The story of Eagles coach Nick Sirianni’s time with Chiefs — before Andy Reid fired him

Nick Sirianni is the first to locate his makeshift stage during Super Bowl media night, and when he sits down, the initial question arrives simultaneously. And then another. And then one more.

Before Sirianni is kindly alerted that, wait a minute, the music is still blaring inside Footprint Center, and he doesn’t have to commence this hour-long process until the clock hits the top of the hour.

“OK, OK,” he says, nodding along.

A brief pause.

A shoulder shrug.

“Go for it.”

It’s a bit careful-what-you-wish-for, because the next question is the one he would hear most frequently over four consecutive days this week in Phoenix and its outskirts. The one of which he would surely tire.

Can you tell us about how it ended in Kansas City?

This story has been repeated often this past week — how Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, in one of his first acts after Clark Hunt hired him in 2013, informed Sirianni he was out of a job in Kansas City.

It’s an intriguing storyline given the circumstances that await Sunday, with the Chiefs and Eagles meeting in Super Bowl LVII. The coach in Kansas City has some history with Philadelphia. But the coach in Philadelphia has an interesting history with Kansas City — and that history, on the surface, provided less of an indication this day would come.

Beneath the surface? You just had to ask the right people.

Because they knew.

We’ll explore why shortly. But the line of questions about the day the Kansas City employment ended — the day Reid called him into his office and let him know that, listen, we already have a wide receivers coach — covered about 17 minutes this week in total, if a certain columnist tallied it all correctly. Ironically, that alone is longer than his last day in KC.

He spent 10 minutes in Reid’s office.

Spent 17 answering questions about those 10 minutes.

Listen, we don’t need to spend time pounding our fists on the table that Reid made a blunder before he’d even coached a game with the Chiefs, even if Sirianni’s replacement, David Culley, was a good position coach in his own right. Reid’s move to favor familiarity offered a trend among NFL coaches moving to new cities, not an outlier.

But Sirianni was an outlier himself, and some sensed it quickly.

After all, we know what became of him after that fateful meeting.

But what came prior?

From KC to Philly

Sirianni landed in Kansas City in 2009, a 28-year-old with his first NFL job, after head coach Todd Haley granted him an interview basically to appease a friend.

The Chiefs had overhauled their coaching and front office staffs after a 2-14 season, a project that placed Haley in charge of the football team and general manager Scott Pioli in charge of its roster.

Both wildly flopped, and today they are out of the NFL.

Along the way, though, they littered their staffs with talent that encompassed longer shelf-lives than their own.

Sirianni moved into Fountain View, an apartment complex on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. One floor above him resided Mike Borgonzi, now the Chiefs’ assistant general manager, and Ryan Poles, now the Bears’ GM. One floor below, Sirianni’s future wife would move in a year later.

The NFL is considered a tight-knit circle. A general manager in the league, an assistant general manager for a Super Bowl team and a head coach for a Super Bowl team were separated by some ceiling tiles.

“The first thing that stood out was his passion about the game,” Borgonzi said. “All he wanted to do was talk football.”

It’s part of what bonded a group of 20-something transplants who knew little else about a new city. That first job wouldn’t last, but the friendships have — Borgonzi and Brandt Tilis, now the Chiefs’ vice president of football operations, were in Sirianni’s wedding.

Oh, and one more important relationship.

“Had a lot of good experiences there,” Sirianni said. “... I just learned a lot of football there that helped me develop as a coach and then obviously the best thing that happened there to me was meeting my wife and then starting my family.”

Sirianni spent his first season as an offensive quality control coach, his next as an assistant quarterbacks coach, then back to offensive quality control and then one final season as a wide receivers coach.

During one particular spring, he walked into Borgonzi’s office with a notebook. Inside, he had detailed his process for grading quarterbacks and wide receivers, and he wanted to compare notes.

“Most young coaches don’t come down with their own notes on how to evaluate players, but he wanted to see our scouting manual and how we evaluate,” Borgonzi said. “He was very curious about different ways to do things. He never thought he had all the answers. I think that was part of his humility, which is what you see today in Philly.”

In a couple of facets in particular.

Sirianni has structured the Eagles offense to suit a quarterback with a skill-set dissimilar to those he coached in past stops. He conducts an offense that paced the NFL in rushing, and if you think that’s because quarterback Jalen Hurts adds to that total, well, here’s another piece of it you should know: Football Outsiders says the Eagles’ rush DVOA has so convincingly lapped the field that even if you wiped all of Hurts’ production from the slate, the Eagles would still have the best rushing offense in football.

They have talent, to be sure, but the Eagles also rate ninth in pass DVOA with a quarterback who slipped to the second round over doubts about whether he could throw the ball at this level.

That’s one facet. One very obvious facet

Another? Buoyed by one of the league’s largest analytics staffs, Sirianni led the NFL in what Football Outsiders termed the aggressiveness index. His fourth-down acumen provided the Eagles more points than any other coach in football supplied his team. The Eagles are ahead of a curve that can provide a slight edge in a league in which every team is looking for an inch. Because Sirianni has developed into one of the game’s very best in-game managers like the snap of a fingers — or maybe he had it all along and just needed the opportunity.

“None of what he’s doing now,” Tilis said, “is surprising.”

Sirianni has boiled down his coaching methods far too succinctly, describing his secret sauce as obtaining good talent.

We wouldn’t be nearly 1,000 words into this column if it were that simple.

“Passion, hard work, humility,” Borgonzi said. “And his players loved him.”

Borgonzi said he would walk by Sirianni’s office and spot quarterback Matt Cassel or perhaps wide receiver Dwayne Bowe sitting in there, striking up a conversation.

In 2012, Sirianni’s only year serving as the team’s receivers coach, the Chiefs stashed Jamar Newsome on the practice squad. He remained there for 51 weeks before the team signed him to the active roster.

“Nick was just so fired up for Jamar,” Tilis said. “It meant something to him. You could tell he was able to make a connection with all the guys. That’s one thing that always stood out about him.

“The other thing is he’s a true leader, a true coach.”

Sirianni is a fiery guy by nature, a personality he does not conceal from the public eye. Instead, that personality illuminates under brighter lighting. He is animated on the sideline, and he has remarked that he doesn’t plan to apologize for enjoying the game.

Can we blame him? This was once taken from him, and for a few weeks that offseason, he was unsure he had any future in the NFL. It was late that offseason — during the week of the Senior Bowl — that he picked up a quality control job with the then-San Diego Chargers. He’d move into their quarterbacks coach, making a strong bond with Phillip Rivers, who began supplying the Sirianni family with offseason vacations as something of a thank you.

A couple of those in the Chiefs front office — who did survive that 2012 offseason — saw it coming.

Provided the opportunity came, of course.

After a three-year stint as the offensive coordinator in Indianapolis, he hopped on a Zoom call with Borgonzi during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The two strategized over potential interviews — Sirianni for a head-coaching vacancy, Borgonzi for a GM opening — and had wondered out loud about how to make the whole thing a packaged deal.

A week later, Sirianni got his first interview.

The job was his.

He’s 23-11 in his two seasons in Philadelphia, and he beat the guy who just won AP NFL Coach of the Year — another former Chiefs assistant coach with whom he overlapped, Giants head coach Brian Daboll — three times this season.

There’s some symbolism there.

There will be Sunday too.