For Andy Reid, a ring means everything

It is opening weekend of the 2015 NFL season. The defending champion Detroit Lions are about to kick things off against grizzled Aaron Rodgers and the perennially powerful Green Bay Packers.

Up in the booth, the announcers prepare for their first broadcast as a team. Veteran play-by-play man Kenny Albert welcomes his new color analyst with a quip about their dinner bill from the night before. Under his trademark mustache, Andy Reid smiles.

"You know me, Kenny," Reid says. "I've always believed you have to stay hungry in this business."

Far-fetched? Maybe. Reid has been coach of the Eagles so long, it sometimes feels he always has been and always will be. But the reality is that no one coaches forever. Win multiple Super Bowls, like Jimmy Johnson and Mike Shanahan, and your time still comes. Fail to win even one and your time comes sooner. Usually.

Reid has been one of the exceptions to that last rule. There are very good reasons for that. He took over a woebegone, dysfunctional Eagles team in 1999 and guided it through the most extended period of success in its history. From 2001 through 2008, the team reached the NFC championship game five times. Through almost every single season of Reid's tenure, fans could root for an exciting, winning team with a legitimate shot to win a Super Bowl.

That is harder than Reid made it look, which has been both blessing and curse to the big man. Blessing because his employers, owner Jeffrey Lurie and team president Joe Banner, appreciate the difficulty of Reid's accomplishments. Curse because coming close without winning it all is thrilling at first, frustrating after a while, and downright torturous after a decade.

Reid has been Eagles head coach through three presidents, three Phillies managers, and 417 Flyers and Sixers coaches. He is as familiar as a longtime neighbor.

No matter how well you know somebody, every now and then something can make you see him from a different, unexpected angle. That happened last week, during the news conference to announce Michael Vick's new contract.

"Nothing will make me happier than to put a ring on the finger of this guy next to me and mine, too," Vick said.

The guy next to him, of course, was Reid. With those words, which echoed what many players say about superstar teammates nearing the end of their own ring-less careers, Vick cast the coach in an entirely different light. After years charged with building and leading a team to the Super Bowl, Reid is suddenly a guy whose players want to win one for him.

It has been seven years since Donovan McNabb and T.O. and Brian Westbrook and Dawkins went to the Super Bowl. That is more time than many head coaches ever get. There are exactly zero players on this team who were in uniform for that loss to New England in Jacksonville, Fla.

That means every current Eagle has been drafted or signed or acquired in trade to play for a coach who has served long and well but whose resumé has one glaring hole. It is up to them - to Vick and LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson and Trent Cole and Nnamdi Asomugha - to take Reid where McNabb and Westbrook and Owens and Hugh Douglas and Troy Vincent could not.

Reid built Version 1.0 of his team around a very definite set of principles and beliefs. That plan produced a six-year run of steady improvement, remarkable consistency and a 7-5 postseason record. Version 2.0 wasn't so good. The Eagles' postseason record is 3-4 in that span, including first-round exits the last two years.

Now we get Version 3.0. Reid may not have abandoned his core principles, but they have become quite flexible. Clearly, the near misses and the ticking clock have created a new sense of urgency.

Eagles fans are pretty much divided between those who think Reid's track record proves he is capable of winning a Super Bowl and those who think Reid's track record proves he is fatally flawed and will never win one.

One of those viewpoints will be vindicated over the next two or three years. That's how much longer Reid's contract runs. If he hasn't won a Super Bowl by then, he will almost certainly be replaced by Lurie and Banner. If he has, well, there is a chance that, after 15 years in the grinder, Reid will be ready to take a break.

Either way, he could end up sitting next to Kenny Albert or someone like him in a broadcast booth. If that seems unlikely because of Reid's less than electrifying news conference persona, it isn't. Plenty of the talking heads doing sports commentary and analysis were less forthcoming, even downright hostile, while they were playing or coaching.

So it can happen. The real question, the only question is whether Reid the TV analyst will be wearing the Super Bowl ring that distinguishes the best of the best.