The Super Bowl is such a large event that it’s hard not to learn something from it. We learned (for like the fifth straight year) that expecting The Brands to come up with witty commercials does more harm than good. We learned that even Pat Mahomes’ “bad” games are still good enough to beat everyone, and all our Dads still have a raging crush on J.Lo. In fact, the only person who didn’t learn something from a Super Bowl, apparently, was Kyle Shanahan.
Knowing the cheeseburger-fueled, bitmoji-swapping friendship that World Champion Andy Reid shares with 2018 NFC North Champion Matt Nagy, one would assume that Nagy picked up a thing or two, on a macro-level, from the Chiefs’ Super Bowl run this year. There’s probably a half-dozen takeaways from Reid’s construction of the NFL’s best team that the Bears would be smart to adapt (having good tight ends works?!), but there’s really only one that’s staring Nagy and GM Ryan Pace in the eyes. It’s not even particularly groundbreaking, either: knowing when to move on from a quarterback, no matter how difficult a decision, makes and breaks title windows.
Consider the start of Reid’s time in Kansas City. In his first season (2013), the Chiefs traded for Alex Smith, who proceeded to put up Pro Bowl-caliber stats while leading them to an 11-5 record. Then they lost a heartbreaker of a Wild Card game and regressed marginally (9-7) the following season. Reid’s one of the brightest coaches in football, and the Chiefs had a good enough roster to string together winning seasons despite a quarterback situation that many thought was holding them back. Matt Nagy was there for a lot of it! Stop me when this doesn’t sound familiar anymore.
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Then, coming off a 12-4 season, Reid and the Chiefs traded up 17 spots to take Mahomes with the full intention of handing him the job eventually. Unfortunately, that came at the cost of Smith, one of the NFL’s universally-respected players and a quarterback who’d probably get a lot more credit if he hadn’t had to spend his career being compared to other first overall picks. He worked well with Reid, and the coach has been open about the emotional difficulties of handing the reins to Mahomes. Everyone says that, at the end of the day, they know that the NFL is a business – but that’s also never, in the history of football, ever made anyone feel better about those tough decisions. You may love the quarterback you have, but NFL braintrusts still have a responsibility to scout, draft, and develop the next guy up.
It’s not a perfect comparison; Mahomes is looking more and more like a truly singular talent. It’s not as easy to move on from someone when you don’t have luxury of a paradigm-shifting player on the depth chart. Still, the Bears’ QB room will presumably look somewhat different next year, just for the simple fact that both Chase Daniel and Tyler Bray are no longer under contract. Pace was adamant that Trubisky is QB1, but he was also adamant about Mike Glennon there, too, and was adamant about taking a QB in every draft before that. But if the Bears want to keep molding themselves in the form of an Andy Reid team, it’d do them well to pay attention to the best decision Reid’s ever made.