ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — Back before the turn of the century, when Andy Reid began his first head coaching job with the Philadelphia Eagles, soul-draining two-a-day practices still were the way in the NFL.

Safe to say Reid availed himself to all the opportunity implied.

Other than the anomaly of emphasizing teaching his system the first few days of his very first camp, Reid for years launched training camp with three straight days of hitting in full pads — morning and afternoon.

And while Reid had tapered that back some before the NFL ended two-a-days in 2011, the Philadelphia Daily News that year reported that national media visiting the camp in Bethlehem, Pa., were in disbelief over “the amount of contact Reid has sanctioned” compared with other camps they’d been to.

Special teams coordinator Dave Toub, who joined Reid in Philly in 2001, a few years ago described the prevailing mindset thusly: “It was like murder … If (a player) could make it through that, you could make it through anything.”

Irritated as Reid might have been by the safety-based rule change, he re-calibrated while sticking with his principles — an underappreciated aspect of his remarkable success.

“It’s way different than when we first got into it,” Reid said Sunday in front of the Scanlon Hall dorm at Missouri Western as the Chiefs were reporting for training camp.

Player safety, he added, is always the top priority.

“So you don’t want to put those guys in a bind,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s a tough sport. This thing, it’s tough. And so there’s a point where you’ve got to reach down (and) you’ve got to be able to push yourself through some things.

“And these camps still do that; it’s just at a different level than maybe what it was when I first became a head coach.”

Since then, Reid has won 301 games — fourth in NFL history behind Don Shula (347), Bill Belichick (333) and George Halas (324) — and become the only coach to lead two franchises to 100-plus victories and guided the Chiefs to three Super Bowl wins.

There are many reasons for all that, of course, with Patrick Mahomes and the Steve Spagnuolo-guided defenses looming largest.

But Reid will always believe it all starts on the proving grounds of spartan sites like this, where Reid last year summed it up deftly as a place where “the cinder blocks are still cinder blocks, no matter how you cut it.”

That’s why Reid and the Chiefs continue to be one of just six NFL teams spending all of their camps away from home — the fewest, excluding the pandemic season, since 2000.

As Reid sees it, the better to build the camaraderie and the right stuff that so often seems to factor into an intangible winning edge: His teams fashioned three Super Bowl victories on comebacks and last season somehow thrived on agonizing margins as it sought to win a record third straight before its comeuppance against the Eagles.

And never mind if some of that esprit de corps is conjured by a common nemesis in the form of the taskmaster.

By way of example, Reid referred to the so-called Long Drive Drills that the Chiefs will be slogging through over and over and over with temperatures in the 90s in the days to come.

Maybe it’s not quite Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks character in “Miracle” forcing players to keep skating from goal line to goal line over and over with the haunting “again” command.

But as receiver Nikko Remigio told The Kansas City Star’s Sam McDowell last year, “It will touch your soul.”

Yet Reid is right when he says players will tell him they hate the drills, which have been known to go 20 or more straight plays without reprieve or water, but still say they’re glad they did them.

Both because of the stamina it cultivates and the mentality that comes with it.

“I think you’ve seen this year and in previous years, it seems like we play our best football in the fourth quarter,” Mahomes said last November. “And it’s because we’ve been preparing ourselves all year long to play our best football then.

“Games in the NFL are such close margins that every game seems like it goes down to that, to the very end, and I feel like we’re the best prepared team in those situations.”

That starts here and now as the Chiefs prepare to begin the season against the Chargers on Sept. 5 in Brazil.

It’s a different undercurrent than a year ago, when the Chiefs were girding to try to make NFL history.

Now, it’s essentially about redemption for a 40-22 humiliation by the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.

To Reid, though, these weeks remain a constant no matter what’s at stake.

“This part stays tough; it’s never an easy camp,” he said. “It builds your foundation that you can bank on. So it’s important that the guys come in in the right frame of mind.

“They know that, and they pass the word down to the young guys that they better be ready to go. That helps us in the long haul.”

To be resilient and mentally tough and able to fend off fatigue — physically and emotionally.

Even if it’s not quite the same agonizing experience that it was in Reid’s early days, there’s a through line from the way Toub described it back then to how it might be seen today.

First things first:

“If you can get through Andy Reid’s training camp,” Mahomes said in 2023, “then you’re going to be able to get through an NFL season.”

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