PHOENIX — Matt Nagy didn’t know what he wanted to do after the Bears fired him as head coach last year.
His ego was hurt and he was tired. He knew he loved football, but wasn’t sure how much it loved him back.
“Everything shuts down,” he said Monday night. “You’re in charge of how many hundreds of people in an organization — to in charge of nobody. That’s hard. ... And you have to figure out what’s next.”
He found his answer half a world away. To celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, Nagy and wife Stacey traveled to South Africa for two weeks. They went on safari, taking videos of lions and leopards and cheetahs.
“It was wild,” he said. “At that point in time, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s time to take a couple risks.’”
Nagy and his wife talked about his four years with the Bears, and what he wanted to do next. He was grateful for his time with the Bears — “2018? No one can ever take that away from us,” he said — but, in a way, was in mourning.
“It was a great time,” he said. “It didn’t continue. It didn’t end the way we wanted it to. That’s a part of everybody’s story. That’s a part of my story.”
Nagy realized he wanted the story to continue.
The day he flew back to the United States, he took out his phone and told the Chiefs he was coming home. In February 2022, Nagy agreed to return to the Chiefs to become the quarterbacks coach for the greatest one walking the earth: Patrick Mahomes.
“The healing process is different for everybody,” Nagy said.
Having Mahomes helps.
Sunday, Nagy’s star pupil — he was the offensive coordinator when the Chiefs drafted him — will play in his third Super Bowl. For the first time, Nagy will be by his side when they take the field against the Eagles.
“I’ve had so much fun this year, being in that quarterback room, being with the coaching staff in Kansas City, being with the fans in Kansas City, everybody,” he said. “It’s rejuvenated me. And I just gotta learn from it.”
There’s plenty from which to learn. Speaking at Super Bowl Opening Night, Nagy admitted as much.
“I failed in a lot of areas,” said Nagy, who went 34-31 in four years as Bears head coach. “But I know for a fact it’s going to make me stronger. I promise you that. I’m telling you right now it’s going to make me stronger.”
Being fired 13 months ago, along with general manager Ryan Pace, hurt,
“At first it’s really tough …” he said. “You feel like you let a lot of people down, people that you build a lot of great relationships with. But at the same point in time, in my opinion, you’ve got to be strong enough to pick yourself up, pick your pieces up, learn from your failures and use it if an opportunity ever comes — whether it’s a position coach, a coordinator, a head coach.”
Rejoining head coach Andy Reid, for whom Nagy worked before taking the Bears job, has been eye-opening. Nagy has watched the way Reid — whom he considers the greatest head coach of all time — handles his head coaching duties. As an assistant under Reid from 2008-17 — his entire professional career before joining the Bears — Nagy didn’t pay attention to such things.
When he interviewed for the Bears job, Nagy prepared for 200 different hypothetical questions about how he’d handle certain situations. After four years in charge, he said that he faced every single situation in real life.
He has a few regrets. He wishes he would have beaten the Packers more often — “Which I didn’t do,” he said, still annoyed — and won more games in general.
Nagy considers clear communication one of his strengths, but admits there were situations where it could have been better.
“I thought I was good at it — and I wasn’t,” he said.
He knows that now.
“I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t hurt, selfishly, for the city, for the players, for the coaches, support staff, etc., in Chicago,” he said. “But you can’t dwell on that. You have to pick yourself up. You have to be better from it.”
He could have been better handling quarterback Justin Fields.
“We knew that that was our future, and we wanted to handle him and do everything we possibly could to make sure he succeeded,” Nagy said. “Scheme, how we handled practices, everything,”
Nagy began last season with Andy Dalton as the starter, though. Fields fell apart in Game 3 — his first career start — when he was sacked nine times by the Browns. By the end of the next week, Nagy gave up play-calling duties.
“It’s not what we wanted for Justin,” he said. “The last thing you want is to hurt somebody’s confidence, a young quarterback, like we did that game. No one wants that for anybody. We needed to learn from that and be able to change some things in how we handled him.
“You end up running out of time.”
He and Pace were “all-in on drafting Justin,” he said, and had a development plan to play to his strengths.
“It’s hard to do that right away, in months in summer in one year,” he said.
Nagy didn’t get a chance for a second summer. But he didn’t stop paying attention to Fields this season, when he came close to breaking the NFL rushing record for a quarterback.
“I was so proud of the way that he moved this year as a quarterback,” he said. “A lot of credit to their coaches and what they do with him. The schemes that they put around him. And the way that he took onto that. …
“He’s one helluva player. He has a bright future in Chicago. I’m proud of him. … He’s going to keep growing.”
Fields is coming off his third new scheme in as many years.
“He was a rookie again this year,” Nagy said. “He learned a whole new offense. It’s going to take time. He’s got all the tools. He has a great future ahead of him. He’s very talented.”
He has the right study habits, too.
“To do what he did from his rookie year to this past year, it’s only going to get better for him,” he said. “He is wired the right way. I got to see him first-hand how he studies, how he practices, his passion for the game. He hates to lose.”
So does Mahomes, who has lost four fewer games in six seasons — 16 — than Fields has in two.
“Patrick is just on another level in so many areas,” he said.
Nagy is along for the ride, one year after the Bears fired him.
“There was a lot of experiences in that journey for me that I could have been a lot better at,” he said. “In the end … we didn’t get results that we wanted.”
