Super Bowl 2024: Steve Spagnuolo still doing a super job in Kansas City
Kansas City defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo talks to the media before the team's practice Friday in Kansas City, Mo. Credit: AP/Charlie Riedel
Just about all of the pillars from the fabulous 2007 Giants team that won Super Bowl XLII, denied the Patriots a perfect season and provided one of the great upsets in sports history are gone from the game these days.
The head coach and the general manager of that squad are out of the game entirely, hardly ever seen or heard from these days except on rare special occasions.
The players have long since ceased buckling their chin straps, though a few remain in our consciousness in different, more evolved roles. Michael Strahan and Eli Manning are omnipresent on our televisions even with rare explicit acknowledgment of their exploits 16 years ago. Antonio Pierce has popped up recently, first as the interim head coach of the Raiders and then, in recent weeks, as the full-time steward of that job. And there are cheers whenever a champ is shown on the video board at a Rangers or Knicks game, but those ovations are dimming with time.
Even the opposing forces that made that Super Bowl so epic finally have bowed out of the game. As we conclude the first full season of the post-Tom Brady era, we move ahead to what figures to be the first full season of the post-Bill Belichick one, with the two all-time greats no longer involved in the day-to-day, game-to-game doings of the NFL.
But there is one character from that mythic clash who keeps chugging along, doing almost exactly what he did back then, albeit for a different team in a different era.
Steve Spagnuolo is still designing defenses, still prowling the sideline, still spitting out the calls and flashing the hand signals that win championships.
On Feb. 11, Spagnuolo will have another chance to do just that as the defensive coordinator for Kansas City in Super Bowl LVIII against the San Francisco 49ers.
A win will propel Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes yet another rung higher on the G.O.A.T. ladder and give them each a third ring in five years. Not bad. But neither of them has ever won a Super Bowl without Spagnuolo as their defensive coordinator. Spagnuolo won one without them.
“We have a history together, so I knew what to expect and where he would go with things,” Reid said of hiring Spagnuolo, who had worked for him as a position coach in Philadelphia before becoming the Giants’ defensive coordinator. “You’re seeing the rewards of that now.”
This season Kansas City allowed the second-fewest points in the league (17.3 per game) and was second in sacks and quarterback pressures. While Mahomes and his receivers scuffled through the regular season, Spagnuolo took the young and old parts he had on his side of the ball and carried the team.
“Yeah, I’d say it’s one of the better defenses that I’ve been around,” Reid said. “We had some real good ones in Philadelphia and some of the early defenses here, I don’t want to slight those guys, they did a nice job for us. Surely, this is a defense that has helped guide this team along as the offense was growing, and now that both are playing well, that’s a tribute to everybody involved.”
“Spags is a magician, man,” safety Justin Reid said after Kansas City held Baltimore to one touchdown in the AFC Championship Game win, doing so with a variety of unpracticed schemes that Spagnuolo devised on the fly from the sideline. “The way that he sees the game, his feel for the game, his timing of the calls and when to bring pressure and when to fake a pressure and drop back into coverage.”
Spagnuolo may be a living vestige of a bygone era here in New York, but in Kansas City, he is beloved for his current exploits. After the win in Baltimore, his players were given the official hats and T-shirts that proclaimed them as the victors, but they were much happier to don the gear they had made and brought themselves. The shirts they most gravitated to were the ones that showed their defensive coordinator with red, glaring Terminator eyes and a simple motto that, this season in particular, has driven the entire organization:
“In Spags We Trust.”
Justin Reid, who spearheaded the fashion statement, said he’s gotten more than a thousand orders for the shirt.
“Aw, man . . . humbling, very humbling,” Spagnuolo said on Friday. “I’m going to shoot him for doing that. I’m trying to burn every T-shirt that I can find. I don’t think I’m getting them all, though.”
They undoubtedly are going to become the must-have swag for Super Bowl parties in much of the Midwest.
Those shirts may not make it all the way here to New York in time for the game, but the sentiment still rings true here.
The Giants weren’t close to reaching this year’s Super Bowl. They still don’t have a defensive coordinator for the coming season. Championships feel just as distant in the past for the organization as they are unforeseeable in the future.
But watching Spagnuolo next Sunday undoubtedly will give Giants fans that rare active reminder of what they once were able to accomplish. Although he was a Giant for only two short years before taking his first and only stint as a full-time head coach in St. Louis, then returned for three more years — capped by taking over as interim head coach in the muddy wake of Ben McAdoo’s firing — he is as deeply etched into the team’s history as Manning, Tom Coughlin and the rest of them.
The difference is we can still see Spags doing his thing.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
