Before Travis Kelce yelled at Andy Reid and bumped into him on the Chiefs’ sideline, his head coach had complimented him for eliminating that type of behavior throughout his NFL career.
“The player’s always been really good,” Reid told CBS in an interview that aired before Kansas City’s 25-22 win in Super Bowl 2024. “Now, he had a temper, so on the field he would go off and do some crazy things. He was a challenge early, but he’s grown up right before our eyes.
“He’s always had that heart, that soft heart, but he had to just grow out of the other stuff.”
Reid agreed with former NFL coach Bill Cowher, who conducted the interview, that Kelce needed to “channel it properly.”
But hours after the interview appeared on the pregame show, Kelce approached Reid after he wasn’t on the field for a key Chiefs sequence — when running back Isiah Pacheco fumbled on the snap that directly followed a 52-yard completion from Patrick Mahomes to Mecole Hardman.
Kelce leaned toward Reid and shouted.
At one point, he even made contact with the 65-year-old and bumped him.
The pair reportedly hugged before halftime arrived — when Reid also “patted” Kelce on the back, according to The Athletic — but it still served as a storyline that kept surfacing in postgame press conferences and interviews, once Kelce had collected nine catches for 93 yards to help Kansas City win its third Super Bowl title in five years.
“He came out of nowhere,” Reid told NBC Sports postgame. “But that’s him. He’s wound up so tight. He says, ‘Don’t count me out! I’m good! I can do this!’ I love that intensity. It radiates.”
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- Travis Kelce hugs Andy Reid after lashing out at Chiefs coach
Reid was hired as the Chiefs’ coach four months before they selected Kelce in the 2013 NFL Draft, making the tight end from Cincinnati a third-round pick and watching him blossom into one of the best tight ends in league history.
He narrowly missed recording at least 1,000 receiving yards in an eighth consecutive season (984), but even in a down year, Kelce topped 70 yards in all four postseason games and collected three touchdowns.
With the Chiefs down by a field goal late in regulation, Kelce accounted for 31 yards — including a 22-yard completion with 16 seconds left — on a drive that ended with a field goal and got the Chiefs into overtime.
Then, he nearly scored the game-winning touchdown, but instead, his catch set up a first-and-goal that ended up with Hardman catching the game-winning pass.
Neither Kelce nor Reid revealed many details about what the tight end told his coach during the second-quarter quarrel, though Kelce joked that he was telling Reid “how much I love him” and Reid joked about how it captured his lack of balance.
But Kelce hinted that the one way to actually hear what happened would revolve around segments captured by his microphone — he was mic’d up during the game, according to an ESPN interview — getting posted.