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My favorite teams
From Sports Illustrated. Blame Ryan Pace for this
Matt Nagy, fledgling real-estate agent, was sitting in the garage of a model home at the end of a cul-de-sac in a new neighborhood in Annville, Pa., in February 2011. The garage was Nagy’s office, basically. He was making $100,000 a year, but he was not happy selling houses. The former Arena League quarterback and NFL coaching intern missed football. His phone rang. Nagy, who had previously interned with the Eagles and knew they’d been having some staff shakeups and was told he might hear from the team, saw the “215” area code and hoped for the best. This is how Nagy remembers the story, as he told me Friday night.
“Matt? Coach Andy Reid here,” the voice said. “Hey listen, we just wrapped up the season. We got two entry-level jobs here, not a lot of money, but you get your foot in the door.”
The conversation with his wife took two minutes. His wife understood that making $100,000 was good for their young family, but being happy with a starter job under Andy Reid making $45,000 was the kind of risk her husband had to take. Nagy took the job. They’d figure out life. And now he’s the coach of the Chicago Bears.
“When you ask about picking a coach you can work with,” Bears GM Ryan Pace told me, “you have to think he’s going to be a good fit. There was just something about Matt. I went to a job fair in New Orleans and got a job [entry level] with the Saints making $500 a month. Matt’s basically the same. He climbed from the bottom. He’s got an appreciation for this and realizes how hard it is to get here.”
Nagy thought he should have been a major-college quarterback coming out of Pennsylvania high school ball, but he got no offers, and ended up playing at Delaware. He thought he should have had a shot to make an NFL roster, but he didn’t, and so he played in the Arena League. When the Arena League folded, Nagy, out of work with a wife and four kids, had to get a job in the middle of a recession. “If not given that opportunity [by Reid], I’d be coaching high school football,” Nagy said. “But once I got that opportunity, I was confident in my ability. I knew if I got to a point where height, weight and speed weren’t the most important factors, I would win that.”
Nagy glommed onto Reid and never stopped working. He followed Reid to Kansas City in 2013 as quarterbacks coach, and got promoted to offensive coordinator when Doug Pederson went to Philadelphia in 2016. Nagy got the play-calling gig from Reid in early December with the Chiefs in a bad offensive slump. The Chiefs scored 26, 30, 29 and 27 points as they salvaged their season. Nagy gets some credit, too, for Alex Smith becoming a better downfield thrower this year, and the Tyreek Hill wrinkles the Chiefs have added.
NFL teams love Reid guys. Teams find Reid guys organized and imaginative. Maybe that’s why Pederson and Nagy got coaching jobs before a far more celebrated and seemingly more prepared offensive coordinator, New England’s Josh McDaniels, has landed one—despite his Belichick/Brady pedigree. There may be no other explanation than Jeff Lurie wanted a Reid type in Philadelphia, and, in Chicago, Pace interviewed McDaniels and liked him a lot but identified more with Nagy. Time will tell if Nagy over McDaniels (and others) was the right choice.
But going from sitting in the garage in a spec house in Annville, Pa., to sitting in George Halas’ chair, in seven years, has got Hollywood written all over it. Now all Nagy has to do is win.
“I’ll always remember something one of my Arena League coaches said,” Nagy said. “I had Doug Plank as my coach in Georgia, and he told us one day, ‘All those people you see driving to work every day, 95 percent of them hate their jobs. You’re part of the five percent. You’re lucky.’
“Ever since that day sitting in the garage in the cul-de-sac and the 215 area code shows up, I’ve been in that five percent. And I am now for sure.”
NFL
Bruce Arians: On Bear Bryant, Love of the Long Ball, and Why the Game Should Survive
A Nagy postscript: I asked him about his play-calling in the wild-card loss to Tennessee. The Chiefs had a 21-3 lead at halftime but had only four second-half possessions, and in those four possessions the NFL rushing champ, Kareem Hunt, had only five carries. Add that to Hunt’s zero carries in the second quarter, and you ask: What gives?
“I brought that up in my interview with the Bears,” Nagy said. “We had four possessions and only 20 plays in the second half. That’s not a lot of plays. You’ve gotta get first downs, either running or passing. We went back and looked at the game, and we evaluated the run-pass ratio. The part that bothers me is our possession after the [Titans’] muffed punt. (That gave Kansas City the ball at the Tennessee 28 with 4:34 left in the third quarter.) We were up 11 there, and we went three-and-out, and we lost five yards. Instead of a 41-yard field goal, maybe, we have a 49-yard field goal try [and miss]. At the end of the third, we could have been up 14, which would have changed the game. If I could go back and do one thing over, it’d be to make sure we don’t call a play that’s going to lose those yards.”
I understand. I still think 20 plays in the second half could have been 32 clock-eating plays with an expansion of the running game, and Hunt’s role, down the stretch.
Matt Nagy, fledgling real-estate agent, was sitting in the garage of a model home at the end of a cul-de-sac in a new neighborhood in Annville, Pa., in February 2011. The garage was Nagy’s office, basically. He was making $100,000 a year, but he was not happy selling houses. The former Arena League quarterback and NFL coaching intern missed football. His phone rang. Nagy, who had previously interned with the Eagles and knew they’d been having some staff shakeups and was told he might hear from the team, saw the “215” area code and hoped for the best. This is how Nagy remembers the story, as he told me Friday night.
“Matt? Coach Andy Reid here,” the voice said. “Hey listen, we just wrapped up the season. We got two entry-level jobs here, not a lot of money, but you get your foot in the door.”
The conversation with his wife took two minutes. His wife understood that making $100,000 was good for their young family, but being happy with a starter job under Andy Reid making $45,000 was the kind of risk her husband had to take. Nagy took the job. They’d figure out life. And now he’s the coach of the Chicago Bears.
“When you ask about picking a coach you can work with,” Bears GM Ryan Pace told me, “you have to think he’s going to be a good fit. There was just something about Matt. I went to a job fair in New Orleans and got a job [entry level] with the Saints making $500 a month. Matt’s basically the same. He climbed from the bottom. He’s got an appreciation for this and realizes how hard it is to get here.”
Nagy thought he should have been a major-college quarterback coming out of Pennsylvania high school ball, but he got no offers, and ended up playing at Delaware. He thought he should have had a shot to make an NFL roster, but he didn’t, and so he played in the Arena League. When the Arena League folded, Nagy, out of work with a wife and four kids, had to get a job in the middle of a recession. “If not given that opportunity [by Reid], I’d be coaching high school football,” Nagy said. “But once I got that opportunity, I was confident in my ability. I knew if I got to a point where height, weight and speed weren’t the most important factors, I would win that.”
Nagy glommed onto Reid and never stopped working. He followed Reid to Kansas City in 2013 as quarterbacks coach, and got promoted to offensive coordinator when Doug Pederson went to Philadelphia in 2016. Nagy got the play-calling gig from Reid in early December with the Chiefs in a bad offensive slump. The Chiefs scored 26, 30, 29 and 27 points as they salvaged their season. Nagy gets some credit, too, for Alex Smith becoming a better downfield thrower this year, and the Tyreek Hill wrinkles the Chiefs have added.
NFL teams love Reid guys. Teams find Reid guys organized and imaginative. Maybe that’s why Pederson and Nagy got coaching jobs before a far more celebrated and seemingly more prepared offensive coordinator, New England’s Josh McDaniels, has landed one—despite his Belichick/Brady pedigree. There may be no other explanation than Jeff Lurie wanted a Reid type in Philadelphia, and, in Chicago, Pace interviewed McDaniels and liked him a lot but identified more with Nagy. Time will tell if Nagy over McDaniels (and others) was the right choice.
But going from sitting in the garage in a spec house in Annville, Pa., to sitting in George Halas’ chair, in seven years, has got Hollywood written all over it. Now all Nagy has to do is win.
“I’ll always remember something one of my Arena League coaches said,” Nagy said. “I had Doug Plank as my coach in Georgia, and he told us one day, ‘All those people you see driving to work every day, 95 percent of them hate their jobs. You’re part of the five percent. You’re lucky.’
“Ever since that day sitting in the garage in the cul-de-sac and the 215 area code shows up, I’ve been in that five percent. And I am now for sure.”
NFL
Bruce Arians: On Bear Bryant, Love of the Long Ball, and Why the Game Should Survive
A Nagy postscript: I asked him about his play-calling in the wild-card loss to Tennessee. The Chiefs had a 21-3 lead at halftime but had only four second-half possessions, and in those four possessions the NFL rushing champ, Kareem Hunt, had only five carries. Add that to Hunt’s zero carries in the second quarter, and you ask: What gives?
“I brought that up in my interview with the Bears,” Nagy said. “We had four possessions and only 20 plays in the second half. That’s not a lot of plays. You’ve gotta get first downs, either running or passing. We went back and looked at the game, and we evaluated the run-pass ratio. The part that bothers me is our possession after the [Titans’] muffed punt. (That gave Kansas City the ball at the Tennessee 28 with 4:34 left in the third quarter.) We were up 11 there, and we went three-and-out, and we lost five yards. Instead of a 41-yard field goal, maybe, we have a 49-yard field goal try [and miss]. At the end of the third, we could have been up 14, which would have changed the game. If I could go back and do one thing over, it’d be to make sure we don’t call a play that’s going to lose those yards.”
I understand. I still think 20 plays in the second half could have been 32 clock-eating plays with an expansion of the running game, and Hunt’s role, down the stretch.
