelly, Lurie's head-coaching hires have not been the hottest candidates in any coaching cycle.
"There's certain core principles of culture -- it started with Andy -- and we don't deviate from that culture," said Lurie (who purchased the team in 1994 and hired Reid five years later) this week. "Every time we've hired a coach, it has been unique to the moment, but they incorporate the core principles we have. We're not asking them to create the culture. We provide what we have and we think they are the best at that moment to accentuate it all. It's one question I don't want to answer. You can call it the secret sauce. It's self-evident to us. When we watch the coaching carousel, it almost doesn't relate to what we're trying to accomplish. The core organizational principles are in cement."
Clark Hunt, the owner of the Chiefs, also credits Reid for instilling the culture when he arrived straight from Philadelphia in 2013. Hunt is more willing to pinpoint what he thinks is one of the most important pieces of that culture.
"How much they enjoy teaching," Hunt said. "I think that's really important, particularly when you're bringing in a lot of new players. If you're not constantly teaching, you're going to go backwards. Andy is always helping them get better and go forwards."
Reid installed a philosophy of roster building that is evident in both teams. Reid, a former offensive lineman himself, has long believed in building from the trenches out, with the need for a quality quarterback being a given. The Chiefs and Eagles have two of the most well-rounded rosters in the NFL, featuring superb quarterbacks and skill-position players -- but the lines form the foundations of both teams, dotted with All-Pros, young stars and future Hall of Famers. Through coaching changes, that has remained a constant in Philadelphia. When Pederson was on Reid's Philadelphia staff, the offensive line had Jason Peters and Jason Kelce. When Pederson was the head coach, it had Kelce and Lane Johnson. Now, Sirianni has Johnson, Cam Jurgens and Jordan Mailata. And while the line has been shuffled a bit more in Kansas City in recent years, Reid still has Creed Humphrey, Joe Thuney and Trey Smith.
"I certainly feel I'm indebted to a lot of people in the NFL, and Coach Reid is a big part of that," Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said this week. "It was always offensive line and defensive line. It was obsessiveness about it and we won. So to me, it was very clear that's where it starts. I learned that from him."
Both teams' general managers got their start during Reid's tenure in Philadelphia. Roseman was named Eagles GM in 2010, lost control of personnel under Kelly and gained it back after Kelly was ousted. Kansas City's Brett Veach began as a coaching intern for Reid with the Eagles before switching to scouting. And both GMs are outstanding evaluators who are comfortable with roster churn. Eight of 11 Eagles defensive starters are different than the 2022 team that played in Super Bowl LVII. There are just seven active Chiefs who were on the team five years ago, when the team won Super Bowl LIV.
Roseman had an offseason for the ages, signing two free agents -- running back Saquon Barkley and linebacker Zack Baun -- who became first-team All-Pros, drafting two starting cornerbacks (Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean) and signing a new starter on the offensive line (Mekhi Becton).
Veach was forced to respond to a series of injuries, trading for DeAndre Hopkins and signing Kareem Hunt and D.J. Humphries during the season. Low-cost players like JuJu Smith-Schuster and Samaje Perine were key contributors late.
"He did a magician's job plugging holes," Clark Hunt said.
The Eagles and Roseman have a reputation for aggressiveness in player acquisition, and in how they structure player contracts, while the Chiefs -- as Pederson put it -- are thought to "play it closer to the vest."
But the Chiefs might not have even made it to Sunday's game were it not for a willingness to change the roster and even the personality of the team. After all, the Chiefs used to rely on a downfield attacking offense with Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce. Then the Chiefs traded Hill, Kelce -- who turned 35 in October -- got older and the offense became more horizontal than vertical. This season, the Chiefs were, for long stretches, a defense-first team. While the Chiefs ranked 15th in scoring during the regular season, they had the fourth-best scoring defense.
"Going back to when I took over the franchise from my dad, our goal was to build a team that could consistently compete for championships," said Hunt, whose father, Lamar Hunt, founded the organization in 1959. "To do that, you have to have a general manager willing to go out and bring new guys in. You primarily have to do it through the draft and Brett has done a fantastic job of drafting well."
The Eagles have thrown more resources at free agency while also extending their own players. Even with the upheaval at coach and quarterback, the Eagles have had a surprising amount of roster continuity, which certainly helps explain why their yearly win totals never sag for too long. They are one of seven teams since 2013 that have had at least 10 players appear in 100 games. Of those seven, they're one of only three that does not have the quarterback included in that group. Of course, it would help any team to have a Core Four like Jason Kelce, Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham and Lane Johnson -- all Eagles lifers, all but Jason Kelce being first-round draft picks -- that formed the backbone of the roster and carried and continued a team culture through multiple coaching regimes. Kelce and Cox retired after last season, but Roseman had already aggressively planned for their departures, drafting their replacements.
With no regime change in Kansas City, there has been more continuity on the Chiefs roster. They have had 221 different players make a start since 2013, the ninth-fewest in the NFL. One of those, obviously, is Mahomes.
On Sunday, the two very different models of consistency will square off -- the Chiefs the ideal, the Eagles the unorthodox. The degree of difficulty for maintaining both is extraordinarily high.
"If you keep getting good players upon good players with good character, you'd have a chance every year in the NFL," Roseman said.
And, he added: "We're striving to be a team like that, that plays like them. Playing for a three-peat is unbelievable."
