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Andy Reid’s Motivational Message to Chiefs Revealed Ahead of Crucial Week 15

Liam McKeone

The Chiefs’ playoff chances are on the ropes entering Week 15, but Andy Reid’s message to his team is simple.
The Chiefs’ playoff chances are on the ropes entering Week 15, but Andy Reid’s message to his team is simple. / Denny Medley-Imagn Images
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The Chiefs are 6-7 entering Week 15 and the outlook is not positive for the defending AFC champs. Injuries to Kansas City’s offensive line have proven mighty difficult to overcome, and overall the roster has simply not played to the standards we’ve come to expect from a Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid-led roster. Time is running out to right the ship with only four games remaining in the regular season.

On Sunday, amid discussions about the Chiefs’ dwindling playoff hopes, NFL insider Ian Rapoport shared Reid’s motivational message to his team entering the home stretch of the season. It was fairly simple, too: anything can happen in the National Football League.

“Here’s my understanding of what it looked like this week in a must-win week for Kansas City,” Rapoport said. “First of all, sounded like a pretty good week of practice from my understanding. Especially, the leaders like Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce and Chris Jones kind of took it upon themselves to make sure their team was focused on the right things.

“As far as how Andy Reid specifically is managing his team through these tough times, from what I am told his message to his team was, anything can happen in this league. Anything. He has seen it all. His goal was to get the players to understand how much is in front of them and keep their energy up.”

It’s a good message for a head coach to deliver to a team, but it’s also the only one Reid can really offer as things stand. A few paths remain for the Chiefs to squeeze into the bottom of the AFC playoff bracket but even if they take care of business on their end there’s still a good chance they miss on the postseason entirely for the first time in the Mahomes era. Which would be an undeniable disaster.

Kansas City isn’t in control of its own destiny at this point. A belief that anything can happen in the NFL is one of the few remaining bastions of hope for the Chiefs faithful. Sunday’s contest against the Chargers is a must-win.

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Liam McKeone
LIAM MCKEONE

Liam McKeone is a senior writer for the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. He has been in the industry as a content creator since 2017, and prior to joining SI in May 2024, McKeone worked for NBC Sports Boston and The Big Lead. In addition to his work as a writer, he has hosted the Press Pass Podcast covering sports media and The Big Stream covering pop culture. A graduate of Fordham University, he is always up for a good debate and enjoys loudly arguing about sports, rap music, books and video games. McKeone has been a member of the National Sports Media Association since 2020.

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