Andy Reid is one of the highest paid American football head coaches of all time

and probably with good reason. He is also paid more than a vast majority of the players at $12 million per year.

He has lead many teams to greatness but it is most evident now with his Kansas City Chiefs winning back to back Super Bowls even when they had a less-than-stellar regular season and were regularly looking like they were just an "average team."

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Andy looks like he couldn't walk from one end of the field to the other without needing to stop for a breather but just like in most sports, your athletic prowess doesn't have a great deal to do with whether or not you can lead a team of elite athletes to victory. We have seen many ex-players who excelled at actually playing the game but completely failed as coaches. I've never dug much into Andy's past but I always remember him because he looks a lot like the Quaker Oats "Oatmeal Guy" who is otherwise known as Wilford Brimley.

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you would expect that any coach would have played football at some point in their lives and with Andy, he did play, just not very much. He started out his career playing for Glendale Community College and I can say as someone who went to a community college, the people on these teams are generally not very good and most community colleges don't even have teams. You certainly wouldn't get excited about being asked to play for one. Apparently Reid was quite good though and ended up getting moved to BYU not so much for his ability but because a good friend of his was wanted by BYU and his pal said he would move there if they took Reid as well. What a great friend! Had it not been for his buddy refusing to go without him, he probably would have ended up being a used car salesman rather than a football coaching legend.

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He would end up playing with legend Jim McMahon who you might remember from the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl-winning team.

Reid didn't play very often but it was while on the team at BYU that he and others around him started to notice that what he lacked in actual skill, he made up for with tremendous analytical and strategic skills. This is far more important as a coach than as a player.

Immediately after graduating from BYU he ended up getting a graduate assistant job with the same football team and did so well at that he was hired by many other minor, but still successful college football programs.

This lead to him eventually becoming the assistant offensive line coach with the Green Bay Packers where he would help guide them to a Super Bowl win in 1996. Once you do that, you can start shopping around for head coach positions and it would take him a while, but eventually he would get hired by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1999. He would help rebuild the Eagles and coach them for many years until 2011. He was let go after a mere 2 consecutive years of losing seasons. I guess Philly just wont tolerate that sort of thing.

This was probably initially quite disappointing to him but it ended up landing him into a 5 year contract with Kansas City and this is where I think he has done his best work. In his first season the Chiefs would go on a 9-0 start to the season beating everyone quite badly including his own team who had just fired him, the Philadelphia Eagles. In a rare show of sportsmanship by Eagles fans, he was given a standing ovation in Philly despite the fact that he was now the coach of the opposing team.

He has been a head coach of 2 teams since 1999 and there have been only 5 years where the teams that he was the head coach of didn't make the playoffs. He also has 3 Super Bowl Championships as a head coach. This 3 victories have been 3 of the past 5 Super Bowls as of right now. There are not very many people (if there are any) that can even come close to this sort of accomplishment as an NFL coach. At $12 million a year he is nicely compensated for his abilities but believe it or not he is NOT the highest paid coach of all time. This award goes to Sean Payton who currently coaches the struggling Denver Broncos. He better get to work if he is going to justify his $18 million per year salary!

I think it is safe to say that Andy Reid is still very good at his job and unless he tires of doing it or is one of those guys that wants to "go out on top" that there is no good reason why he would be leaving any time soon.