KANSAS CITY – After his quick rise and nearly as quick of a fall as the head coach of the Bears, Matt Nagy is headed back to where he found the most sustained success in his coaching career.
On Friday, the Chiefs confirmed that Nagy will rejoin the team as a senior assistant and quarterbacks coach, returning to Kansas City where he was on head coach Andy Reid’s staff from 2013-2017. This comes after he was fired by the Bears in January after posting a 6-11 record.
Nagy was the quarterbacks coach for the Chiefs from 2013-2015 before taking over the offensive coordinator duties for the next two seasons. In that time, he primarily worked with starting quarterback Alex Smith but did have Patrick Mahomes for his first season in Kansas City.
Running Reid’s system of offense, the Chiefs under Nagy were 13th in points and 20th in yardage in 2016 before seeing an increase in 2017 as the ranked sixth in points and fifth in yardage in 2017. In that season, Kansas City won the AFC West division title, which led to Nagy getting hired as Bears’ head coach.
In his first season in Chicago as a head coach at any level, the Bears stunned many with a 12-4 record and an NFC North championship. Carried by a strong defense that was ranked at the top of the league with some creative offense that offered hope for the future, Nagy was named the league’s Coach of the Year in 2018.
But the failure of the offense to ever turn around under Mitchell Trubisky, Nick Foles, Andy Dalton, or Justin Fields over the next three seasons would prove to be Nagy’s undoing in Chicago. The Bears finished 8-8 in 2019 and 2020, backing into the playoffs in the newly created seventh seed in the last year, the bottomed out to 6-11 in 2021.
Nagy was fired on January 10th along with general manager Ryan Pace.
