Andy Reid, Steve Spagnuolo and the call that altered Kansas City Chiefs history

As Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce on Wednesday night at the Kansas City Sports Awards banquet mulled life after football, he spoke to “just kind of being curious and being adventurous in different career fields.”

Then he glanced from the stage in the direction of defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, another honoree at the 51st annual event scripted by the Kansas City Sports Commission and presented by Polsinelli at the Downtown Marriott.

“Knowing that football is going to end,” Kelce said, with his typical comedic touch, “for everyone except for Spags.”

Like “the Keith Richards of football,” joked dinner co-host Mick Shaffer of KSHB 41.

Over more than 40 years through nearly two dozen coaching roles in three countries, nine states and the District of Columbia, the 64-year-old Spagnuolo could be called a rolling stone himself … albeit one substantially less weathered than the 80-year-old Richards.

But he’s only in his golden years in the sense that this is the golden era of his career.

That’s why he not only received that local coach of the year award but also recently was honored by the Pro Football Writers of America with what was essentially a (richly deserved) lifetime achievement award.

The distinction left Spagnuolo “shocked, humbled and concerned,” he joked in July, adding, “When you get an award that says lifetime achievement on it — it means you’re getting old, right?”

In his case, though, it’s a little like the 1970s Clairol commercial: “You’re not getting older; you’re getting better.”

As the Chiefs seek an unprecedented Super Bowl three-peat with superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes as their guiding light, they’re fortified once more by the man whose defense paved the way last season, and whose arrival in 2019 has been vital to fulfilling the promise of Mahomes.

That was never more so than with the defense that a year ago finished second in the NFL in both points and yards allowed and thus made Spagnuolo the first defensive coordinator to be part of four Super Bowl champions — three with the Chiefs and one with the Giants.

This dynastic era of the Chiefs, and clarifying time in Spagnuolo’s career, is so normalized now that it’s infused with the anticipation of plenty more ahead.

And it suddenly all appears so seamless that it’s easy to forget where it all stood after the 2018 season, when none of this looked inevitable.

Doomed by porous defense, the Chiefs suffered yet another tormenting postseason loss, this time to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game, amid their half-century Super Bowl drought.

As that unfolded, Spagnuolo hovered in coaching limbo amid a year out of the game and wondering if he’d ever get another desirable chance.

It was a crossroads both for the franchise and Spagnuolo.

Maybe Andy Reid, even bolstered by the phenomenon that is Mahomes, was going to go on to be the greatest coach never to win a Super Bowl … instead of bound for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.

Maybe football was going to end for Spags after all.

‘So many unknowns’

Not that Spagnuolo was going to go back to law school, as he’d once aspired to do.

“That was way back when; I was beyond that,” he said with a smile in an interview with The Star one day during camp in St. Joseph. “I’m not sure what I would have done.”

Entirely unsure of what was going to happen next, he tried to prepare himself for the possibility he’d enter another career altogether.

Maybe he would have gone into TV, he said.

For that matter, the Massachusetts native and former high school hockey star added, “I always wanted to coach ice hockey.”

All those things and more were swirling in his head.

Whatever else he might have contemplated, though, the then-58-year-old knew this: It was at once a time to lie fallow, replenishing himself, and refresh his view of football itself … just in case.

He didn’t have to take the year off, after all, since some opportunities beckoned. But he knew he needed a reset more than he needed a job, especially since the ones that came up didn’t sit right.

“I wanted to spend time with my wife, and I wanted to take a big, deep breath after we had struggled that year in New York,” he said. “Deep down inside, I knew I wanted to coach.

“But there are so many unknowns when you’re in that situation.”

So he spent more time seeing friends from home and around the NFL, and with his wife, Maria, including long periods at her family’s house in the Jersey Shore town of Avalon.

But he also dedicated many days to research and development at NFL Films in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, where he took what he has called “oodles of notes” and audited himself and gained perspectives that are impossible to attain when you never really step away.

“It’s push the pause button and look at things that you wouldn’t normally look at because you don’t have time,” he said. “This thing’s a week-to-week deal, and you hone in on the team you’re playing.

“But when you’re sitting where I was at NFL Films, I could decide every day what I wanted to look at or study. You just grow that way. It was huge.”

‘Sometimes change is uncomfortable’

Not that he’d lost faith in his ability to coach when the Giants let him go after he became their interim head coach in 2017 — a development that punctuated what appeared to be a diminishing career.

Virtually since ascending to the pinnacle with his Giants defense muzzling Tom Brady and the undefeated Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII, most of the next decade since had gone awry.

While Spagnuolo wasn’t beyond reproach in that, he also was ensnared in a series of rotten circumstances.

That included going 10-38 as the head coach of a St. Louis Rams organization that by then was less invested in playing opponents than playing the NFL, and the city, to be able to move back to Los Angeles.

In 2010, his second season there, Spagnuolo’s Rams went 7-9 — more victories than the franchise had in the three previous seasons combined — and were in playoff contention until the last week of the season … only to fall back to 2-14 a year later.

The next season, Sean Payton hired him as defensive coordinator in New Orleans before Payton was suspended for the season and fired Spagnuolo upon his return.

After a couple seasons as a defensive assistant with the Ravens, in 2015 Spagnuolo returned to the Giants as defensive coordinator. In 2016, his defense ranked second in the league in points allowed.

But it tumbled to 27th the next season as head coach Ben McAdoo was fired after 12 games and Spagnuolo became the interim head coach. Despite his hopes of making that permanent, he was let go at the end of the season.

None of that made Spagnuolo waver about his coaching acumen.

Still, he practiced what he likes to preach to his players: “Growth comes with change, and sometimes change is uncomfortable.”

He embraced some new schemes here, tweaked some thinking there, in the longshot event that just the right job might somehow surface.

‘I needed people there that I could trust’

When Reid was an assistant coach at Texas-El Paso in the late 1980s, Spagnuolo often visited a longtime friend, Steve Telander, who also was on Bob Stull’s UTEP staff.

Also on that staff was Dave Toub, now the Chiefs’ special teams coordinator, who was a college teammate of Spagnuolo’s at Springfield College.

After Stull took over at Missouri in 1989, bringing along Reid and Toub, among others, Spagnuolo was such a frequent visitor that he might as well have been a voluntary member of the staff.

That created a certain connection with Reid, who enjoyed teasing Spagnuolo about his New England accent since his own parents were from that part of the country. Reid also admired Spagnuolo’s football mind and work ethic.

The chemistry was such that Spagnuolo was among Reid’s first hires when Reid left Green Bay to take over the Eagles in 1999.

“I needed people there that I could trust; that’s what you do when you’re a young coach,” Reid said in 2019. “And I trusted him with everything.”

The sentiment was just as vital 20 years after Reid hired Spagnuolo the first time (and worked with him for eight years before Spagnuolo went to the Giants).

Long before those “In Spags We Trust” T-shirts were popularized last season, Reid once more embraced that thinking at a pivotal moment in his career — one that would shape his legacy in KC and beyond.

In the wake of firing Chiefs defensive coordinator Bob Sutton, he texted Spagnuolo:

“Are you still a free agent?” wrote Reid — embellishing it, Spagnuolo confirmed, with a smiley-face emoji.

Spagnuolo was ecstatic, both about an opportunity he couldn’t have scripted better and about the chance to help Reid break through to the frontier he’d long wanted to see his friend reach.

“I was fortunate to land with somebody I love and trust,” Spagnuolo said. “It doesn’t always work out that way.”

At that first camp in St. Joseph, he could hardly contain himself. He felt “like a little kid,” he said then. “That’s how I feel. I feel 12 again.”

In some ways, that’s been true ever since for Spagnuolo, who spent more seasons in Philadelphia but never has held one role this long.

‘I can just count on him’

As Reid prepared to get in a cart after a practice in St. Joseph a few weeks ago, I asked him what had made him so sure Spagnuolo was the way to go.

Between his schemes, penchant for detail and teaching skills, Reid said, “I thought he would be a perfect fit.”

Considering the Chiefs have played in four Super Bowls in Spagnuolo’s five seasons after not playing in any for 50 years, you could say it’s been just that.

So much so that Spagnuolo figures to get another head coaching opportunity but won’t just jump at it, either: “If it’s the right one, I’d love to do it again,” he said.

A lot has gone into this being the right job.

And not just because Spagnuolo employs what Mahomes referred to during camp as “every defense known to man” and what defensive backs coach Dave Merritt considers the most complicated (and ever-changing) system in the NFL.

His effectiveness also is about something more.

“He cares: You know what I mean?” cornerback Trent McDuffie said. “I truly feel like we’re his extended family when it comes to just how he treats us (and) how he approaches the game.”

As much as it might at times be “tough love,” McDuffie said, “I think that just shows how much he does care. He wants to put us in the best positions on the field but also off the field.”

He added, “I can just count on him.”

McDuffie is one of a number of players who also have noted the nurturing role of Maria Spagnuolo, who spent her first full season in Kansas City in 2023.

Between her vivacious presence and the amazing meatballs that she makes, defensive line star Chris Jones suggested on The Rich Eisen Show last season that she makes Spagnuolo a better person and even helped the defense improve.

“I thought I was a nice guy before,” Spagnuolo said, laughing.

More seriously, though, having her here now is a constant morale boost for him.

“Maria, to me, is the rock that I can lean on,” he said.

Meanwhile, he’s become a rock of ages for the Chiefs.