KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In mid-July last year, just before the start of training camp, Matt Nagy logged onto Zoom around 4 p.m. and didn’t end the meeting until 9. For five hours he heard quotes from 40-some anonymous people in his professional coaching career who had the freedom to tell it like it is. Unfiltered and unvarnished, Nagy got to hear it all. “I didn’t know how it was going to go, but it was one of the most profound things in five hours I’ve ever done in my entire life. It was revealing, just powerful,” Nagy told CBS Sports in November. “I mean, anybody that’s going to sit here and listen to everything that 40 people are saying that you could have done better or also things that you did well.” The former Chicago Bears head coach and now Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator finally did a “blind spot” report. His friend and longtime NFL reporter Laura Okmin has been offering them to interested coaches for years, and that offer had been there for Nagy since the Bears fired him after the 2021 season.
After four years and a Super Bowl loss and only one head-coaching interview last cycle, Nagy decided to take her up on the offer. She asked him for 40 names of people from his career who she could contact, and they would stay anonymous and be able to speak freely. “This isn’t the Nagy fan club,” he says. And after three months of making calls across the country, Okmin finished the report. He wanted “the bad” first, but he says she started with some softer critiques before getting into the meat of it. By the end — all the good and all the bad — Nagy found himself saying “that’s fair” to a lot of the quotes she read to him. “I get emotional about that when I think about it over the years,” Nagy says. “It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been really healthy and good for me. And so when you take the blame off of everybody else and you put the blame on yourself, you’re able to be real … which I did on July 12th of this past summer.”
— Nagy interviews Thursday for the vacant Titans and Raiders head coaching jobs, and on Friday he has one with the Cardinals. It’s possible he gets more looks as teams continue their first round of interviews into next week. Though Nagy got his first head-coaching gig in large part because of his success calling plays for Andy Reid’s Chiefs in 2017, he has not called the plays in his second go-round in Kansas City. He…
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2026-01-08 11:00:56
