The Kansas City Chiefs are gearing up for the preseason and then the Chiefs’ regular 2025-26 season. With less than two months to go until the Chiefs play their first game of the regular season, it’s an exciting time for the team.
While there’s lots of talk about the best players in the NFL leading up to the 2025-26 season, and rightly so, sometimes, it’s easy to overlook that there are other factors to a team’s success. One of the biggest measures of how well a team is going to do during the season, for any sport, is their coaching staff. From the head coach down to the coordinators and their staff, having a solid coaching staff is so critical to making sure a team thrives.
Now, ESPN has released its tally of the best coaching staffs in the NFL. In the feature, Ben Solak breaks down all of the NFL team’s staffs and ranks them from best to worst. So, where do the Kansas City Chiefs and Andy Reid land?
Kansas City Chiefs Head Coach Gets Honored
Solak ranks Reid and his staff as the No. 2 best coaching staff in the league. That’s a great spot, although we think Reid and his crew deserve to be higher.
“The Chiefs, who have reached three consecutive Super Bowls and won three of the past six, deserve a lifetime achievement award,” he notes in the Friday, Aug. 1 feature. “There is no doubt Reid is a Super Bowl-caliber head coach; there is no doubt Spagnuolo is a Super Bowl-caliber defensive playcaller.”
But, there’s something that could be not so great for the Chiefs. In the piece, Solak says the team “had a coaching problem they couldn’t solve in 2024: how to get explosive gains out of their offense.”
“The early-season injury to Rashee Rice and diminished athleticism of Travis Kelce left them without reliable receivers over the middle of the field, and the offense turtled,” he adds. “Thirty-two percent of Patrick Mahomes‘ pass attempts were to targets behind the line of scrimmage — only Tua Tagovailoa outpaced him. And 10.7% of Mahomes’ attempts created explosive gains — the lowest number of his career.”
In the end, Solak says that “the staff in Kansas City is still remarkable. But this is an important year.”
PFF Names the Top Coaches in the NFL
At least PFF believes Reid is No. 1. In their ranking of the best coaches in the NFL, they have Reid on top. Reid does have the stats to show he’s one of the best.
“Like Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots teams before them, the Kansas City Chiefs are the masters of situational football,” Dalton Wasserman says in the piece, published on June 24. “The Chiefs played in 12 one-score games last season, including the playoffs, and won all of them. They found a way to reach the Super Bowl for the third straight season because Andy Reid has his entire team prepared for any situation.”
He adds, “The Chiefs ranked 17th in PFF offensive grade during the first three quarters of games but slotted into fourth in that same category in the fourth quarter and overtime. They simply find ways to step up their game despite their flaws, injuries and lack of explosiveness. That’s a testament to Reid’s levelheaded approach to the game and wealth of experience.”
