MIAMI-- --It's the quintessential dopey Super Bowl week question: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
This year, there's a legit answer, at least if you ask the two coaches, the Indianapolis Colts' Tony Dungy and the Chicago Bears' Lovie Smith: a coaching tree.
Well, Dungy has a tree. Smith is one of its products. This tree is unique in a couple of ways - it's one of the more recently planted, since Dungy has been an NFL head coach for only 11 years, and its branches include primarily, although not solely, African-American coaches.
As much as for any coach yet to win a Super Bowl can expect to be, Dungy's proteges from his six years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and five with the Colts are suddenly hot properties. Smith coached on his staff in Tampa Bay. So did Herm Edwards, who has taken the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs to the playoffs.
So did Mike Tomlin, handed the keys to one of the great NFL coaching legacies when the Pittsburgh Steelers hired him. So did Rod Marinelli, who, the consensus is, deserves a better organization than the Detroit Lions.
The fact that Dungy now meets one of his professional progeny in a Super Bowl adds to the intrigue of this historic matchup. Such meetings don't happen very often in pro football, period, much less in the Super Bowl. So this is even more new ground broken.
"It is something we did talk about happening," Dungy said this week in yet another recounting of the pre-playoff game lunch in Indianapolis he had with Smith and Edwards. "The fact that it all started for us back in 1996 with the Bucs has made this a very special feeling."
Smith, Edwards and Tomlin look at Dungy as their coaching godfather. But Dungy makes it clear that he didn't materialize as a head coach out of thin air.
"I'm not the head of it. I have to look back and thank Coach [Chuck] Noll for giving me a chance to come into the NFL and getting me started," he said.
Dungy's style is close to a dead ringer for Noll's - no surprise since he played on one of Noll's four Super Bowl championship teams in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Noll wasn't a screamer, either; he gave respect and got it, and his players rewarded him for his trust.
"I would say I'm somewhere in the middle of the tree, and the roots are Chuck Noll," Dungy said.
