It's still probable the Lions and Steve Mariucci will end up making a match, but it's far from inevitable. Some sources who know the former San Francisco head coach put the odds as low as 50-50 that he'll be able to talk himself into the job.

That's right, talk himself into it. If Detroit gets desperate and throws a $4 million annual salary at Mariucci, look for Mooch to find enough good reasons to take the plunge in Motown. Especially since his agent at IMG, Gary O'Hagan, probably won't let him turn such a deal down in light of Mariucci passing on the Notre Dame and Tampa Bay jobs last offseason. IMG will argue that you can't keep saying no to such offers and still expect to keep getting them.

But keep this in mind: Mariucci's wife, Gayle, adores living in the Bay Area and isn't thrilled with the idea of leaving it for Michigan. Four million dollars a year can buy a lot of happiness, but it can't buy you good weather. If there's a steeper quality of life drop-off in the NFL than going from San Francisco to Detroit, I'd like to know what it is.

In reality, Mariucci may be a Michigan native, but he's more of a California guy these days than anything else. He loves having that perpetual deep tan and living the West Coast lifestyle. In his heart of hearts, it may be tough to go back to the cold and gray days of his home state.

Also, Mariucci may be torn between the lure of taking a year off from coaching to do TV work and make high-paying appearances and not wanting to sit out a year and become less visible on the league's radar screen.

Will the Lions' Matt Millen get his man? It's likely. But it's not a lock.

When Millen fired head coach Marty Mornhinweg on Monday, the assumption around the league was that the Lions president/CEO already had a deal cooked with Mariucci, otherwise he wouldn't have moved so swiftly the morning after the Super Bowl.

But such is not the case. As he has done in other instances, Millen leaped first, without knowing for certain where he would land. Or as one NFL team executive put it this week, with 31 other teams and 31 other general managers, a pre-arranged deal would be the standard practice before canning the incumbent. But with Millen, all bets are off.

Here's one successful big-name head coach Millen won't be landing: Three-time Super Bowl champion Joe Gibbs. League sources on Friday confirmed what the Detroit News first reported: that Millen contacted his former head coach in Washington to see if he had any interest in returning to the NFL after 10 years out of the game.

Gibbs, 62, could not be reached for comment Friday, but sources say he politely declined Millen's overtures. Gibbs was the Redskins' head coach from 1981-92, but quit the NFL and eventually became a winner as a NASCAR owner.

Gibbs is a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons and serves on the team's board of directors. He has had other opportunities in the past 10 years to return to an NFL sideline, but turned them down.

Millen played his final NFL season for Gibbs in 1991, which was Washington's most recent Super Bowl champion. The two remain friends.

Could the league's new guidelines stipulating that teams must interview at least one black candidate for each head coaching vacancy wind up being considered more of a detriment than a positive development? That line of thinking is starting to be heard within league circles, especially among some black assistant coaches, who feel that most of this year's coaching searches have only included token black candidates.

The concern is that with former Vikings head coach Dennis Green being the only black candidate that Dallas and Jacksonville interviewed -- and in the Cowboys' case there was only phone contact with Green -- that those searches weren't exactly examples of wide-open experiments in diversity.

Also, Green this week declined to interview in Detroit because he couldn't be convinced that the Lions job wasn't all but promised to Mariucci in advance. That perception might make it difficult for Detroit to find a black candidate to interview, and thus comply with the league guidelines.

"Some people feel it's even worse now, worse than if they hadn't addressed the issue at all," said one league source close to the minority coaching community. "The process is a farce, and some people are telling candidates to not interview, to decline the interview unless they can be sure it's a serious inquiry."

But Atlanta Falcons executive vice president and chief administrative officer Ray Anderson, a member of the league diversity committee that set up those guidelines, strongly disagrees with that shortsighted approach.

"It's too early to judge the initiative by the unique situation that Jerry Jones was in in Dallas, and the bad fit in Jacksonville with Denny Green," Anderson said. "And then, the Detroit situation is at best, bizarre. Both Cincinnati and San Francisco have taken the guidelines very seriously, and you don't want to disregard the progress that has been made because of a couple unique situations.

"Anyone who would say it's worse than it was before isn't being realistic. Before you could run around without the glare of the spotlight on you when you were conducting your search. Now at least you can't do that. You are going to draw attention. Some situations are going to have some uniqueness, but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say the whole initiative if flawed. It's too early to say that."

The way I see it, Monte Kiffin and Jim Johnson owe Terry Donahue and the San Francisco 49ers quite a debt of thanks. Both veteran defensive coordinators -- two of the best in the game -- got big raises from their current teams after the 49ers' general manager asked them to interview for San Francisco's head coaching vacancy.

Tampa Bay's Kiffin on Thursday night accepted a reported three-year deal for $5.1 million, just before he was scheduled to fly to San Francisco for an interview. Philadelphia's Johnson earned a four-year, $3.6 million package last week after the 49ers had contacted him.

Including the reported signing bonus of $1.1 million, Kiffin's deal averages $1.7 million, an unprecedented sum for an NFL assistant. Johnson's deal averages $900,000 per season.

Consider that both men will make more this season than Minnesota head coach Mike Tice, whose $600,000 salary in 2002, the league's lowest, jumps to the $800,000 range this year. Kiffin's deal also tops those agreed to recently by Marvin Lewis in Cincinnati ($1.5 million average) and Jack Del Rio in Jacksonville ($1.3 million), as well as several other incumbent head coaches like Oakland's Bill Callahan and Buffalo's Gregg Williams.

Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.