I met Tony Dungy the first day he enrolled at the University of Minnesota. And I have kept in contact with him since.
I always tell people that if you judge a person from 1 to 10, then Dungy, who brings his Colts to the Metrodome today, is a 20.
He is one of the most amazing people I have met in my long sportswriting career, and I have never heard a person say a bad word about him. He has done so much for so many.
And he brings with him Tom Moore, who was the Gophers offensive coordinator when Dungy was the team's quarterback. Now Moore, who helped recruit Dungy in college, is Dungy's offensive coordinator with Indianapolis, and he will be here today calling the plays for the great Peyton Manning.
"Still going strong," Dungy said of Moore. "Tom is approaching his 70th birthday, and I see no signs of him slowing up. He's got a great relationship with Peyton, and the offense still just keeps rolling, kind of a top-five offense every year. And he's a big, big part of it."
Dungy has a lot of respect for another coordinator in today's game. Leslie Frazier was on Dungy's staff in 2005 and '06 before becoming the Vikings defensive coordinator, so Frazier knows the Colts personnel pretty well.
"He is a good guy, a good coach, but more than that a good person," Dungy, himself a former Vikings defensive coordinator, said of Frazier. "I think [he's] somebody that everybody in the organization kind of tunes in to. The players really like [him], and I think the [Vikings] defense is just going to get better and better.
"Leslie, you know, played on those great Bears teams, and he'd been a head coach in college. He just knows people and he's very, very sharp. He was at Cincinnati and I'd recommended him a couple of places and we said, 'Hey, you ought to come work with us.' And he was a big part of our Super Bowl team, and I just think he's destined to be a head coach."