Feb. 5, 2010

Caldwell's path from bad to Super is unwavering straight line

By Gregg Doyel | CBSSports.com National Columnist
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MIAMI -- When he was at Wake Forest, this couldn't happen. That's all I can tell you. When Jim Caldwell was the head football coach at Wake Forest, he wasn't on the fast track to the Super Bowl. He wasn't on the slow track to the Super Bowl. He wasn't headed anywhere but out of football. He was that overmatched at Wake Forest.

Don't look at me like that. I was there. I saw it. I wrote about it. I talked to Caldwell many times, watched him coach many times. After all those discussions and all those games, how many times did I imagine him as the head coach of an NFL team in the Super Bowl? Zero times.

Jim Caldwell was 26-63 during his eight years at Wake Forest. (Getty Images)

In 1999, finally having a winning season in his seventh year at Wake Forest, Caldwell began preparing for a future without football. He started to buy inexpensive real estate around Winston-Salem, N.C. He was a pragmatic guy, and he wanted to be ready for the future, whatever the future held. Maybe, if coaching didn't work out, he would become a real estate mogul.

"You never know," he told me in 1999.

No, you don't.

Less than one year later, Caldwell would be fired. History remembers him as one of the worst coaches in ACC football history.

On Sunday, Caldwell will coach the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV against New Orleans. Win or lose, history will remember him as one of the best rookie coaches in NFL history.

That's one bizarre dichotomy, but I can explain it. Seriously, I can. I get it. I understand why Caldwell was so bad at Wake Forest, and I understand why he is so good at Indianapolis.

For one thing, he's the same guy now that he was then. That's a crucial detail. Caldwell didn't change -- his circumstances did. He is just as humble as he was then. Just as wise, just as organized. Just as stubborn. Just as bland. Just as uninspiring. That's the wrong skill set at a place like Wake Forest, because Wake Forest needs a coach with imagination and charisma, not a coach so dry and methodical that he literally mapped out family trips to the Winston-Salem shopping mall ahead of time.

"You don't want to retrace your steps," Caldwell told me in 1999. "That's not efficient."

No, it's not. And neither was Caldwell as the coach of the Deacons. For reasons both academic and historic, Wake Forest has long struggled to recruit the players needed to compete in the ACC, and Caldwell -- for all his football acumen -- couldn't overcome that. A bad roster grew worse as the Caldwell era grinded on, and the uncreative offense he learned as an assistant to Joe Paterno at Penn State wasn't going to work with the Deacons' athletic deficit. Wake Forest football is a hard job, yes. But for Caldwell it was damn near impossible.

Here he is now, with the Colts, with the same skill set that betrayed him at Wake Forest. The offense is led by the league MVP (Peyton Manning), and the defense by the league's only Pro Bowl set of defensive ends (Dwight Freeney, Robert Mathis). With such a roster, a coach with a plan can win a lot of games. And Caldwell has always had a plan.

For 30 years he walked out of staff meetings and jotted down the most important details, filling notebook after notebook. Over the years he filled boxes with those notebooks, including several as Tony Dungy's quarterbacks coach at Tampa Bay in 2001 and then at Indianapolis from 2002-08. When Caldwell replaced Dungy after last season, several boxes of notebooks went into his office.

This is an organized man, which is what the Colts needed. They didn't need someone to reinvent the wheel. They needed someone to carry on in the tradition of Dungy, who won 85 games and one Super Bowl from 2002-08, and Caldwell has done that.

"There are probably more similarities than differences," Colts tight end Dallas Clark said.

But Caldwell has done it with a tweak here and there. That, too, is a crucial detail. Caldwell didn't just move into Dungy's office -- he moved out some of Dungy's staff. Within weeks of his promotion, Caldwell let two prominent coaches go: defensive coordinator Ron Meeks and special teams coordinator Russ Purnell. Technically, neither coach was fired, but they left because Caldwell didn't want them to return. Caldwell replaced Purnell with former Wake Forest assistant Ray Rychleski, and he replaced Meeks -- and his predictable cover-two pass defense -- with Larry Coyer, who was an assistant at Iowa when Caldwell played there in the 1970s. Coyer blitzes more in one game than Meeks would blitz in one season, and the Colts defense loves it.

"Were not as predictable," said linebacker Gary Brackett, the Colts' defensive captain. "Now when a quarterback comes to the line of scrimmage he doesn't know exactly what coverage we're in."

The Colts win because general manager Bill Polian is the best personnel man in the league, and because Caldwell knows how to funnel that talent into a game plan. He doesn't lead the Colts with fire -- he leads them with preparation.

"It's not inspiration by exhortation," Caldwell said. "I'm not an individual that's gifted with golden oratory. We like to keep it simple and straightforward, and I think our team responds to that."

Ask Manning.

"The players have responded to his methods," Manning said. "Coach Caldwell has achieved that status that players want to do well for him -- and therefore the effort is outstanding."

Time will tell if Jim Caldwell is truly a great NFL coach, or simply the right man in the right place at the right time. Or maybe that is, by itself, the recipe for greatness. Before George Seifert won two Super Bowls with the 49ers, he coached two years at Cornell -- and he was horrible, going 3-15. But in eight years with the 49ers, he won seven division titles. Great coach or great system? Who cares? Seifert won huge.

Time will tell on his NFL legacy, but for now Caldwell is doing the same thing. What happened at Wake Forest doesn't matter. He won his first 14 games this season, then rested his starters midway through the 15th. The Colts lost, but here they are in Super Bowl XLIV. Caldwell had a plan, and his plan worked.

Maybe coaching Manning and the Colts is as easy as walking the mall. But you don't want to retrace your steps, and Caldwell hasn't done that. He has been the most efficient rookie coach in league history.