Conference championship games lack recognizable coaches

In the last 20 years, there have been exactly two men who won the Super Bowl as an unproven head coach. Mike Tomlin and Brian Billick had yet to establish themselves as big time NFL coaches until they won championships with the Steelers and Ravens, respectively.

In three weeks, we are guaranteed to include another coach in that not-so-elite group. The four teams remaining in the 2010 NFL playoffs are all led by coaches who have never even sniffed the Super Bowl as head men.

The AFC title game is the Rookie Coach Bowl, featuring the loyal assistant who inherited a championship-caliber franchise in the Colts’ Jim Caldwell, against the fiery defensive mastermind with Super Bowl pedigree who single-handedly changed the mindset of a team in the Jets’ Rex Ryan.

The NFC Championship features two coaches who have had mild success with their respective franchises, but have yet to reach the Super Bowl with talented teams.

Sean Payton led the Saints to the conference title game in 2006 before losing to the Bears, but besides that year New Orleans has not even reached that far. Brad Childress was a well-known offensive coordinator under Andy Reid in Philadelphia, but had yet to make the Vikings contenders until Brett Favre jumped on the ship before this season.

With Caldwell and Ryan, both coaches are in their first seasons with their respective teams, and both have endured seasons that could not have followed more dissimilar paths. Caldwell inherited a roster chocked full of stars, namely 2009 NFL MVP Peyton Manning. As an assistant under previous coach Tony Dungy, there was little to no transition within the locker room.

Quite frankly, despite Caldwell’s inexperience, the Colts were expected to make it this far.

Ryan is another story. The son of defensive mastermind Buddy, who coached the Bears to the Super Bowl XX title, Rex took over a team coming off an embarrassing finish to the 2008 season and started a rookie quarterback. The Jets were not picked to make the playoffs by practically everyone, and for good reason.

Ryan, who coached the defense for the Ravens before coming to New York, brought his high-wired, tell-it-like-it-is attitude to the Jets, and after a ho-hum 14 weeks, has the Jets soaring into Sunday’s game.

The rookie quarterback is Mark Sanchez, who struggled most of the season before the offense was scaled back late in the year to allow the Jets to play similar to Ryan’s Ravens of old. Like Baltimore in 2008, the Jets used a persistent running game and a suffocating defense to carry their rookie quarterback through to the playoffs.

Each of these coaches come from much different backgrounds to their respective teams, and each have varying levels of experience, but the common denominator between them all is the lack of big-game victories as head coaches.

As history suggests, the Super Bowl champion requires an experienced head coach who has been in the spotlight for several years at the highest level of the sport. The trend will be bucked this year, and one coach will take the leap from promising young coach to established winner.

The sacred threshold awaits, begging to be crossed.

Revis a muzzle in human form

Jets at Bengals, Saturday 4:30, NBC

Note to wide receivers across the NFL: stop calling out Darrelle Revis. The Pro Bowl cornerback for the New York Jets has taken the best locker room quips, tweets, and everything in between from opposing receivers this season. All he’s done in response is shut the best players in the league down completely.

The latest loudmouth to call Revis out was Chad Ochocinco from Cincinnati.

“Darrelle Revis couldn’t cover me in a brown paper bag on a corner of a Manhattan street inside a phone booth,” Ochocinco said.

How many catches did he have Sunday night? Zilch. He played much of the game, too, but it didn’t matter. In the first half, the Jets dominated a unmotivated Bengals team, leading 27-0 at halftime.

Carson Palmer had one of the worst games of his career, completing just 1-of-11 passes before being pulled from the game early in the third quarter.

Yes, the Bengals’ playoff fate had already been decided by kickoff, they knew they’d be the #3 seed in the AFC, but you would think that Ochocinco would want to back up his weeklong taunting.

Here’s a list for you: Andre Johnson, Randy Moss, Robert Meachem, Marques Colston, Devery Henderson. The average receiving numbers per game for those five players was 4.8 catches for 68 yards. Against Revis, none of those players had more than 35 yards and no more than five catches in a game.

Ochocinco gets one more chance this week to break the trend of star receivers silenced by the third-year veteran from Pittsburgh. If he fails to do so, the Jets have the upper hand.

The pressure of this game for New York rests on the defense. With a rookie quarterback and an untested offense around him, the top-rated defense in the NFL will have to be true to form this weekend.

Carson Palmer’s playoff career isn’t much better than the Jets’ Sanchez’s. Palmer tore his ACL in the first quarter of the 2006 Wild Card Playoffs against the Steelers.

Nevertheless, Palmer is an established seven-year veteran and is more prepared for a game of this magnitude than Sanchez.

That being said, it’s hard to prepare for a Rex Ryan defense that only six days before made you look like a third-string Arena League gunslinger.