Why a simple 3 x 5 notecard with two words explains Andy Reid’s leadership style

When Andy Reid was the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, he would pass messages to quarterback Donovan McNabb via notecards. Reid called them nuggets. They were usually short, just a thought or goal or a few words of motivation. They weren’t supposed to be life changing.

“His thing was like: ‘I’ll give you a li’l nugget,’” McNabb said. “Just something to take in.”

Reid was a young coach, and he was always jotting down ideas, a lesson from Bill Walsh or Winston Churchill that would find its way onto a 3 x 5 card. Some of those cards went to McNabb. Others to coaches. But one card in particular ended up behind Reid’s desk. It featured just two words, and two decades later, it still offers the simplest understanding of Reid’s leadership.

“Don’t Judge.”

At 66, Reid is one of the most successful coaches in NFL history: fourth all time in victories with 300; first in playoff appearances with 20; tied for third with three Super Bowl championships, with his Kansas City Chiefs two wins from the first three-peat in NFL history.

At the heart of that success is a straightforward leadership style that has guided players and influenced assistants, including his opponent on Sunday. (Buffalo Bills coach Sean McDermott is one of 11 former Reid assistants to become an NFL head coach.) It’s built on a simple premise: Don’t put people in a box. They might surprise you.

McNabb likes to tell a story from 25 years ago, when he was a young quarterback coming out of Syracuse. He was a projected first-round pick, and while the prejudices against Black quarterbacks had softened in recent years, they still existed. Some in the NFL questioned if Black quarterbacks were a good fit for the West Coast offense. McNabb heard all the doubts.

Reid thought the idea was odd. McNabb was a smart guy and a great athlete. Wasn’t it the coach’s job to utilize a player’s strengths? Why couldn’t it work in Philly?

When the Eagles drafted McNabb with the second pick in the draft, Reid told McNabb his plan: “I’m going to build this offense around you and your ability.”

Five years later, the Eagles were in the Super Bowl and McNabb made the Pro Bowl six times under Reid.

“I always took it as, ‘Don’t judge someone because of their skin color,” McNabb said. “Don’t judge because of what other people may say about you. … Don’t judge because someone may be a little bit different than you.”

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The ethos behind the card has permeated locker rooms in Philadelphia and Kansas City. But when Reid was starting out, it underpinned another one of his beliefs: Coaches should be teachers first. And teachers should not judge their students.

Brad Childress, another former Reid assistant, always marveled at the message because coaches are natural judges. It’s what they do. This guy can play; this guy can’t. But Reid wanted his assistants to go deeper — to understand why a player might be struggling.

“To take it to its most base level, it was: ‘Don’t act like you know everything about a guy,’” Childress said.

Reid was a teacher once. When he was a graduate student at BYU, he earned a master’s degree in professional leadership in physical education and athletics. When he arrived as an assistant coach at the University of Missouri a few years later, he was assigned to teach a class called “The Coaching of Football.”

The course was held in a small auditorium that fit close to 40 students. Many were football players signed up for an easy elective. Reid taught a module on offensive line play, often standing before the class and demonstrating the proper way to close out your hips on a block.

“His classes were so engaging, and he did things to make you want to learn the game,” said John Diffley, a Missouri student who later became a high school coach in St. Louis.

The way Diffley remembers the course, other assistant coaches would show up and break down film, going through the motions as they explained formations and plays. But Reid excelled at holding the students’ attention. He told stories and jokes. He actually seemed to love teaching.

“He was really good at breaking down his terminology,” Diffley said. “He actually really left a lasting impression.”

When Reid started out in Philly, he often gifted a book to his assistant coaches called “Mastery Teaching,” a resource textbook originally printed in 1982. Written by a UCLA professor and researcher named Madeline Hunter, a pioneer of learning in the 20th century, “Mastery Teaching” was intended to educate school teachers, breaking down the profession to the theoretical level.

It was a little wonky, and a little dry. Not every coach made it through. (“I can’t tell you I read the whole thing,” Childress said.) But it spoke to something that Reid valued. As Hunter writes in the first chapter: “Even champions have coaches.”

To sift through “Mastery Teaching” is to encounter methods still visible with the Chiefs. Hunter believed that teaching could be broken down into seven elemental steps, that motivation could be taught, that raising a student’s “level of concern” for improvement was paramount, that a teacher’s “feeling tone,” or humor, could foster a productive learning environment, and that there was a way to hold students accountable while dignifying their incorrect answers.

“Be careful with the ‘no’ that always wants to slip out of your mouth,” Hunter wrote. “It can be lethal and discourage students from further participation.”

Hunter also believed in the power of modeling, a form of demonstration that stuck with Reid. When receiver Marcus Kemp first arrived in Kansas City in 2017, he realized the coaching staff didn’t just teach specific route depths and splits, like most teams did. Reid instead explained step-by-step how he wanted the route run and why it was run that way. If the route was a 12-yard “In,” he showed Kemp exactly where his feet needed to start and exactly where he needed to make his break.

“He explains a lot of the details that take a lot of guesswork out of the offense,” Kemp said. “A lot of his routes have those specifics.”

Which is why it’s interesting that one of Reid’s most famous students showed up in Kansas City with a simple trait: He wanted to break all the rules.

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Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce remains a staunch believer in what he calls the “Andy Reid Way.” He’s also a prime example of Reid’s “Don’t Judge” philosophy.

It’s easy to forget now, given the “Saturday Night Live” host duties and the championship rings and the famous girlfriend, but Kelce was once a young player with a hot temper, a tight end with a tendency to freelance. When the Chiefs took Kelce in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft, he was just a few years from being suspended from his college team at Cincinnati for a failed drug test. His early years included him throwing a towel at a referee and a lewd gesture during a game.

“The first five years coaching this guy was like riding a bucking bronco,” Childress said.

Kelce lived off script. He lined up incorrectly. He ran the wrong routes. He often ignored the details of his route and just found open space.

“He has a great feel,” Childress said of Kelce. “A feel might be doing something completely opposite of what he should do. ‘What’s he doing? I don’t know, but he’s open, throw him the ball.’ And that’s so not Andy.”

Reid’s whole offense was and still is built on precision. But he didn’t try to change Kelce. Instead, he saw possibilities and leaned into his personality.

“If he didn’t let him be creative, you’d be trying to push a round peg in a square hole,” Childress said. “And it would stifle the kid.”

Reid still has what he calls his “non-negotiables.” For Kelce, one of those was tardiness. If a meeting began at 9 a.m., and Kelce wasn’t there by 8:30, Reid would stop by the office of tight ends coach Tom Melvin.

Hey, Mel, where’s Travis? 

Coach, it’s 8:30, we don’t have a team meeting until 9. 

Well, his ass is supposed to be in here at 8:30.    

“There were times that he snapped at him,” Childress said. “I know that. (Travis) knew who was boss.”

Kelce has become one of the best tight ends in NFL history, a surefire Hall of Famer whose greatest attribute is his feel. He has the most postseason catches in league history and is behind only Jerry Rice for postseason receiving yards and touchdowns.

He also can still boil over, as he did on the sideline of last year’s Super Bowl. But when it happened, and he bumped into Reid, it wasn’t just an awkward confrontation between a player and coach. It was a window into a relationship. Reid didn’t react. The Chiefs won the game.

“He’s one of the best leaders of men I’ve ever seen in my life,” Kelce said after the game. “I owe my entire career to that guy and being able to kind of control how emotional I get. I just love him, man.”

When John Harbaugh became Reid’s special teams coach in Philadelphia in 1999, he noticed the “Don’t Judge” card in Reid’s office almost every day for nine years. But he never asked what it meant. It was always just there.

Then, one day last year, he interviewed Reid for the Harbaugh Coaching Academy and finally brought it up.

“Don’t put people in a box,” Reid explained. “You never know once you open the box for ’em what’s going to pop out. So give them a chance. Give them a chance to dream a little bit.”

(Top photo: Aaron M. Sprecher / Getty Images)