Reid and Belichick: Good friends, great rivals
AP photo Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid and Patriots head man Bill Belichick are great rivals and good friends.
When it comes to Bill Belichick vs. Andy Reid, it’s always a mutual admiration society.
After all, the New England Patriots coach and his Kansas City Chiefs counterpart are good friends. This will be their third post season meeting, with the Belichick owning a Super Bowl and an AFC Divisional Round win.
“Yeah, he’s the best at it, right?” Reid said of Belichick during a media conference call on Wednesday as the two teams prepare for Sunday’s AFC Championship Game at Arrowhead Stadium. “He’s won more games and been in more championships than anybody. I would say he’s pheneomenal at that and you know you’re going to get a great challenge.”
Your turn, Bill Belichick.
“He’s always tough to go against,” Belichick said of Reid. “He does a great job of game planning and he does an excellent job of developing an offensive system that’s very hard to defend, and they have great players doing it.”
The thing that Belichick seems to admire the most about Reid is his ability to adapt and also create.
“He’s done a great job of that, probably as god as any coach that I’ve seen,” Belichick said. “He does a great job of taking new ideas, new concepts and utilizing them in a productive and efficient way, depending onw aht he;s working with and how they fit into what he’s doing or personnel. … But I’d say he’s very creative.”
And that poses a problem for the Patriots, as Belichick knows there will be some new wrinkles from the October meeting that the Patriots were able to win 43-40.
“You see it every year,” Belichick said. “And he continues to, even over the course of the year from when we played them in October, he’s come up with more things to create more of a problem.”
But Reid knows he’s got a problem, too. It’s trying to beat the best in a title game they rarely lose (8-4 in the Brady-Belichick era).
“I think I’ve mentioned this before,” Reid said. “If there’s such a thing as a dynasty in the National Football League, then they’ve been that.
“I’m friends with the head coach. I think the world of him. I think he’s a great coach. He’s done a phenomenal job of keeping that thing together. We’re getting ready to get their best shot.”
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What’s in a trophy? Evidently a lot when it comes to this AFC Championship Game. The winner gets the Lamar Hunt Trophy, which ironically is named after the Chiefs late founder and owner Lamar Hunt. The team is now owned by his son, Clark.
Reid was asked what it would mean to hand the trophy to the Hunt family.
“It’d be great,” he said in one of the many press conferences televised live Wednesday on the NFL Network. “I mean, when it has your name on it, it’s a pretty good thing. Lamar Hunt was special. I think he was special to the National Football League. And obviously special if he’s your father.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with his kids and Clark in particular.”
It evidently filters down to the players. Chiefs quarterback Pat Mahomes said the players are given a pretty extensive history lesson when they are drafted by the franchise.
“I think the awesome thing we do here with the player development team is they take us through the whole history,” Mahomes said. “We come over to the museum we have here in the stadium,they take us through how (Lamar Hunt) made the AFL (American Football League) pretty much from scratch, and had this vision, and made what is now the AFC, tried to combine with the NFL (the 1970 merger) and made what is this beautiful league. It truly is special to have someone like that who’s created your franchise, and you want to do whatever you can to kind of bring honor to him and that family as they’ve kind of helped make this a place where we can play and have fun and help love the sport that we play.”
Thus he, like Reid, would relish the chance to see the trophy be presented to the Hunt family.
“It’d be awesome,” Mahomes said. “We haven’t gotten that trophy before, us as a team. To kind of bring it back home in a sense, would be truly an honor for me and this whole team, to give it not only to Clark but this whole community.”
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Anybody care about Sunday’s forecasted bone-chilling weather? Forecasts have varied, but temperatures by game time are supposed to be barely reaching the teens, if that.
“Yeah, we’re going to get ready for the Chiefs,” Belichick said. “Whatever it is, it is. Love to play in a championship game. Schedule it wherever you want. We’ll be there.”
“It’s not like we’re playing in 10 (degrees) and they’re playing in 50,” Patriots receiver Phillip Dorsett said. “We’re both playing in the same temperatures so we both have got to adjust and both have to be ready for it.”


