When it is a truly lousy team, Reid will note that the players line up quite well for the national anthem, that they very rarely are late for their charter flights, and that there is very little discarded athletic tape left on the locker room floor after games.
In the week leading up to the game against the 0-4 (soon to be 0-5) Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Reid did everything but predict a late-season run to the Super Bowl.
"Again," he said, finally closing up after several minutes of prattling on about the Bucs' many attributes, they are "good football players - special teams, they've done a nice job there. We know what we have ahead of us."
Yes, that would be a 33-14 win against a Tampa Bay team that was undertalented and poorly coached.
You can't blame Reid. He does have empathy for the struggling masses of bad teams in the league and doesn't want his players to take any games lightly. He is apparently under the impression they have no access to the league standings and, more to the point, actually pay attention to what he says in his news conferences.
Nevertheless, Reid went out of his way this past week to extol the many virtues of today's opponent, the 1-4 Oakland Raiders, a team in such disarray its head coach might be arrested any day for allegedly breaking the jaw of an assistant coach.
"We understand their record, but we understand the reality of what we see on tape," Reid said. "A team that came out and played San Diego right to the end, came back the following week and beat Kansas City . . ."
And a team that lost three straight games after that by a combined score of 96-16.
". . . They have some young players that are very explosive on the offensive side, and they're working through some things, and the offensive line had a couple injuries. They're a potentially explosive football team."
And if you sit on a lump of coal long enough, you've got yourself a diamond.
