The Year of Coaching Anonymously

TAMPA If you squinted, staring hard at the man behind the lectern with the same high forehead, the chiseled jaw and that assured way of squaring his shoulders, you could almost see the mentor in Arizona Cardinals Coach Ken Whisenhunt on Monday afternoon. Only Bill Cowher he is not. At least not yet. Rather, on the first week of the event that could change his life, Whisenhunt was an enthusiastic imitation.

And in that he was simply a reflection of the league in which he coaches.

For decades the NFL has been about the men wearing headsets and carrying clipboards. Nothing mattered more than the head coach's glare. In fact, for a time, general managers were presumed to be such an untidy intrusion on the imperial rule of the coach they were deemed moot and replaced with nerdy little men more schooled in the principles of integral calculus rather than football theory. Their primary task was to decipher the salary cap and leave the manly task of picking football players to the coach.

This led to a league of super coaches who begot followers schooled in their theories who then became super coaches themselves until it seemed every NFL team that mattered had a Bill Parcells or a Mike Holmgren or Mike Shanahan, their Super Bowl rings twinkling, on its sideline.

Then they disappeared.

Parcells retired two years ago, remaking himself as a general manager. Holmgren and Tony Dungy retired this winter. Shanahan was fired, as was Jon Gruden, just like Brian Billick and Marty Schottenheimer before them. In three years the super coaches were all gone, save for New England's Bill Belichick.

They have been replaced by people such as Whisenhunt. Unknowns almost all of them. Many were so obscure, like Atlanta's Mike Smith or Raheem Morris, Gruden's replacement in Tampa Bay, most fans didn't even know they were assistant coaches at all.

So on Monday two US Airways jets landed at the airport here, making breaking news on local television as gate agents pushed rolling staircases to the jetliners' doors, prying them open only to be greeted by Whisenhunt and Pittsburgh's Mike Tomlin, two coaches whose life narratives barely have been written.

Which might have something to do with the early malaise of Super Bowl week -- once the most booming sporting event of the year. The famous radio row that usually hums with the blather of so many sports talk shows all at once was half-filled on Monday. The surrounding media center, buzzing in years past with small throngs who gathered around the famous players and coaches who walked by, was strangely quiet. The most recognizable figure making the rounds on radio row Monday morning was Pat Williams, the eccentric senior vice president of the Orlando Magic. Hardly a football face.

It was almost as if once the coaches who were the whole show left, the show went along with them.

"We've seen that ownership is making changes faster than before," said Charley Casserly, the former Redskins and Houston Texans general manager.

But as to why this has happened, Casserly does not know. Nobody really seems to know. "You have to ask the owners," he said.