Mass. native Steve Spagnuolo now a three-time Super Bowl champion
BOSTON -- With the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl on Sunday night, much of the attention has naturally been placed on the likes of Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Andy Reid. That's how things go in a star-driven league, of course.
Yet as the confetti gets swept away for good off that slick turf in Glendale, the spotlight ought to take a few moments to focus in on Steve Spagnuolo.
Now, considering the Eagles gained 417 yards of offense and scored 35 points, the Kansas City defensive coordinator probably didn't get too many tributes written for him on Sunday night and Monday morning. Yet Spagunolo's defense scored a key touchdown, forced a couple of punts and limited the Eagles to field goals on two possessions, allowing Mahomes and Co. -- with some assistance to the men in stripes -- to do what was necessary to take home the Lombardi.
With that, Spagnuolo earned his third Super Bowl ring, elevating him to some rarefied air in the coaching ranks. Outside of coaches who worked for the Patriots during either dynastic run -- including fellow Chiefs assistant Brendan Daly, who now has five Super Bowl rings -- winning one Super Bowl has been the pinnacle for most NFL assistants this century. Winning three is, clearly, quite the feat.
For Spagnuolo, a Massachusetts native who grew up in Grafton before playing football at Springfield College, it's been quite the journey. He began his coaching career at UMass in 1981, and throughout his career he's coached at six different colleges, eight NFL teams, and two different NFL Europe franchises. Outside of an eight-year stint working for Andy Reid in Philadelphia from 1999-2006, only one of his first 14 coaching stops lasted more than three years. Nine stops lasted two or fewer years.
But Spagnuolo really established himself with some permanence in the NFL in 2007, his first year with the New York Giants. That massive career leap came at the expense of his hometown team, as he engineered the Giants defense that shut down Tom Brady and the previously undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl LII. That gave Spagnuolo his first Super Bowl ring at 48 years old, and considering the magnitude of the event, it ensured that Spagnuolo would be sticking in the NFL for a long time.
He landed his first head coaching gig shortly thereafter, though his stint with the St. Louis Rams was a bit of a debacle. He went 10-38 before getting fired.
He then bounced around from New Orleans for a year, then to Baltimore for two years, then back to the Giants for three years, before heading to Kansas City to replace the fired Bob Sutton to help Mahomes and the Chiefs get over the hump.
They did that immediately, going from the 24th-ranked scoring defense before Spagnuolo's arrival to seventh in 2019, en route to a Super Bowl victory. Spagnuolo's defense intercepted Jimmy Garoppolo twice and came up with a fourth-down sack to help secure the title.
That championship was the first for Kansas City since 1969, and it laid the foundation for what's now being considered a potential dynasty after three Super Bowl appearances and two wins in a span of just four seasons.
And while New Englanders certainly didn't enjoy seeing the Chiefs hoist another Lombardi, there's still got to be some enjoyment to hearing such a notable Boston accent inside the victorious locker room.
From UMass to UConn to UMaine, from Barcelona to Frankfurt, and from Andy Reid's staff in Philly to the Giants to the Rams and to Andy Reid's staff in Kansas City, it's been a remarkable football journey for the 63-year-old from central Massachusetts.
