It's over. The Age of Manliness in sports is finished. Yes, all three of our classic All-American sports -- baseball, football and basketball -- have been co-opted by nerds, by mathematicians and philosophers. Real men no longer need apply! Our athletes today are just so many video-game pieces -- incidentally flesh and blood. Why, it's as if the western movie has been turned into ballet or hip-hop turned into a string quartet. Oh, the shame of it.

Baseball, football and basketball used to be run by grizzled old players who had lived the right stuff. But today, our three champions are all coached by men who played not a single day in the big leagues. Interlopers, imposters, wannabes.

Jack McKeon is a grandfather, rescued from the rocking chair to manage the Florida Marlins. As a player, the closest he ever got to the major leagues was a Class AA spring training camp 51 years ago.

Gregg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, never even played in a minor league. He was an air force officer, for goodness sake. And Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, was a preppy who had an undistinguished gridiron career at Wesleyan College. Excuse me: Wesleyan? Ladies and gentleman, what is happening to our red-blooded games? It's like having Bill Gates run the Marines and Dr. Phil in charge of the bureau of Firearms, Tobacco and Alcohol.

All this started back in 1964 when a retired metallurgist named Earnshaw Cook came out with a book published by MIT entitled Percentage Baseball. It was heretical. Bat your best hitter first, not third. Never bunt -- never. Relief pitchers should be used to start games. And so forth. Real baseball people, who knew the real percentages, said Cook was nuts. Then along came a busher named Earl Weaver, who couldn't hit himself, but pretty much proved Cook right. The manager's idea of strategy: two walks and a three-run homer. Dr. Longball. An evangelical Christian on the Orioles once said: "Earl, you gotta walk with the Lord." Weaver replied: "I'd rather you walk with the bases loaded." Earl went into the Hall of Fame.

An amateur statistician named Bill James began writing more popular heresy. Oakland general manager Billy Beane, a bust as a player, took up James' sacrilegious ideas and Oakland bloomed. Toronto and Boston joined the apostasy. The Red Sox even hired James, which is like Dick Cheney hiring a French chef.

Meanwhile, Patriots' owner Robert Kraft chose Belichick, who majored in economics, as his coach, because Kraft was impressed that Belichick understood "incremental analysis" about team payroll. Payroll, not passing. Belichick boned up on fourth-down strategy by reading an Internet piece by a Cal Berkeley professor about the statistical disadvantages of punting. The trend accelerates.

The New Jersey Nets fired coach Byron Scott, an elite former NBA star, and hired Lawrence Frank, a 33-year-old 5-foot-8 munchkin, who, in college, was a manager -- yeah, the guy who handed out towels to the real players -- and has never been a head coach, except maybe for a CYO kids team. And Frank has the Nets playing like gangbusters.

Hey, if we can put a man on the moon, and a rover on Mars, maybe the same kind of guys can win a stupid game. Still, it makes you yearn for the good old simple days of gut-feeling in sport, like when Chuck Dressen of the Dodgers used to say: "Stay close, boys, and I'll think of something."

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.