Andy Reid was born in Los Angeles to parents from New England, and his journey has traversed much of the terrain from sea to shining sea.
He went to college at Brigham Young, and he most visibly climbed the coaching ladder from El Paso through Columbia, Missouri, to Green Bay. And he’s certainly most associated with his NFL head coaching jobs in Philadelphia and Kansas City.
Each step was essential to the next in some way or another, all part of the fundamental underpinnings of a football coach who has guided his teams to more wins (NFL only) than all but five men ever and has steered the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl in 50 years.
But attached to the moment looming on Feb. 2 against the San Francisco 49ers in Miami is a certain symmetry and a spotlight on a humble and largely overlooked pivot point in Reid’s career: His first full-time coaching job was at San Francisco State from 1983-85, when Reid was part of Vic Rowen’s three-man staff that would come to include future Tampa Bay Bucs coach Dirk Koetter.
Safe to say the man now navigating the infinite details of preparation for his second Super Bowl as a head coach had a decidedly less glamorous introduction to the work after he’d spent a year as a graduate assistant at Brigham Young. Back then, the job called for teaching classes, selling hot dogs amid campus protests to fund-raise for the Gators’ scant football budget and traveling 10 hours by bus to some games. All for about $22,000 a year.
In an interview with The Star on the occasion of Reid’s Chiefs meeting Koetter’s Buccaneers in 2016, Reid laughed repeatedly at the recollection of driving ramshackle “State Car 15” to tote the grill on its roof and the tiny office shared by the assistants.
“I’ve come a long way from selling hot dogs to now (when equipment manager Allen Wright) actually gives me a couple after the game — and I don’t pay for them,” Reid said, laughing, on Wednesday.
The respect factor
More seriously, though, Reid remains cognizant of how that time with a now-defunct Division II program as a “learning ground” helped launch his career.
“It gives you that respect factor (for) where you are now. And you appreciate it. You don’t take it for granted,” Reid said, adding, “You feel very privileged to be in this position.”
For that matter, he felt privileged to be in that position at the time under Vic Rowen, whose name you might not know. But as what Reid called “a great teacher of coaches and players,” Rowen had a profound influence on Reid’s life both in the moment and by extension.
That impact is just another example of how one person can change how everything aligns in people’s lives … something Reid has gone on to provide for others in many ways.
Put another way, these Chiefs probably aren’t in the Super Bowl without Reid’s vision for the franchise … and the roots of that are in San Francisco under Rowen.
Rowen is referred to by San Francisco State as a mentor to LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young, and he earlier had hired Mike Holmgren. In turn, Rowen helped Holmgren get a job with Edwards at BYU while Reid was still in Provo — and Holmgren later lured Reid to the Packers from Mizzou.
More to the immediate point, the connection between Rowen, Edwards and Holmgren was what got Reid his first coaching job.
Rowen died in 2013, but in 2001 he told the Philadelphia Daily News how he came to hire Reid after he’d attended a number of spring practices at BYU.
“I talked to LaVell quite a bit when I was up there, as I always did, and I got to know Andy,” Rowen said then. “We had a small staff, just three coaches including me. We threw the ball. We were wide-open. I needed somebody with that kind of background. That’s when I hired Andy.
“I wasn’t looking for geniuses. I just wanted somebody who was going to be hard-working and loyal. I’m very serious about that: We weren’t looking for geniuses. Character meant a lot to us. I don’t know if anybody can tell the future. All I knew was, after getting to know him, that Andy was the kind of guy we wanted in our program.”
He added, “He had been around a big-time program at BYU, so Andy wasn’t nervous when he came to us. He had a great deal of self-confidence, self-assurance. You’ve got to have that on a three-coach staff, and Andy did. And he was organized. That’s another thing about a small staff; you have to do a whole lot of things. You can’t survive if you aren’t organized, and he was.”
An eye-opener
Still, the experience was eye-opening for Reid, who likes telling how much more so it was for Koetter —who was 26 when he arrived in 1985 from Idaho and was off-balance in that atmosphere. While the affable Reid was like “the mayor of San Francisco State,” as Koetter put it in 2016, Koetter wasn’t much used to city life.
By way of example, Reid said each lived in walking distance of campus with their wives and typically walked to and from work together on days that usually extended from around 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. But when they’d part about 400 yards from Koetter’s apartment, Reid said, Koetter usually sprinted home out of worry for his safety. He wasn’t much more comfortable on campus Thursdays.
When they’d set up for hot dog sales, with Reid as the “guru” of grilling and Koetter the “worker bee,” as Koetter described it in 2016, an alarm usually blared during lunch. Students would fall on the ground playing dead in what Koetter remembered as anti-apartheid protests and Reid recalled as both that and anti-nuclear.
But the hot dog sales went on, since the much-needed revenues went toward everything from bus rides to the so-called recruiting budget.
“The big decision on a recruit was whether to pay for his lunch at the student union or not,” Koetter said then, laughing.
The team went 3-6-1 in 1985, the one year Koetter and Reid were together in San Francisco. Reid went on to Northern Arizona for a year, while Koetter went to Texas-El Paso.
Much like the six degrees of separation stuff that landed Reid at San Francisco State, their bond was part of each moving forward. Koetter “begged” Bob Stull to hire Reid at UTEP/ And during his interview lunch, Reid got an endorsement from Dave Toub … now the Chiefs’ special teams coordinator.
From there, it was on to Mizzou and the NFL when Holmgren hired Reid after the 1991 season.
The rest is history, you might say. But it all started in San Francisco State, an improbable golden gate to the rest of his career.
This story was originally published January 23, 2020 5:00 AM.