One of the strangest moments of Super Bowl LVIII came when Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce aggressively approached — and bumped — head coach Andy Reid during a frustrating first half.
Reid stumbled and nearly fell, but he didn’t engage with Kelce. After the game Reid downplayed the incident. Kelce did, too.
Also downplaying it was Tom Brady, on his Let’s Go! podcast on SiriusXM.
“There’s always little family issues and of course I don’t mind seeing it because I was a part of a lot of those things,” Brady said. “Emotions are so high. You are definitely not centered and balanced. You’re not in a meditative state at that point. You are fully determined to go out there and to win. So I think a lot of the things that are said during the games, people should just let them fly off their back. And I actually think Coach Reid handled it just awesome, like he always does, because he just said, ‘I was a little off balance and Travis is such a competitor.’ And I love that because it just speaks to his leadership ability. . . .
“It speaks to the self-confidence that Coach Reid has in himself, too, because he doesn’t take that personally at all. He doesn’t look at that and feel like someone offended him. He takes it for what it is and doesn’t make it more than it is and doesn’t see someone’s trying to belittle him. Travis is not trying to do any of those things. He’s just trying to be fired up and stay in the moment.”
Right, but Kelce clearly crossed a line. And very few players other than Kelce would ever get away with it.
To Reid’s credit, he kept his eye on the bigger prize. Doing to Kelce what, say, Bill Belichick once did to Malcolm Butler wouldn’t have helped the Chiefs win the Super Bowl.
That’s all that mattered in the moment. And Kelce and the rest of the Chiefs players should remember that. It’s not a blank check to go bump Big Red whenever a player might feel like it. Reid was willing to look the other way because he didn’t want the incident to get in the way of the team’s quest for its third Super Bowl win in five years.