The crazy Eagles connections with Super Bowl-bound 49ers and Chiefs
Javon Hargrave: After spending three years and twenty-three sacks with the Eagles, Hargrave inked a four-year, $84 million deal with the 49ers. In his debut season, he racked up 7.0 sacks. Now ranked fifth among active interior lineman, Hargrave has 44 ½ sacks. With the Eagles in 2021, Hargrave was selected for his first Pro Bowl; with the Niners this year, he earned his second.
Matthew Harper: Harper was an Oregon player for Chip Kelly and started working as Kelly’s assistant coach in Eugene. Harper was hired by Kelly to work as an assistant coach for special teams and later as an assistant coach for defensive backs during Kelly’s three years here. One of Doug Pederson’s nine retained Kelly assistants, Harper worked with wide receivers and special teams under Pederson and was a 2017 Super Bowl winner. Harper joined the 49ers in 2021 as an assistant special teams coach.
T.Y. McGill is a seasoned defensive tackle in his ninth season. He has been cut sixteen times by the Seahawks, Colts, Browns, Chiefs, Chargers, Eagles, Commanders, Saints, Vikings, and 49ers, but he continues to play. McGill played in nine games during his two distinct stints with the Eagles in 2018 and 2020. He recorded half a sack, two tackles for loss, and three quarterback hits. This season, McGill made two appearances for the 49ers.
Matt Pryor was the sixth-round draft choice of the Eagles in 2018. He played 10 games over his three years with the Eagles before starting 14 games with the Colts in 2021 and 2022. In 15 games this season, he only saw 42 offensive snaps divided across six games—most of which were blowout victories—despite having signed with the 49ers this year.
Darryl Tapp: During his 12-year NFL career, Tapp played for six different teams. From 2010 to 2012, he was a member of the Eagles, where he started three out of 39 games as an edge rusher. He finished his career with 29.0 sacks and six sacks in three seasons here. After the 2017 season, Tapp announced his retirement. He then worked for a year at Central Michigan, Vanderbilt, and his former school, Virginia Tech, before becoming an assistant defensive line coach on Mike Shanahan’s coaching staff. In Washington in 2013, Tapp was an offensive coordinator for his father Mike, while Shanahan served as his offensive coordinator.
Mike Bradway: From 2008 to 2017, he worked with the Eagles in a variety of capacities in the scouting department under the direction of Howie Roseman and current Chiefs general manager Brett Veach. Bradway rose through the ranks to become assistant director of college scouting before being hired away by the Chiefs following the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory. Joe Douglas acknowledged that Bradway found Dallas Goedert at South Dakota State.
Currently in his 25th year with Andy Reid, Rick Burkholder spent the first 14 of those years as the Eagles’ trainer. Since 2013, he has served as the Chiefs’ head trainer and vice president of sports medicine and performance.
Mark Donovan, a former quarterback for the Giants training camp and North Allegheny High School and Brown University, served as the senior vice president of operations for the Eagles from 2003 to 2009. He then joined the Chiefs, initially as chief operating officer and then as team president in 2011.
Ken Flajole: A veteran coach with almost fifty years of experience, Flajole oversaw the linebackers for the Eagles during Doug Pederson’s five-year tenure. Before joining Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo in Kansas City again in 2021, Flajole worked alongside him with the Rams from 2009 to 2011 and the Saints in 2012.
Corey Matthaei: Matthaei started his coaching career in the summer of 2006 as an intern with the Eagles at Lehigh. He advanced to coaching assistant under Reid in 2008, and in 2010 he became the head coach’s assistant. Matthaei was hired by Reid in 2013 to help with offensive quality control and went on to be elevated to assistant quarterbacks coach in 2015. This was Reid’s first Chiefs staff. He began serving as an assistant offensive line coach in 2018.
Tom Melvin: He’s coached Travis Kelce, Chad Lewis, and a good hundred tight ends in between. For the past 25 years, Melvin has coached Reid’s tight ends with the Eagles and Chiefs. However, their history together as coaches dates back to 1986 at Northern Arizona and 1984–1985 on the staff of San Francisco State. That’s why Melvin and Reid started working as coaches almost forty years ago.
Matt Nagy: Brett Veach, the current general manager of the Chiefs, was one of wide receiver Nagy’s favorite targets while he was quarterback for Delaware in the late 1990s. After graduating from college, Nagy played for a number of Arena League clubs. In 2008, he began working as an intern for Reid as a coach. In 2009, the Eagles attempted to sign Nagy as a player since they were short on quarterbacks during training camp. However, the NFL rejected the signing because Nagy was still bound by an Arena League contract. He continued to serve as a quality control coach after serving as a coaches’ assistant for Reid’s coaching staff through 2012. He was hired by the Chiefs in 2013 as Reid’s first quarterbacks coach, then in 2016 and 2017, he was appointed offensive coordinator. He returned to the Chiefs, first as the quarterbacks coach last season and then as the offensive coordinator this year, following four years as the head coach of the Bears (he was the losing coach in the Double Doink game).
Todd Pinkston: Selected in the second round by the Eagles in 2000, Pinkston caught 184 passes for 2,816 yards and 14 touchdowns over his five years with the team. Only a few months after turning 27, his career was cut short by an Achilles injury he sustained during training camp in 2005. His eight receptions of 50 yards or more during the 2001–2004 season ranked seventh in the NFL. Pinkston, who is Reid’s running backs coach, began his coaching career in 2009 as a coaching intern with the Eagles. However, this is his first season as a full-time NFL assistant coach.
In addition to Bill Belichick, Don Shula, and Tom Landry, Andy Reid is the fourth coach to lead at least five teams to the Super Bowl. Reid now ranks second to Belichick in postseason victories and fourth in NFL history with 258 wins. His goal on Sunday is to become the sixth coach to win three Super Bowls, after Bill Walsh, Chuck Noll, Joe Gibbs, and Belichick. With the Eagles and Chiefs, Reid has attended five conference championship games and six total. In his twenty-five years as a head coach, his teams have made it to the postseason in nineteen of those years. He has only had three losing seasons (1999, 2005, 2012), none of which occurred in the same decade.
Steve Spagnuolo: In 1999, Spags was a defensive assistant on Reid’s first Eagles staff. He was one of nine NFL head coaches that year, along with Doug Pederson, Pat Shurmur, John Harbaugh, Ron Rivera, Sean McDermott, Brad Childress, Leslie Frazier, and David Culley as assistant coaches. On the roster were veteran NFL assistant coaches Eric Bieniemy, Al Harris, Mike Caldwell, and Duce Staley. Before taking on the roles of defensive coordinator for the Giants in 2007 and head coach of the Rams in 2009, Spags spent eight years coaching both linebackers and the secondary for the Eagles. In 2019, he took on the role of defensive coordinator for the first time under Reid, following stints with the Rams, Saints, Ravens, and Giants.
Prince Tega Wanogho: The offensive tackle was the sixth-round selection of the Eagles in 2020 and was only involved in one game for the team, a defeat over Washington at the Linc on the last day of the season. Before the 2021 season, the Chiefs signed him. In the previous three years, he has appeared in 22 games, but he has only participated in two this year. Tega Wanogho was taken off of injured reserve by the Chiefs earlier this week.
Dave Toub: Picked ninth overall by the Eagles in 1985, Toub never saw action in the NFL. He started his coaching career in the middle of the 1980s at UTEP, and in 1987, he and Reid were both part of Bob Stull’s Miners staff. Reunited as coaches at Missouri, Reid brought Toub on board in 2001 to help lead Harbaugh’s special teams staff. Under Lovie Smith, Toub played for the Bears from 2004 to 2012. After Reid and Smith were sacked after the 2012 season, Reid was hired in Kansas City, where he brought Toub on board as assistant head coach in 2018 after Toub had previously served as special teams coach.
Brett Veach: In 2004, after serving as an intern and a coaches’ assistant for the Eagles, Veach became Roseman’s scout in 2010. Following his relocation to Kansas City in 2013, he and Reid saw advancement from personnel analyst in 2013 and 2014 to co-director of player personnel in 2015 and 2016 to general manager since 2017. Most people agree that Veach pushed Reid to select Patrick Mahomes in the fall of 2014, during Mahomes’ first year at Texas Tech. The Chiefs drafted Mahomes three years later.
