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And so it was that Charley Casserly, general manager and director of football operations for the Houston No-Names, attended his first rodeo last weekend. With his family in tow, all sporting the new Western-style duds they were forced to hurriedly purchase to avoid looking like greenhorns, Casserly served as grand marshal for the rodeo parade, traversing the route in a covered wagon instead of the frisky stallion or Brahma bull that organizers first suggested.

For the former Washington Redskins general manager, respected around the league for his skills of organization and attention to detail, there was also the first inspection of the proposed training camp site. The first hiring of a pro scout. The first interview with a recent college graduate who will serve as an intern. The first substantive discussions with owner Bob McNair, who shelled out $700 million for the league's 32nd franchise, about developing a profile for the kind of coach they will hire sometime next year.

Oh, yeah, on Tuesday morning there was also the first meeting of Casserly's scouting staff, a modest assembly of four.

"It was," said Casserly, "a milestone of sorts. I mean, we had a real staff meeting. I actually had a working staff to gather together and we got down to the business of football."

Casserly and his three employees will attend the NFL scouting combine workouts this weekend in Indianapolis, having been assigned Row 32 for the 40-yard dash testing. They will be the smallest contingent at Indy, but also the one with the most work to get accomplished. Fortunately, they do have time on their side.

The personnel meeting and combine represent a welcome change of pace for Casserly, who has been charged with building the franchise, literally, from the ground up. It is a task Casserly welcomed, the job he most coveted out of the various positions he interviewed for the past couple months. The travails of the expansion Cleveland Browns franchise aside, Casserly can't be second-guessed for coveting an opportunity to leave his fingerprint on every component of the fledgling team.

Ask yourself these questions: Would you rather start from scratch with a new franchise or try to undo the mess Casserly would have inherited had he leaped at the chance to take over as major domo of the New Orleans Saints? Is it better to do things your way right out of the chute or to follow in the footsteps of Bill Parcells and have every personnel decision held up for scrutiny against the way "The Tuna" might have done it? Isn't it a lot more comfortable to select a head coach with whom you can co-exist than to try to find a common ground with Bill Cowher, the guy whose overbearing ego chased Tom Donahoe out of the Pittsburgh Steelers operation?

Evaluated in comparison to the alternatives, those other job vacancies for which Casserly was the preeminent candidate, the Houston opportunity -- yeah, rodeos and all -- looked pretty appealing.

Casserly has spent many hours of late comparing notes with the architects of the most recent NFL expansion teams. He huddled with Jacksonville coach Tom Coughlin, the czar of the Jaguars. He spoke with Bill Polian and Dom Capers, the original general manager and coach of the Carolina Panthers. He closely scrutinized the expansion list from which Cleveland began to stock its roster a year ago.

If those other start-up ventures made mistakes along the way, Casserly wasn't about to publicly delineate them earlier this week. But, rest assured, he privately made note of the plusses and the minuses in each of those three situations. Then again, Casserly takes a lot of notes these days. It would not be an overstatement to suggest the first person likely to get rich from the new Houston franchise is the guy who owns the office supply store delivering legal pads to the team.

Casserly embarked on the newest adventure in his NFL career with eyes wide open. Five weeks later, he could use an industrial-sized vat of Visine. Every day, he said, there are elements for which he didn't plan, new tasks he didn't count on having to do.

He spent an entire day recently ordering video equipment and tape. Another day was devoted to discussing carpeting for the locker room. There is no such thing, it seems, as menial when the end product is to field a team two seasons hence.

Given his inauspicious start in the league, Casserly doesn't know the meaning of menial anyway.

Back in 1977, seeking to land any kind of job in the NFL, he sent a letter to all 28 franchises and, in essence, volunteered to work for free and to do just about anything. Redskins coach George Allen was the only man to respond, and Casserly soon found himself working 16-hour days and living in an $8-a-night room at the YMCA in Alexandria, Va. A dozen years later, when Bobby Beathard moved to San Diego, the former high school coach who had begun his career in the league as an unpaid intern in the scouting department was elevated to general manager.

Casserly remained with the Redskins until last year when new owner Daniel Snyder decided that he and coach Norv Turner could no longer work productively together. Casserly might never admit it, but the call by Snyder was probably the right one at the time. In hindsight, it made Casserly a hot commodity in the league, and he was able to continue to collect paychecks with Snyder's signature on them until McNair hired him as his franchise architect.

Houston owner Bob McNair ponied up $700 million and chose Charley Casserly to make it pay off.(AP)

Over the past month, Casserly has discovered he's not being paid simply to be a football Frank Lloyd Wright, either. He has visited some of the newest training facilities in the league, pored over blueprints and artists' renderings, talked with contractors and sub-contractors. The process of building a roster can't come too soon for Casserly, who must first get through the endeavor of building a place in which to house it.

The good news is there will soon come a point when Casserly and his staff can concentrate on the people side of the business: on finding a coach and assistants, on filling out the personnel department, on evaluating meat on the hoof. The rodeo, of course, isn't a bad place to commence such an exercise. Then again, Casserly knows a heck of a lot more about busting the wedge on a kickoff than busting a bronc at a livestock show.

Soon enough he will get to put that knowledge to work. It won't be long until Casserly is back with a stopwatch in his hand instead of a shovel. He was recently reminded by West Virginia coach Don Nehlen that the best part, and arguably the hardest part of the job, is yet to come.

"(Nehlen) said that what we're looking for is the 'it,'" Casserly said. "Does a guy have it or doesn't he have it? It's just a feeling, you know, an instinct. But he's right. We have to have some people who can identify the 'it' in players. And then we have to go get the guys with the 'it' and turn them into a football team."