There are great coaches all over the NFL. Super Bowl champions. Coach of the Year winners. Future Hall of Famers.
But when it comes to head coaches, across the board, no division can match the AFC West.
Andy Reid, Sean Payton, Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh.
It’s Mount Rushmore — or maybe Mount Passmore.
That’s 10 conference championships and five Super Bowl rings, possibly the most accomplished quartet of coaches since the league went to eight four-team divisions in 2002. There are no weak links.
“I really appreciate the competition,” said Carroll, coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. “I think it’s amazing that we all have a chance to be in the same spot. It’s good.”
Most decorated in this group is Kansas City’s Reid, whose Chiefs have won three of the past six Super Bowls. His teams have won six conference titles — one by Philadelphia and five by Kansas City.
In 2004, Reid was the youngster in an NFC East coaching foursome that included Bill Parcells (Dallas), Joe Gibbs (Washington) and Tom Coughlin (New York Giants). At that point, neither Reid nor Coughlin had led teams to Super Bowl victories.
“I was the low man on that totem pole,” Reid said. “That was a great group to go against, tremendous coaches. I remember that well, being a young guy trying to compete against them.”
Carroll, 73, and Reid, 67, are the NFL’s two oldest active coaches. Harbaugh and Payton, born six days apart and both 61, rank fourth and fifth. Each is on at least his second team as an NFL head coach, and Carroll is on his fourth.
“We’re in this because of the competition,” Reid said. “You love that part of it.”
The Chargers’ Harbaugh is the only one in this group who hasn’t won a Super Bowl as a head coach. His San Francisco 49ers came up five yards short of a Lombardi Trophy in the 2012 season, losing to brother John Harbaugh’s Baltimore Ravens on the league’s biggest stage.
“Don’t put me on that dance floor,” Jim Harbaugh said in reference to measuring up to the other three AFC West coaches. “I haven’t won the Super Bowl. I’ve still got some work to do before I get put in that category with them. Let me earn that one.”
He won’t have to wait long for a measuring stick. In a notable scheduling twist, the Chargers face all three division opponents in the first three weeks. They play host to the Chiefs in Brazil, then are at Las Vegas on Monday night of Week 2 before facing the Broncos at home in Week 3.
Not since 1988 have the Chargers opened the season with three division opponents in a row.
“You look at Andy Reid, Sean Payton, Pete Carroll, I’d say the same about all three of them,” Harbaugh said. “They’re that iron wall that negativity crashes against and crumbles. They’re rebounders. They might have a bad year, but it’s not two in a row. Not those three guys. They always find a way.”
Harbaugh has interesting connections to each of them. He was coaching Stanford when Carroll was coaching USC, and in 2009 the Cardinal were on the winning end of a 55-21 blowout at the Coliseum. That’s when microphones caught a deflated Carroll asking, “What’s your deal?”
Their rivalry continued in the NFC West, when Carroll was coaching the Seattle Seahawks and Harbaugh was with the 49ers. Publicly, at least, they weren’t pals.
But the way Harbaugh describes it, they’re cut from the same win-at-all-costs cloth.
“Pete’s somebody I’ve always looked up to,” the Chargers coach said. “We’ve just always been competitors. Had I played for Pete Carroll or been on his staff as an assistant, we’d have been like brothers. We’d have been breathing the same air. Nothing but respect.
“If it weren’t for being on opposite sidelines, we’d be like brothers. That’s the kind of guy you’d send a Christmas card to, but you don’t because you’re too busy trying to scratch each other’s eyeballs out. Nature of the business. Dog eat dog.”
Said Carroll: “There’s always been some media stuff about Jim and I. I’ve never thought that was the case. I just have great respect for his ball coaching and who he is and how tough he is, and John as well.”
As for Reid, he’s revered in the Harbaugh household. Ray Rhodes hired John Harbaugh in his final season with the Eagles, but Reid kept the young coach on staff as special teams coordinator. Harbaugh stayed for eight more seasons under Reid before leaving to become head coach of the Ravens.
“The way John talks about Andy, and the way Andy treated our family, we were always welcome around the team, in the meal room, the meetings,” Jim Harbaugh said. “Couldn’t have been more amazing. A class act all the way. Just first class.”
Actually, it was the patriarch of the coaching family, Jack Harbaugh, who first met Reid. It was 1989, when Jackie Harbaugh was leading the American Football Coaches Wives Assn. She needed someone to put teddy bears into gift bags for a charity visit, so she roped in her husband. One other coach showed up, a young offensive line coach for the University of Missouri. Andy something…
Years later, when Jack was visiting his son in Philadelphia, he and Reid connected the dots.
“Andy Reid holds a special place in the heart of our family,” Jack Harbaugh said.
The connection between Jim Harbaugh and Payton dates to 1987 when Harbaugh was a first-round pick of the Chicago Bears, and — after NFL players went on strike that season — Payton, undrafted out of Eastern Illinois, was quarterback of Chicago’s replacement team.
Those fill-ins, nicknamed the Spare Bears, went 2-1 in their three games.
“I didn’t want to be a spectator,” Harbaugh recalled. “It was killing me, watching him out there getting those reps. I wanted to be out there bad. But Sean did really good. He put us in a good position. We won the division that year and those wins he got were a big part of it.”
Once during Harbaugh’s rookie season when he was struggling, some loudmouthed Chicago fans were expressing their displeasure with him. Harbaugh’s parents were sitting within earshot, as was Payton — at the time back to watching games from the stands.
Payton walked over to the boo birds and told them to pipe down and to be respectful around the young quarterback’s family.
John Harbaugh and Payton were on staff together at the Eagles for a year, and Jim Harbaugh’s 49ers beat Payton’s New Orleans Saints in a 2011 playoff game.
“I remember shaking Jim’s hand afterward and telling him, ‘I hated losing that, but that was a historic game,’” Payton said.
Between coaching the Saints and Broncos, Payton worked as an analyst for Fox. That gave him a chance to survey the NFL horizon from a different perspective.
“That year I worked at Fox, I wanted to get back in it,” he said. “I had a chance to interview with a few teams. It’s not like you were wanting to jump into a division with Andy and [Patrick] Mahomes, but it was ownership-driven and what we had in Denver.”
The next season, Harbaugh was hired by the Chargers. Now, it’s Carroll and the Raiders.
“I love Andy, I love Jim, I love Pete,” Payton said.
“It’s like you’re a horse with blinders on, but you know the other three horses are running. You can’t see them, but you can hear them breathing and you know they’re right there next to you. And that’s just good coaching.”
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