Todd Pinkston can go from infamy with the Eagles to glory with the Chiefs. As a coach.

LAS VEGAS — The walking, talking symbol of an era of Eagles football that was as fun and as frustrating as any in the franchise’s history was alone for a moment in an end zone of Allegiant Stadium on Monday night.

On the list of people and topics that would command anyone’s attention on Super Bowl LVIII media night, Todd Pinkston might have gone unmentioned and unnoticed. These are the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. This is the Super Bowl of Travis and Taylor, of two compelling quarterbacks in Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy, of two innovative and accomplished head coaches in Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan. This was media night, with goofy questions from Day-Glo-dressed questioners, with the kind of menagerie that would have been grist for Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, with the comedian Carrot Top hopping on the media shuttle to the stadium just to wander glumly through the chaos.

Who would care about the Chiefs’ running backs coach?

Philadelphia would. I mean, duh.

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Think about it. Todd Pinkston, coaching? Todd Pinkston wasn’t known as a coach on the field during his five seasons with the Eagles in the early 2000s. Todd Pinkston was known as a cotton-swab-skinny wide receiver who never lived up to being a second-round draft pick in 2000. He was half of one of the more ignominious duos in the city’s sports history: he and James Thrash, Pinkston & Thrash, a buddy-cop comedy that NFL defenses laughed at.

It wasn’t that the two of them were bad guys or even terrible receivers. It was that they weren’t quite good enough. It was that they were the weak links on three Eagles teams that reached the NFC championship game and lost, the manifestations of Reid and Joe Banner’s belief at the time that, when it came to winning a Super Bowl, elite wide receivers were luxuries and not necessities. It was that they were the impetus for the Eagles to acquire Terrell Owens and change their entire approach to the position.

That Todd Pinkston, coaching? On a Super Bowl team?

It makes sense if you understand Reid — his coaching tree, his tending to it to help it grow — and if you understand Pinkston.

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After Pinkston suffered a ruptured right Achilles tendon during training camp in 2005, it didn’t take long for him to begin thinking about what he would do once his career was over. An Achilles tear was that debilitating then. Once the Eagles released him the following year and Washington cut him in 2007, he took for granted that it was unlikely, if not impossible, that he’d ever play again.

“It was a goal in mind from the time I retired,” he said Monday night. “I knew I wanted to coach at this level.”

And if he couldn’t, he had a backup plan: He would coach, teach, and mentor high school students.

Reid brought him back to the Eagles as a coaching intern in 2009, and from there, Pinkston started a long, slow climb through the lower levels of the profession. Another internship, with the Minnesota Vikings in 2010. Five years at Petal (Miss.) High School, about 90 miles south of his hometown, Forest. Five years at Austin Peay University as the program’s wide receivers coach. A couple of more years at Stockbridge High School in Georgia, where he was the assistant head coach, the special-teams coach, and the receivers coach.

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All the while, he stayed in touch with Reid, who over his 25 years as an NFL head coach has shown no hesitation in plucking a mentee out of obscurity. Remember: Doug Pederson was coaching at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La., when Reid hired him with the Eagles. Note to the NFL’s owners, general managers, and head coaches: If you want to widen and deepen your pool of coaching talent, you do what Reid does: You forge and maintain relationships, and you give someone you know and trust a shot. He had done it with another former Eagles wide receiver, Greg Lewis, and when Lewis, who was the Chiefs’ running backs coach last season, left to become the Baltimore Ravens’ receivers coach, Reid called Pinkston.

“Todd has a consistent personality,” Reid said. “He’s a good teacher. He’s patient. He’s done a real nice job.”

Pinkston’s tutorials with the Chiefs’ backs focus mainly on receiving and blocking: how to catch a pass at the ball’s highest point, how to pick up a blitz. A back who can’t do those things can’t play in Reid’s offense.

“I can’t tell them how to run because they’re running backs,” Pinkston said. “Biggest thing for me is that we know our protections, protect the quarterback. For the Chiefs, if you don’t protect One-Five” — Mahomes, No. 15 — “it’s going to be a problem.”

His days with the Eagles aren’t a distant memory for him. He remembers every game he played in the NFL, he said, which means, even now that he is 46, the slights are still fresh. There always seemed cause to question his toughness, whether he was too skinny and slight, maybe too tentative, to be as good as a second-round pick ought to be. There was the 2003-04 NFC championship game, when the Carolina Panthers’ Ricky Manning appeared to manhandle Pinkston all night.

“If you go back and watch film,” he said, “everything was not on me. Those are the things that people don’t see.”

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There was the prime-time game at FedEx Field in 2004, when Joe Theismann called him out on ESPN for having “alligator arms” on a deep downfield pass from Donovan McNabb, when Pinkston claimed he lost the ball in the lights. There was Super Bowl XXXIX, when Pinkston had four catches for 82 yards in the first half against the Patriots, including a spectacular 40-yarder to set up the Eagles’ first touchdown, only to sit out most of the second half with cramps.

None of those incidents and accusations bothered him as much as the outcome of that night in Jacksonville: the Eagles’ 24-21 loss, his last game in the league.

“The down part is,” he said, “we didn’t win the Super Bowl.”

He is content with the rest of his career. He pointed out that he led the NFC in yards per reception (18.8) in 2004. He was better, he believes, than people wanted to acknowledge.

“I think so,” he said. “When you play that position, you’re always in the spotlight. The quarterback has to throw to somebody, and when you’re not as productive as people expect, they’ve got to find a way to bring you down. My thing was, I wanted to eliminate distractions, make the plays when I had an opportunity.

“I never let it bother me. Even the name-calling or the boos or whatever, those are distractions. You just go out and play your game, because those people have never been down on the field. They’ve never played a snap. That’s one thing Coach always said: Eliminate distractions. Don’t worry about what’s going on in the outside world.”

Around him Monday night in Allegiant Stadium, it was nothing but the outside world, and he was practically invisible. But he was there, and come Sunday … Todd Pinkston, coaching? Todd Pinkston, a Super Bowl champion? In Philadelphia, that would be the strangest sight of all.