WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Most men like to think they know football, and I mean really well.
Think about it. If you're watching a television show about, say, the Mars rover program, that's probably a time to sit and absorb the information rather than standing up and shouting something like "What, they're deploying the X-ray Lithochemistry device to scan that rock? Come on, man! Use the robotic arm that scans the luminescence of organics there. Do it. Do it, you moron! Do it!"
Men do this all the time with football, questioning the strategy of coaches and the techniques of players and doing it all at high volume. Doesn't matter if the critic has only played the game on Madden NFL. He just knows.
So we come now to the case of Kathryn Smith, the first woman given a full-time NFL coaching assignment. Surely there were some who huffed and puffed when that news broke last week. At the minimum, there were derisive growls that she's only Buffalo's special-teams quality control coach, whatever that means.
Truth is, it means plenty.
It means that Smith, 30, is starting out on the lowest rung of the NFL coaching ladder, which is the best way to determine whether a person has the stomach and the savvy for the job.
It means that Bills Coach Rex Ryan has seen enough during the seven years that Smith has served on his administrative staff in the scouting and personnel departments that her skills are suited to a different challenge with the team.
And it means Smith is getting into the coaching business the hard way, which is always the best way, no matter the line of work.
Quality control is a broad term that applies to everything from entering and categorizing thousands of plays into the computer to analyzing data on opponents' trends to being a gofer on the practice field. Usually, too, it includes organizing and coaching a scout team in a particular area of expertise so that the head coach can know what he's up against and whether his own game plan might actually work.
Smith won't be given any special privileges, at least not the kind that most of us would want to claim. She'll be supervised by a special teams coordinator and outranked by a special teams assistant. If Smith ever gets around to blowing her whistle on the practice field, in other words, there will be other coaches wondering why.
It was the same for new Miami Dolphins Coach Adam Gase when he worked as an offensive quality control coach at Detroit during his early NFL years.
Jon Gruden started out as a quality control coach, too, making $500 a month and frequently sleeping at the San Francisco 49ers' offices. Other future NFL head coaches also did the dirty work of quality control, like Eric Mangini, Tony Sparano, Raheem Morris and Todd Haley.
"It's the greatest job in football as far as learning," Haley said in a 2009 New York Times article.
Haley, like Smith, never played football, but he's busy these days as offensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Now there was another woman, Jen Welter, who got a training-camp job last summer coaching inside linebackers for the Arizona Cardinals. The Palm Beach Post's Jodie Wagner wrote a story about the Sebastian River High School graduate, who played 14 seasons of tackle football in women's professional leagues.
Sort of makes it feel like a revolution is going on, but there long have been women in high NFL front-office positions, like Dawn Aponte of the Dolphins, and women getting opportunities in other men's professional sports, like San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon and like Jessica Mendoza, who recently was named to ESPN's full-time Sunday Night Baseball announcing crew.
What makes Smith different is the challenge of dealing with football players directly and at their foulest. If she's smart enough and tough enough, they'll listen and they'll all succeed together. If not, Ryan will replace her.
It ain't rocket science, though now that we mention it, women had no major difficulty conquering the final frontier of space, either.
Sports on 01/28/2016