The NFL misses the value of quiet self-awareness. It’s why Frank Reich remains overlooked.
Attention is perhaps on the wrong man in the backwash of Philadelphia Eagles Coach Doug Pederson’s tank job. Maybe the more important figure to consider is the man who’s not there: Reich. More and more, you wonder just how much Reich had to do with that improbable Super Bowl win in the 2017 season when he was their offensive coordinator. With him, Carson Wentz looked like a franchise player and their offense rose from 22nd in the league to seventh. Without him, Wentz has deteriorated into a brooding, displaced heir. With him, Nick Foles won a Super Bowl MVP award as a backup. Without him, Foles has lapsed back into a relief role with Chicago. With him, the Colts are 11-5 and in the postseason for the second time in Reich’s three years at the helm. Without him, the Eagles are in the dumpster.
Total up the wins Reich has been associated with over the past four seasons, counting Philly, and he’s at 41. That’s only seven games back of Andy Reid. How many coaches can figure out how to average 10 wins no matter whom he has under center? How many coaches have put 41 points on the New England Patriots — in the Super Bowl — after losing their starting thrower to a torn ACL, as Reich did as the Eagles’ coordinator in 2017? How many coaches have won a playoff game in their first season in the big office? Just three, to be exact. How many coaches could manage to go 7-9 even after Andrew Luck’s sudden frayed-shoulder retirement left him with Jacoby Brissett? And then revive his team with a 39-year-old Philip Rivers, his third quarterback in three seasons?
The only thing, you figure, that allows Reich to work so peacefully in this business without the proper regard is that he is by nature so self-deprecating and secure in who he is. “The backup role has always suited me,” Reich joked when he got the Colts job only after Josh McDaniels reneged at the last minute.
Among other things, Reich is one of the most insightful conversationalists in the league about his craft and what makes a good coach — or decision-maker in general. “Having conviction is a good thing, but if you don’t have the maturity to know when to exercise that conviction, then you’re a loose cannon,” Reich said a few weeks ago in a phone conversation on the subject. “That’s the key. You don’t want to be an aggressive decision-maker just for the sake of saying you’re aggressive. There has to be discretion.”
Discretion? Yes, discretion: a discerning sense of time, place and situation, and an awareness of how your words and actions are likely to affect others.
“Anybody can be an aggressive decision-maker,” Reich continued. “But to be a good one there needs to be two sides of the coin. You need the conviction and strength to say, ‘Yes, this is the direction we’re going,’ but you also have to be able to abandon that with discretion. You have to know, ‘When is the right time to shoot that bullet or play that card?’ If you don’t have that, you end up making the kind of decisions that disqualify you as a decision-maker.”
A striking characteristic of Reich’s teams is that he has the ability to make his players feel equally secure in themselves, and what he thinks of them. The biggest word stamped on his locker room wall is “Truth,” and apparently, they trust that he tells it to them. More than one has remarked on Reich’s habit of coming right back to a guy after he has made a bad play, to give him a chance to redeem himself. Earlier this season, Foles was asked about Reich’s effect on him in Philadelphia. He replied by crediting him as the coach who really “triggered” his Super Bowl MVP performance.
“He was the one who really figured me out as a player and realized that we had it all wrong,” Foles said. “ … He was like, ‘I trust you; just go do your thing.’ No matter what, if I threw an interception or I threw a touchdown.”
Reich says of his handling of players: “The turnover is so high in this league it sounds macho to say, ‘You got to earn trust.’ We don’t have time. We have vetted you. You are in this seat, and that means we think you’re trustworthy; that’s why you’re here. Start there. That way you can accelerate trust. If players or coaches take the mode of ‘We’ll put this on probation and have a trial period,’ no. You’re going to get lost. You will be left in the dirt in the tracks.”
He adds: “These aren’t robots. They aren’t just chess pieces moving around scoring points and knocking people down. You got to know your guys.”
Reich’s guys aren’t predicted to last long in these playoffs, given that in the opening round Saturday they have to meet the Buffalo Bills, winners of six straight under the horsepower of Josh Allen and a coach of the year candidate in Sean McDermott. But arguably no man in the NFL knows better how to pull off an improbable upset than Reich — or has a more underrated burn buried in his pleasant personality.
Reich, you’ll remember, came off the bench to quarterback two of the greatest comebacks in football history, Maryland over Miami from 31 points down to win, 42-40, as a collegian in 1984, and that overtime thriller as a pro in relief of injured Jim Kelly when he led the Bills back from a 35-3 deficit to beat the Houston Oilers in an AFC playoff game in 1993. “The pressure is not on us,” Reich said this week. “No one is going to give us a chance.”
Beware of Reich when no one gives him a chance. Most people misunderstand pressure, he remarked in that talk a few weeks back. They think they have to rise up to it. “Really what happens is, it’s not that people rise up; it’s that a lot of others get weighed down by pressure,” he said. “The people who are best in the moment don’t get weighed down. Why don’t they feel that pressure? Well, one reason is, they can live with the consequences.” In his case, peacefully.
