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."
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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 returned to K.C. in 2022 and became the OC for a second time in 2023, coordinating the offense to two Super Bowls and winning one of them.
This season didn't go as planned. The Chiefs hovered around .500 all season long after a 2024 season where they won every close game they were in. The Chiefs were eliminated from playoff contention in Week 15 just minutes after Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL, and they finished with a 6-11 record on six straight losses. Kansas City's offense ranked 20th in yards and 21st in points.
NFL team owners consumed by public relations wins may balk at hiring a non-play-calling offensive coordinator coming off a season like that, but Reid has said in the past that Nagy was the best coaching prospect he ever had in his coaching tree. And Reid thinks Nagy will be even better the second time around.
"He's experienced an organization," Reid says, "he's experienced how you work with an owner, he's experienced how you do the personnel side of it, how you have to work with a GM and how you have to be on the same page, together, with that. And he's had to deal with players and coaches, and everybody has issues. So, there's a human element to it. And he's done all of that and I think he's ready to roll, and get out there, and knock it out again."
The Bears hired Nagy in 2018, and he led them to a 12-4 record and a spot in the NFC playoffs that today lives on as the Double Doink. No matter, Nagy earned NFL Coach of the Year honors and the Bears, by all appearances, had their coach of the future after ending a seven-year playoff drought.
The team was celebrating victories in Club Dub, the trade-up for Mitch Trubisky was paying off, Nagy was an excellent play-caller-coach and the Bears had their first NFC North title in eight years.
Trubisky and Nagy started off hot in the Windy City, going 12-4 in 2018. The next few years saw a decline
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The next season Chicago couldn't recover from a four-game losing streak midseason and missed the playoffs at 8-8. It was during that year that, upon reflection, Nagy says he started to lose his way a bit. Instead of being himself, he began getting bogged down in the minutiae. Midway through the 2020 season, he handed off play-calling duties to his offensive coordinator.
"When I have all these responsibilities and you're with your coaching staff and you're almost like an offensive coordinator, even though you don't have that title," Nagy says now, "it's my job to be able to step back, empower the people that are with you, your coaching staff, your players and be a head coach. And so I was doing both and it just became inconsistent. It wasn't consistent. I felt like at the time it was the right thing to do."
The Bears snuck into the playoffs as the seven seed but lost in the wild-card round. The next season, Nagy again began the season calling plays and again handed them off. By Thanksgiving, it became clear to observers he was coaching in his final season in Chicago. The Bears fired him at the end of the year with a career 34-31 record, two playoff appearances and only one losing season.
Okmin came to Nagy about the blind spot report. "I think it could be really good for you," he recalls her telling him. But he wasn't quite ready for it. Not yet.
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Last year the only team to interview Nagy for a head-coaching job was the Jets. In his three years back in Kansas City he won a Super Bowl as quarterbacks coach, won another as offensive coordinator and had just lost to the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX. He entered the 2025 season with an unknown future on the final year of his deal with the Chiefs, and he decided he was mentally prepared for this report.
In July just ahead of training camp, Okmin and Nagy got on a Zoom. She started reading off the quotes.
Someone said his genuineness and morals made it feel like you're the only person in the room when you're speaking with him. Another, presumably a player, said that when he retires, the only coach he would invite to his retirement party is Nagy.
Then someone says he has such a big heart that he listens to too many people. He says he needs to keep schedules tighter, like how Andy Reid does it.
"It's easy to be overwhelmed in that chair, especially the first time you're in that chair," someone says about Nagy in this report. "You have to lean on your people. You can't do it all. You have to delegate. He took on a lot more tasks than what he needed to."
I ask Nagy if that means he didn't trust the people around him.
"I think, big picture for me, I needed to have more trust. It wasn't that I didn't trust them, I trusted them. I needed to have more trust," he says. "I needed to be able to let them do and empower them and let them do what they're great at. And when you try to go around and do more a little bit here or there, you have a hundred different distractions. It takes you away from what you need to do best, which is let them do their thing, be the head coach, and be there to support them, be there for the players, and hit the different silos within the organization as a leader."
The quotes continued. One person finally broaches the play-calling elephant in the room.
"Take a long hard look at calling plays," the person says. "He's great at it, but I think his leadership, vision and the way he touches people and communicates with people will have a stronger impact because it's rare. If you're not calling plays, you are seeing around corners more and it just takes so much time and it gets easy to get lost."
But if he's this offensive guru, shouldn't he keep calling plays? That was his calling card to get the first job, after all. Are you not going to call plays if and when you become a head coach next time, I ask.
"I've always been taught to never say always and never. But really, for me, I'm really intrigued by the CEO leadership role," Nagy says. "A lot of stuff that came back from the positive side in the blind spots was just that they feel like, and I do believe that a lot of my strengths is from the leadership side of being able to build relationships, empower people, be a leader of people, and let them do their deal, do the delegating and empower.
"I'm really leaning towards more of the, hire unbelievable staff around you, let them do what they do and then go around and be of the CEO approach. And I have over the last two years really spent some time talking to some coaches and some people on that leadership side of guys that coaches that aren't maybe calling plays and more of the CEO style approach. And it's been very intriguing and neat to hear."
Reid (right) has said in the past Nagy was the best coaching prospect he ever had in his tree.
Getty Images
Nagy got plenty of praise in this report, but when we sit down with one another I want to hear the constructive criticism. He didn't wait years to do this report to be told how great he is.
These critiques could be tough to hear if you're on the receiving end of them, but they seemed fairly mild to me. So I ask him, what was the hardest quote to hear in this report?
Someone said that when a player screws something up, Nagy's emotions can come off like he took it personally, or that he doesn't believe in the player. He recalls the quote being something like "as I can give somebody belief in what they can do, he just needs to make sure with his emotions and everything that he doesn't take it away from them."
Nagy has always been competitive. He learned in high school as a player to keep his emotions in check because he was the quarterback. While he tried to lead by his actions, he also wasn't shy to let his voice be heard. And as a coach, there's a balance in that.
So when Nagy got that criticism back, that impacted him.
"That hit me, because I'm a positive human being. I believe in positivity," Nagy says. "But you also do have to have a dark side. You have to be able to let these guys know there's got to be an accountability. How do you show that, and how do you give that accountability to the players and to your coaches?
"I know this isn't a big tough word that a lot of people like to use, but I used it a lot in Chicago... As long as they know you love them, then they'll do a lot for you. And so balancing how you critique them, how you criticize, wearing your emotions on your sleeve, that's where I think for me, I really been trying to work on that. Even now, today as a coach in Kansas City, how can I be the best coach for the players that I don't take that away from them?"
That could be easier said than done for a coach. Patrick Mahomes had heard his offensive coordinator underwent this blind spot report but didn't know many of the specifics. I asked him what the biggest difference is between Coach Matt Nagy he worked with his rookie year and the Coach Matt Nagy today.
"He's learned -- and I think he already knew -- but learned even more on how to just talk and interact with more and more people and be able to go out there and have his voice in the offense, but also get the voice from the players, which I think is really cool," Mahomes says. "And you can see how excited guys are to go out there and play when you have receivers drawing up their own plays and tight ends drawing up their own plays. And they might not be exactly what they drew up, but they have their imprint on the offense, which I think gets guys fired up to go out there and execute the plays."
🔎 What Matt Nagy learned from his 'blind spot' report AreaThe QuoteThe AdjustmentLeadership style"You have to lean on your people. You can't do it all."Clearer delegation and a CEO-style focusPlay-calling"If you're not calling plays, you're seeing around corners more."Openness to leading without calling playsEmotional reactions"I have to make sure I don't take belief away from them."More intentional emotional control
The Chiefs season ended sooner than anyone there expected, but clearly there is still enough interest in Nagy that nearly half the teams with openings are considering him as their head coach. And he's taking the lessons he learned through this blind spot report into those virtual interviews this week that could turn into in-person interviews next week.
As he reflected back on the report, he says that up until that July day, he felt that 90 percent of himself felt good, healthy and "healed" from everything that happened in Chicago years earlier.
"But there was a 10 percent of me that was still hanging on, and I didn't know how much that 10 percent meant to me," he admits. "When I was done with the five-hour Zoom of reading my blind spots, I felt like there was a great amount of closure on me now having confirmation of what I know. That 10 percent was hanging on to me and that it's almost like the last chapter of the book. The book is closed. Now it's go time."
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