“Andy Reid’s combination of diligence and a sense of mischief has established him as one of the game’s best-ever coaches. Now, the question is whether he can guide his struggling Chiefs back to the Super Bowl.”

Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, has won more than 250 games in his career, fourth all-time, which puts him high on any list of the N.F.L.’s greatest coaches. Most of the others in that pantheon are men who personify the sport’s militaristic soul — Vince Lombardi, for example, the fabled coach of the 1960s-era

Green Bay Packers, or Reid’s contemporary, the grim Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. But Reid is no Lombardi or Belichick; he’s Steve Jobs. He’s a designer, a tinkerer, a product engineer who imbues his football with creativity and even an occasional touch of whimsy.

To take his measure is like looking into a kaleidoscope. Adjust the view, and you get different images. He’s the jolliest fat man in America — renowned for his appetite and for being the wryly comic figure in TV ads for State Farm and Snickers — or the saddest. He’s a father figure to his players, and he’s the father of two sons who have faced serious criminal charges, one now dead from a heroin overdose and the other in prison after grievously injuring a little girl while

driving drunk. He controls everything. And he controls nothing.To take his measure is like looking into a kaleidoscope. Adjust the view, and you get different images. He’s the jolliest fat man in America — renowned for his appetite and for being the wryly comic figure in TV ads for State Farm and Snickers — or the saddest. He’s a father figure to his players, and he’s the father of two sons who have faced serious criminal charges, one now dead from a heroin overdose and the other in prison after grievously injuring a little girl while driving drunk. He controls everything. And he controls nothing.