A players' coach

Del Rio appears to have a lot going for him in Jacksonville

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Three weeks have passed, and already Jack Del Rio has surprised the skeptics. Jacksonville's rookie head coach hasn't activated himself once in that span, not even for voluntary offseason workouts.

Del Rio, who at 39 is six months younger than Jerry Rice, wears the label of a player trapped in a coach's body. Well, that's not quite right. Make it a coach trapped in an ex-player's body. Or whatever combination fits best for a guy who last year as Carolina's defensive coordinator famously charged onto the field to join his players in a game-clinching celebration scrum.

There are hands-on coaches, and then there are pile-on coaches.

"The way I look at it, I'm myself," said Del Rio, who on Jan. 17 became the game's second-youngest head coach, after Tampa Bay's Jon Gruden. "I can't unwire the way I'm wired. I don't really feel like I think like a player. I played, there's no question about that. But now I'm a coach, and there's a big difference. I can only go so far. On Sundays, I stand behind that white line -- most of the time."

Most of the time, Jaguars fans will be able to count on Del Rio to straddle that line with a familiarity to both worlds that autocratic former Jacksonville head coach Tom Coughlin never could have affected. After all, Del Rio's 11-year NFL playing career as a middle linebacker (1985-95) was almost twice as long as his six-year assistant coaching apprenticeship (1997-2002).

Del Rio is dubious as to whether the proximity to his playing days will really make a difference in his relationship with his players. Others, me included, aren't. With on-field talent dispersed so evenly, keeping a team playing hard and committed to one goal seems to be about half the battle in today's NFL coaching. Coughlin clearly lost his own locker room two or three years ago, and it was a factor in the Jags' declining performance.

Del Rio acknowledges that he walks in the door with heightened credibility due to his playing career, but says it only extends so far.

"I think too much can be made of that at times," he said. "I think it buys you about the first half hour in your association with a guy, whether you play or not played. At some point, you're either helping that guy get better and he knows it, or you're full of it and he knows it."

Who makes the better NFL head coach, the former league veteran or the career coach? The data is inconclusive. Young former NFL players like Jeff Fisher, Tony Dungy, Herman Edwards, Bill Cowher and Jim Haslett have known plenty of recent success, but Bill Parcells, Steve Mariucci, Mike Shanahan, Brian Billick, Bill Belichick, Andy Reid and Mike Holmgren did not have NFL playing careers to speak of.

Still, somehow I expect that at this point in his coaching career, Del Rio's strongest attribute is his ability to relate to players and infuse them with the same wall-to-wall enthusiasm that helped him squeeze every last drop of production out of his athletic talents. I know this: He has the Jacksonville job because he is both an excellent coach, and a young, fresh face who stands in stark contrast to his predecessor's.

"I count on being able to help the guys that I coach go out on the field and play with confidence and poise and a real understanding of all the different situations that they're going to face," Del Rio said.

"I want them to have a confident approach and to be able to go out and play aggressively in that setting. I know my role now is to help teach them and then stand back and watch, where before I prepared to actually go out and do it. It's a different mindset, no question."

It's not a mindset Del Rio thought he'd ever have until the mid-1990s or so, when he made the Pro Bowl as a Viking and worked under Dungy's tutelage. Dungy's four-year stint as Minnesota's defensive coordinator (1992-95) mirrored Del Rio's tenure with the Vikings.

"We would talk," Del Rio said, "and he would tell me he thought I'd be good at this. He thought I'd enjoy being around the game. He probably had the biggest impact in terms of me saying, 'You know, I'd like to do that some day.'"

I remember meeting Del Rio for the first time at a Vikings-Saints joint training camp workout in LaCrosse, Wis., in July 1997, where he was starting his coaching career as an assistant strength coach on the New Orleans staff of new head coach Mike Ditka. After a year out of football, working as a stockbroker, Del Rio was eager to get back into the game. Figuratively if not quite literally.

Less than six years later, Del Rio has completed one of the most meteoric rises in recent NFL coaching history. But in some ways, he hasn't come all that far. It depends on how roughly you measure the distance between the field and the sideline.

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