We will find out Wednesday when the Eagles will travel to Kansas City to play Andy Reid’s Chiefs this season.
We already know this: It’s remarkable that they are.
NFC teams aren’t supposed to face AFC teams every season. The Eagles, for instance, have never played another AFC team more than two years in a row and they’ve never played 10 of the 16 teams from the other conference two years in a row.
But this will be the fifth straight season the Eagles have faced the Chiefs, thanks to their two Super Bowl meetings in the last three years. The teams already set the record for most consecutive seasons that an NFC and AFC opponent have met when they played each other in last season’s Super Bowl.
Before that, the only AFC-NFC rivals to do battle even three years in a row were the Vikings and Raiders from 1976 through 1978 and the Cowboys and Steelers from 1977 through 1979.
The funny thing about the Eagles and Chiefs meeting in five straight seasons is that there was a time when these teams met so seldom that it was fair to wonder if they were even in the same league.
When the Eagles played the Chiefs for the first time in 1972 at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, Hall of Famer Hank “Matriculate The Ball Down the Field” Stram was still the head coach. The Eagles stunned the Chiefs that day by winning 21-20.
And then the teams did not meet again until the 1992 season.
No two NFL teams ever went a longer time without playing each other.
The Eagles and Chiefs remained just two teams from opposite conferences that rarely played each other until 2013. Sure there were some ties between the teams. Dick Vermeil, for instance, coached the Eagles to their first Super Bowl in 1981 and surfaced as the Chiefs head coach two decades later in 2001.
But it wasn’t until Andy Reid’s 14-year run with the Eagles ended after the 2012 season that the Eagles and Chiefs forever became entwined.
Big Red opted for Kansas City as his next destination and the chase to see if he or the Eagles could win the Super Bowl first was on.
The burgeoning rivalry started immediately with Reid and the Chiefs arriving at Lincoln Financial Field just three games into his Kansas City coaching career. He beat Eagles rookie head coach Chip Kelly that Thursday night in September.
Four years later, Reid’s former quarterback and offensive coordinator Doug Pederson took the Eagles to Kansas City in Week 2 and Big Red won again.
But it was the Eagles that went on a run after that and Pederson beat his mentor in the race to the Lombardi Trophy when Nick Foles led the franchise to its first Super Bowl title in a shootout against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in early 2018.
Two years later, Reid, at the age of 61 and in his 22nd season, finally got his own Super Bowl title when the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in South Florida. Reid and the Chiefs have been to every Super Bowl except one since and that’s when the rivalry with the Eagles truly heated up.
The string of five straight seasons with the teams playing each other started in 2021 when Reid went to Philadelphia for the second time in eight years and again walked out of the Linc with a victory. This time, he relied on five touchdown passes from Patrick Mahomes as Jalen Hurts, in his first season as a starter, couldn’t keep pace with Kansas City’s high-powered offense.
Reid made some history that day, too, becoming the first NFL coach to win 100 games with two different franchises.
A season later, the rivalry kicked into high gear when the Eagles and Chiefs met in Super Bowl LVII in the Arizona desert. This time, Hurts was the better quarterback, but Mahomes still rallied the Chiefs for a 38-35 victory in the final minutes. Reid had his second Super Bowl title.
His third came a season later when the Chiefs beat the 49ers in the big game for the second time in five years, but only after the Eagles had beaten Reid for the first time earlier in the year in Kansas City. On his way out the door, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni made sure to let the Chiefs’ fans know they had been beaten.
It’s that kind of stuff that spices up an already good rivalry and you surely weren’t going to get that from Reid.
That set the stage for last season’s Super Bowl rematch between the Eagles and Chiefs, who had a chance to become the first team to pull off a three-peat in the Super Bowl era.
It was an opportunity that was emphatically denied by the Eagles, who built a 34-0 lead on their way to a 40-22 rout in Super Bowl LIX earlier this year. Sirianni showed he could beat Reid. Hurts proved he could be better than Mahomes. The Eagles’ defense displayed why it was the best in the business.
And now, in 2025, the Eagles and Chiefs are going to meet again for a fifth straight season.
You can argue that the Cowboys-Steelers rivalry of the 1970s was better because the teams combined to win six of the 10 Super Bowls and played each other twice in the title game. But the Steelers won both those games and the teams only played each other five times in the entire decade.
The Eagles and Chiefs both have Super Bowl wins against each other in this decade and their fifth meeting against each other is coming halfway through the decade. The Eagles and Chiefs have also combined to win five of the last eight Super Bowls.
Add in the Reid-against-Eagles factor and it’s clear that this AFC-NFC rivalry is the best one ever.