In Vick, Reid has his own Favre

It has taken nearly 30 years in all, but Andy Reid might have finally heeded the best and most important advice that Mike Holmgren, his lifetime coaching mentor, ever showed him by example.

Reid was a graduate assistant at Brigham Young University and Holmgren the BYU quarterbacks coach when the two first met, and the coach was taken by the passion and zeal of the former offensive lineman.

Holmgren's appeal was obvious to everyone who worked with or played for him. He was funny and personable, which didn't hurt, but he also had an innate brilliance for devising and implementing coaching schemes, and for selecting the right guy from among the available players to do the right job.

After their brief time together at BYU, Holmgren helped Reid land a position on the staff of San Francisco State, which had been Holmgren's previous stop. From there, Reid would coach at Northern Arizona, the University of Texas-El Paso, and Missouri. Holmgren went from the passing offense of LaVell Edwards at BYU to the West Coast laboratory of Bill Walsh and George Seifert with the San Francisco 49ers.

Six years and two championships later, Holmgren was hired as head coach of the Green Bay Packers, and when he put together his staff, Andy Reid was one of the first calls he made. Onboard with the Packers for what would be an amazing ride, Reid studied Holmgren carefully and tried not to miss a thing.

"I had a hard time believing, [among] head coaches in the National Football League, anybody did it any better than Mike Holmgren," Reid said. "And now that I've been a head coach, I still feel that way. The way he handled all the different situations, there weren't a lot of holes there. And he's a smart guy, good with people, and makes good decisions."

Some of the things Reid took from his seven seasons with Holmgren in Green Bay are apparent. His version of the West Coast offense borrowed Holmgren's signature screen pass and an affection for double tight-end sets when it makes sense. But all West Coast models are tweaked and customized by their owners, and Reid's interpretation is influenced as much by the vertical, stretch-the-field philosophy of Sid Gillman - the granddaddy of bombs-away football - as by Walsh's intricate horizontal creation.

What Reid really got from Holmgren, however, is a template for how the head coach should organize his team and how the personnel should be fitted to the scheme. In this 2011 season, his 13th as a head coach, his 20th since beginning to work full time with Holmgren, and his 30th since meeting the man, Reid has put the most difficult, least intuitive lesson into play.

The quarterback is the most important player on a football field, but never more so than in the read-and-react world of the West Coast offense. That quarterback doesn't just have two or three options on a given play but an almost limitless array of combinations that can spring the lock of an opposing defense.

The West Coast demands that the quarterback is a disciplined student of the offense. He must be predictable and reliable, cool in the pocket; willing to sublimate his first instincts and make the instant computations necessary to sort through the progressions of the offense until he finds the right one.

In San Francisco, Mike Holmgren's quarterback for six of his seven years as QB coach and offensive coordinator was Joe Montana (followed by Steve Young), and there is little doubt no quarterback could have fit that offense better than Montana. He had a good arm, not a great one, but he was accurate and calm and devoted to the precise calculus of the West Coast offense.

By the time Holmgren was hired away from San Francisco, it was an article of faith that, for a West Coast QB, steady was more important than showy, and as many games are won in the film room as on the field.

Now that his legacy is that of a graying memory playing touch football in Wrangler jeans, it is hard to remember exactly who Brett Favre was in 1992 when Mike Holmgren sighed and, perhaps against his better judgment, made Favre the starting quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.

Favre was a wild washout as a rookie for the Atlanta Falcons, with a reputation for running the roads at night and sleeping through team meetings during the day. He improvised plays in practice, drew receiving routes in the dirt and generally drove head coach Jerry Glanville crazy, which wasn't that long a drive.

The boy had an arm, though, but the only two passes caught during his rookie season were caught by the other team. When someone asked Glanville what it would take to get Favre in a game, he replied, "A plane crash."

Green Bay general manager Ron Wolf traded for Favre in the following offseason and installed him as the backup behind Don Majkowski for his new head coach. No one expected all that much, and things would have been a lot simpler if Majkowski hadn't gotten hurt early in the season.

Favre was still hardheaded and unpredictable, and, well, he didn't remind Holmgren of Joe Montana that much. He threw three interceptions in one game, fumbled four times in another, and fans in Lambeau Field were calling for third-string rookie Ty Detmer.

Holmgren swallowed hard and stuck with Favre, however. He took the young quarterback out behind the practice complex one day near the end of that season and told Favre that he was his quarterback, and, if they went down, they were going down together. The offensive system and the team were both in his hands.

"It was pretty wild here for a while," Holmgren once said, looking back across a championship or two.

You'd have to admit the decision to go with Favre worked out fairly well.

Andy Reid was on hand for all of that initial wildness and ultimate success, but when it came time to draft a quarterback for the Eagles, he selected a guy who was as settled and predictable as the young Favre was fractious and impulsive.

Donovan McNabb was just the kind of quarterback Reid wanted, one who would master the intricacies of the offense, become as familiar with its paths to success as well as with its escape hatches. (Favre never developed an interest in the latter, and, late in his career with Green Bay while speaking to Philadelphia reporters, he boasted that he wasn't a "Checkdown Charlie" - a pretty blatant slap at McNabb that must have stung Reid as well.)

McNabb was the guy for Reid, but he never became The Guy in the biggest of games, a fact even Reid was forced to admit after a decade of trying. The Eagles, steadfast if nothing else, went out and drafted McNabb's apparent replacement, selecting another system wonk who would make the right reads and deliver efficiency at the expense of electricity.

The thing was, Kevin Kolb never got the chance to become the next Donovan McNabb, and maybe he should thank Clay Matthews for helping him avoid that lukewarm fate. Kolb suffered a concussion, Michael Vick began to light up the sky with his fireworks, and Reid rode along for the rest of the 2010 season.

Here we are a year later, and, if you think about it, Andy Reid has done the most out-of-character thing in a coaching term during which he always stays in character. Not only did he dismiss Kolb, the handpicked successor, and stay with Vick, but he approved the organization's decision to make Vick the face and future of the franchise with a huge, front-loaded contract.

The precious offense that Reid carefully crafted from the cloth handed down from Gillman to Walsh to Holmgren has been given over for good to a quarterback whose next move is never scripted, whose courage is often greater than his discretion, and whose track record as a disciplined performer is neither lengthy nor impressive.

Notwithstanding that, he also happens to be great.

It is what Holmgren saw in Favre in 1992. That the man is bigger than the manuscript. It is what Reid sees in Vick in 2011. That there are some things more important the "t" in system being carefully crossed.

It took long enough to get to this point, of course, but nobody ever said mentoring - or winning a Super Bowl - was an overnight process.