One year after being canned by the Bears, Matt Nagy is in the Super Bowl for the first time. Nagy returned to Kansas City to rejoin his mentor Andy Reid’s staff as the Chiefs quarterbacks coach and senior assistant. Many wondered if it would be a brief stop for Nagy to regroup until he began looking for another offensive coordinator job elsewhere. But Alex Gold, a sports talk radio host in Kansas City, believes Nagy could be in for the long haul with the Chiefs.
“I think a lot of people expect that if Andy Reid, four or five years from now were to hang it up, and Matt Nagy's on the staff, that's who would get it,” Gold said on 670TheScore on Wednesday.
“I think that’s an extremely likely scenario.”
It might sound crazy, considering how bad things got with the Bears towards the tail end of Nagy’s tenure as head coach, but Nagy could make more sense for continuity in Kansas City.
“A lot of it is relationship with Patrick Mahomes,” Gold said. “They basically had a great working relationship from day one going back to when Mahomes was drafted. And it's funny, you guys are in Chicago, so of course the Matt Nagy view on him is so much different there than what it is here.”
It’s been well documented that Nagy played a big role in the Chiefs drafting Mahomes in 2017. The Bears also have Nagy to thank for landing Justin Fields in 2021, so no one can deny that he knows how to pick a QB. The question is whether he learned enough from his time in Chicago to lead an entire football team again.
Of course, there’s the matter of whether or not Eric Bieniemy is still with the Chiefs, too. Bieniemy has been the Chiefs offensive coordinator since 2018. By all accounts he’s been very successful in that role. But Bieniemy has yet to land a head coaching job, despite numerous interviews with numerous teams.
“If you're Clark Hunt, the owner of the Chiefs, and let's say Eric Bieniemy is still somehow on staff four years from now, which by the way I do not believe that will be the case, but if he is, how on earth do you pass up Eric Bieniemy when you, the owner, have come out and said that he should be a head coach and you've been vouching for him all across the league? That would be a really complicated setup. But if he's out of the picture then I think Matt Nagy absolutely would be a front runner.”
Nagy won Coach of the Year in 2018, his first season with the Bears. He led the team to a 12-4 record in the regular season, but the Bears were bounced in the Wild Card round against the Eagles. They never got their groove back, and went 22-27 over the next two years with another first-round playoff loss. The Bears fired Nagy after the 2021 season, and hired Matt Eberflus to replace him.