In Herm's Head

"If we continue to play the way we've been playing, we've got a shot. And that's all you can ask for. It really depends on this month and how we're going to finish up this month and go into November.

"If you can win some games in November," he continues, "it sets you up pretty good for the December run. After this month, we'll know more about our football team."

Even his mother notices that he doesn't betray his feelings on the sidelines.

"When they show him [on television], he just has his arms crossed and he is standing there," Martha Edwards says. "They don't show him too much because I think he never shows emotions. It's just not interesting enough for them."

It wasn't always that way.

Nobody had a bigger mouth than the teenage Herm Edwards. For his inabili­ty to shut up, he earned the nickname "Herm the Germ." He rubbed his shoes with Vaseline so they'd shine in the lights for Friday-night football games. Every chance he got, he reminded anyone who would listen that he'd play in the NFL someday.

"He told all his friends and his coaches, 'You will see me on TV one day,'" Martha Edwards recently told The Pitch from her home in Seaside, California, where Edwards grew up. "They laughed at him. They made fun of him."

So Edwards just said it louder and more often.

He took his boisterous attitude to college, where he bounced around from the University of California-Berkeley to Monterey Peninsula Junior College, then back to Cal and then to San Diego State.

After he graduated, no NFL teams were interested in the skinny defensive end who spent every game in the face of the other teams' wide receivers. But Edwards showed up at the Philadelphia Eagles' training camp and, simply by outworking everyone, ended up a starter by the first preseason game.

In the NFL, Edwards started to mellow. He remembered what his father had taught him about how to succeed. Herman Edwards Sr. served in World War II. Afterward, he was working as a checkpoint guard at an Army base in Gelnhausen, West Germany, where Martha Gerstner was a switchboard operator. They dated for six years before she agreed to return to the States and marry him. Edwards Sr., who died in 1978, warned his son that, with a black father and a white mother, he was sure to face prejudice — but he could beat it by working hard.

Herm Edwards was never a star in the NFL. He never made the Pro Bowl. Instead, he took his father's advice about hard work and didn't miss a game for nine of his 10 seasons — 135 consecutive starts.

He made a name for himself by being in the right spot at the right time in one game, on November 19, 1978, just months after his father's death.

Edwards' Eagles were behind the Giants, 17-12, late in the fourth quarter. The Giants' quarterback fumbled a handoff, and Edwards scooped it up and ran it back for a touchdown. Eagles fans would remember the play as "the Miracle at the Meadowlands."

Edwards offers a simple explanation for how he ended up with that ball. "All you can ask is for an opportunity, and then you have to take it," he says. "I've never squandered my opportunities, and I don't take them lightly."

After he quit playing, Edwards went to work as a scout for the Chiefs in 1990. Edwards found a mentor at the Chiefs in defensive-backs coach Tony Dungy. When Dungy took over as head coach in Tampa in 1996, he took Edwards with him. Dungy taught Edwards his conservative style of play calling and sold him on a new philosophy: abandoning the field-general style of coaching and instead treating players almost as equals. It took Edwards about a decade to work up to a job as head coach, but in 2001 he took the helm of the New York Jets.

Edwards made it to the playoffs three out of his five years with the Jets. But in 2005, the Jets managed just four wins and put up 24 points (or more) only three times. Injuries likely contributed to his team's poor performance. But no city is tougher on its coaches than New York, and Edwards was blamed for turning a playoff-quality team into a loser.