After making his sixth Super Bowl appearance as a head coach in 2024, analysts and surveys placed him at the top of the NFL coach rankings. But in 2025, Reid failed to lead the Kansas City Chiefs to the playoffs for the first time since 2014, finishing with a 6-11 record. This led critics to question whether Reid can still coach the Chiefs back to their championship form. Now, the latest NBC Sports ranking of the NFL’s best coach has only magnified the flaws in Reid’s coaching.
On April 7, when NBC Sports’ Patrick Daugherty released his ranking of NFL head coaches, he placed Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay ahead of Andy Reid. In 2024, McVay ranked No. 2 on the list. But last season, as he led the Rams to a 12-5 record and an appearance in the NFC Championship game, he proved to be better than Reid.
“Andy Reid is one of the greatest coaches in the history of football,” Patrick Daugherty wrote in his NBC Sports column. “This was true even before he found Patrick Mahomes. If you want to say he’s still the best current coach, you could easily win the debate. Now, is he still the most dynamic? That would be harder to argue.”
NFL coaches get ranked on how they can help their teams dominate during their championship windows. And in that criterion, Andy Reid has stood at the top for more than a decade.
Since arriving in Kansas City in 2013, Reid has completely transformed the franchise. The Chiefs had just finished the 2012 season with a disastrous 2-14 record. Then, in his first year as head coach, Reid engineered an immediate turnaround, leading the Chiefs to an 11-5 record and a playoff berth.
NBC Sports ranked Sean McVay as the best coach in the NFL, overtaking Andy Reid for the top spot this year https://t.co/ZdByZpTyXT
— Cameron DaSilva (@camdasilva) April 7, 2026
Things truly changed since 2017 when Andy Reid made Patrick Mahomes the starting quarterback. Now, the Reid-Mahomes duo has won nine consecutive AFC West titles and three Super Bowl rings.
“It’s the culture we’ve built here,” Patrick Mahomes said in an interview with ESPN back in 2023. “That started before I even got here with Coach Reid and the coaches they had. They built this culture of, ‘This is how we’re going to work, this is how we’re going to prepare, and this is how we’re going to win.’”
In 2024, the Chiefs fell short of a three-peat after losing Super Bowl LIX 40–22 to the Philadelphia Eagles. Still, few doubted Reid’s ability to help the Chiefs return to the Super Bowl era. But last NFL season became Reid’s first losing campaign since 2013. The 2025 season also snapped the Chiefs’ streak of nine consecutive AFC West titles.
The latest CBS coach rankings are only making Reid’s case worse, suggesting that the head coach has a lot of work to do before the 2026 season.
Daugherty believes that Andy Reid is not the NFL’s best coach
As Andy Reid enters his 13th season with the Chiefs, he now holds the distinction of being the longest-tenured NFL HC with a single team. With the experience, Reid has already made several offseason moves aimed at improving the roster around Patrick Mahomes. But Patrick Daugherty thinks that the problems with the 2025 Chiefs went deeper than the roster issues.
“For as much as 2025 was about bad luck, unfortunate injuries, and sometimes both (see Travis Kelce separating Xavier Worthy’s shoulder in Week 1), it was the lack of dynamism and adjustments that stood out more,” Daugherty noted in his NBC Sports column. “I am not a ‘football mind.’ I know there is always an overarching strategy that might not be immediately apparent to my civilian understanding.”
“But I feel I am qualified to ask: What is the thesis of this passing game? How has watching Patrick Mahomes become boring? Then I might follow up, if it is forces beyond Reid’s control holding back the aerial attack – poor draft capital, lack of cap space, league-wide defensive trends – why is it being supplemented by nothing on the ground?”
The Chiefs’ offense did not look like itself in 2025, even though Mahomes finished with 3,587 passing yards, 22 touchdowns, and 11 interceptions. The Chiefs’ weak running game and lack of reliable receivers became an issue even before Mahomes was ruled out with an injury in Week 15. The Chiefs’ offense also ranked 20th in the NFL in total offense, averaging 320.6 yards per game last season.
Now, Patrick Daugherty thinks that last season, Andy Reid’s offensive schemes lacked dynamism, putting them at a disadvantage. This offseason, Reid has moved on from the Chiefs’ OC Matt Nagy to Eric Bieniemy.
Meanwhile, Sean McVay made adaptable game plans, utilized his roster, and pushed the Rams deep into the playoffs last season. That kind of flexibility, according to Daugherty, is exactly why McVay now deserves the title of the NFL’s best coach.
And if Reid wants to reclaim that crown, he has to make more than just some tweaks in his coaching in the upcoming season.
