CHICAGO - The coaches are the stars of this week's AFC and NFC championship games.
Denver's Mike Shanahan, Seattle's Mike Holmgren, Carolina's John Fox and Pittsburgh's Bill Cowher all have been to Super Bowls. Shanahan and Holmgren have won rings.
Not many players on any of the final four teams have won Super Bowls. Except for the Panthers, who were runners-up two years ago, not many players even have been to a Super Bowl. Thus their coaches will have to lead the way.
Only 22 coaches have won Super Bowls. Only 39 coaches have won NFL titles since regular championship playoffs started in 1933.
The overwhelming majority of them have won their first titles early in their careers: 69 percent by the third season, 79 percent by the fourth.
A third of them - 13 - have won it all in their second season. That's why the Bears' Lovie Smith knows what he's talking about when he said after his second season, "We're definitely on pace, not necessarily ahead."
Cowher, in his 14th season, would break Tom Landry's record for winning a Super Bowl so late in a career. Landry was in his 12th season before his Dallas Cowboys won their first.
Shanahan and Holmgren would break Landry's record for winning Super Bowls so far apart - six years between his 1971 and 1977 teams.
Holmgren won in 1996 with Green Bay and Shanahan's Broncos beat Holmgren's Packers in 1997 and won again in 1998. The Bears' George Halas still holds the all-time record for gaps between championships - 17 years between 1946 and 1963 - before Super Bowls were invented.
Holmgren would be the first to win Super Bowls with two different teams. Weeb Ewbank won NFL titles with the Baltimore Colts in 1958 and 1959 and then won Super Bowl III with the New York Jets in 1968.
You wonder why coaching contracts are so short: three, four, five years. You wonder why Green Bay's Mike Sherman got fired after five winning seasons followed by one 4-12. Then you see a pattern.
Only five coaches in NFL history have won titles after their fifth year on a job: Landry, Green Bay's Curly Lambeau in his ninth year, Philadelphia's Greasy Neale and Oakland's John Madden in their eighth years and Pittsburgh's Chuck Noll in his sixth year.
True, four are in the Hall of Fame and Madden is a finalist this year, but all coached in an era of slightly more patience ... only slightly.
Like Halas, Lambeau's long coaching career began (1919) before title games were played. He was in his ninth year before the Packers placed first in the standings.
Landry was the first coach of the 1960 expansion Cowboys, who stuck with him from thin until thick.
Cowher, dean of NFL coaches, is lucky he works for the same Rooney family that stuck with Noll, but unlucky that Noll had won four Super Bowls by his 11th season. Cowher is 1-4 in AFC title games and 0-1 in the Super Bowl for owners who reward consistency.
The urgency to win is greater now with free agency increasing possibilities and high franchise cost increasing demands.
In the last 25 years, a coach has been on the job only 2.7 years before winning his first title. In the first 47 years of playoff games, the average was 3.7.
In the last 25 years, Holmgren is the only Super Bowl winner to do it as late as his fifth season. That 1996 title in Green Bay was as patient as the Packers apparently are going to get.
Now in his seventh season in Seattle, Holmgren has survived the loss of his dual title of general manager and is attempting to make history.
In only his fourth season in Carolina, Fox is in prime time to win his first. He would join Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells and Mike Ditka in that span.
If the Bears win in Smith's third season next year, Smith would join very good company, including Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, Bill Walsh and Shanahan.
He's already behind Halas, Paul Brown, Blanton Collier and Joe Gibbs, each of whom won in his first or second season.
