It seems likely that Gruden spends more time watching tape than the average N.F.L. coach; certainly he spends more time talking to other coaches, because he has no secrets to protect. From one perspective, this might seem like a waste: one of football’s sharpest minds, watching all the teams without coaching any of them.

But, from a different perspective, it is football’s complexity and secrecy that seem wasteful: all that intelligence and effort devoted to delicate, multivariable contingency plans that the vast majority of fans will never notice, let alone decipher. Football strategy, an arms race between offenses and defenses, is a bit like Beane’s moneyball: it doesn’t necessarily make the sport more entertaining, and may indeed make it less so. Tim Tebow, of the Denver Broncos, became one of the year’s biggest stories precisely because he counters this trend: he is a much maligned quarterback, dogged but crude, who has thrilled fans—and converted Gruden, a former skeptic—by reviving a violent and risky offensive scheme called the option, which was supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the speed and aptitude of modern N.F.L. defenders. Tebow throws less and runs more: instead of looking calmly downfield, he might scuttle toward the sideline, daring a linebacker to try to tackle him.

John Madden, the ultimate coach-turned-commentator, discovered that, after twelve years of coaching professional football, he was burned out; his thirty-year second act, as an analyst and a lovable celebrity, eventually came to define him, and he never seemed to question his decision to abandon the sidelines. Gruden is still widely perceived as a potential coach—his name is mentioned, online and on sports radio, whenever there is a quivering team in need of defibrillation. But executives at ESPN won’t say whether his new contract includes a provision that would allow him to return to coaching, and, for now, Gruden considers himself lucky to have one of football’s best jobs. “Every time, after a Monday-night game, I try to walk by the locker rooms, because I love to see the team that just won,” he says. “And then you drift by the losing team’s locker room. You just see the pain, the fatigue in people’s faces—that’s what you don’t miss.”

Gruden grew up in a football family, the son of a journeyman coach, Jim Gruden, who was hired as an assistant at Notre Dame in 1978, when Gruden was fifteen. There was AstroTurf in the basement and Notre Dame memorabilia on the walls. The décor changed in 1981, when his father was fired, which turned Gruden against the Fighting Irish without turning him against the game. He wanted to be an élite quarterback, but he wasn’t as strong or as fast as his younger brother Jay, who went on to be a star at the University of Louisville and in the Arena Football League. So Jon enrolled at the University of Dayton, where he was a communications major and a second-string quarterback for a third-tier team. He discovered that he loved studying anything that was football and nothing that wasn’t.

In “Do You Love Football?!,” a memoir that Gruden published after his Super Bowl victory, he remembers his peculiar fondness for the aesthetics of coaching: as a teen-ager, he practiced drawing perfect chalk circles so that when the time came to diagram plays his “X”s and “O”s would be neat and consistent. He proved himself at a series of assistant-coaching jobs at colleges, and then, starting in 1990, in the N.F.L., working as a glorified secretary for Mike Holmgren, the offensive coördinator for the San Francisco 49ers, who found that his new assistant was unstumpable.

Gruden was thirty-one when the Philadelphia Eagles named him their offensive coördinator, and he was thirty-four when Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, named him head coach. Gruden modernized the Raiders’ playbook, using short pass plays to lure opposing defensive backs toward the line of scrimmage, leaving them more vulnerable to occasional long passes. In 2002, Davis traded Gruden’s services to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in exchange for four prime draft picks and eight million dollars.

Gruden’s success in Tampa Bay may have arrived too quickly. He won the Super Bowl in his first year, propelled by a ferocious defense. Since he is considered an offense-minded coach, some of the credit went to Monte Kiffin, the team’s revered defensive coördinator. In the years that followed, the Buccaneers never won another playoff game, and Gruden struggled to build a reliable offense. In his last six seasons, the team cycled through seven different starting quarterbacks. By the time he was fired, his record at Tampa Bay was fifty-seven wins and fifty-five losses. He pushed the Buccaneers to their first Super Bowl, but he left behind a team that was worse than the one he inherited.

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Earlier this season, on a Tampa radio station, Shaun King, a former Buccaneer quarterback, complained that Gruden was “judgmental” and “dishonest.” Gruden replied, mischievously, “I did fail miserably in developing Shaun King.” By most accounts, Gruden had strained relationships with many of his Buccaneers; Derrick Brooks, a linebacker who was sent to the Pro Bowl, the league’s all-star game, eleven times, recalls that he occasionally served as a mediator between his teammates and Gruden. But players who aren’t winning consistently are supposed to be unhappy—and no coach had great success with King, an outstanding college quarterback who never became an outstanding professional. Coaches are at the mercy of their players, and this must be the worst part of the job: watching helplessly as one perfectly conceived play after another springs imperfectly, sometimes disastrously, to life.

To see football from a coach’s perspective is to see almost nothing but failure: a grim parade of misaligned bodies, incorrect decisions, missed signals, and bad ideas, occasionally interrupted by a heads-up play or a feat of physical genius. Football is entertainment, but the players dissected on Gruden’s screens seem less like performers in the spotlight than workers under surveillance. Ensconced in his lair in Tampa, far from the “Monday Night Football” cameras, Gruden can sound shockingly negative. He is forever judging players who don’t or can’t excel—“slapdicks,” he calls them, or, more familiarly, “slappies.” A defensive lineman gets shoved back on his heels and collapses, too calmly, onto the turf. “He just looks like he’s enjoying this, getting blocked,” Gruden says. Three receivers run malformed routes, and they all end up in the same throwing lane. “That’s horrific,” Gruden says. An offensive tackle dives halfheartedly at the feet of a defender, who leaps over him and knocks down the quarterback. “I can’t take it,” Gruden says.

It is an analyst’s job to notice these errors, and to somehow incorporate them into a coherent account of the game. John Madden revolutionized the form, highlighting mistakes while also minimizing them, by deflating the game’s pretensions. He talked as if he were standing with friends around a barbecue grill, and his casual diction encouraged fans to imagine highly paid professionals as spirited amateurs. He taught viewers how to recognize well-laid blocks, but he also loved fat guys, busted plays, muddy fields. The NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth, a former wide receiver, has honed a smooth, aloof style, presenting players’ errors for inspection and gentle ridicule. During a recent game, he responded to an interception by saying, with satisfaction, “He made a blind throw, and paid a big price for it.”

But, for Gruden, there is nothing funny about a mistake, and if he downplays errors it’s because he wants to fix them. His enthusiasm isn’t meant to fool the fans—it’s meant to motivate and inspire them, as if they were players. Some of Gruden’s best moments occur when he forgets where he is, offering viewers advice they are unlikely to use in their everyday lives. One night, a slow-motion replay of a short throw known as a screen pass inspired him to wax pedagogical on the art of blocking. “When you run a screen pass, and you’re the first lineman out, you have to look for that linebacker who’s matching the back in man-to-man coverage,” he said. “And, if you get him, you’ve got a big play. Great job!”

“Monday Night Football” has been one of television’s highest-rated programs since its début, on ABC, in 1970. Roone Arledge, the television executive who created it, realized that the tribes of fans who watched their local teams on Sunday would also tune in, en masse, for a nationally televised game on Monday. The timing, and the bright lights, implied that the Monday game was special, and the perception has lingered. But, because the games are scheduled months in advance, and because football—with its short season and frequent injuries—is hard to predict, Monday’s games are no better or worse, on average, than any others. The show moved from ABC to its corporate sibling ESPN in 2006, and the transition from an entertainment network to a sports network has been accompanied by a shift in emphasis. Where once “Monday Night Football” tried to link football to popular culture (the comedian Dennis Miller spent two seasons in the booth), now it is dedicated to football purism.

Even so, “Monday Night Football” is the most popular show on cable television, typically drawing about thirteen million viewers—more than twice as many, often, as its closest competitors. No sport has benefitted more than football from television’s high-definition reinvention, which makes it somewhat easier to follow twenty-two men, wearing suits of plastic armor, carrying out twenty-two different assignments at the same time.

Earlier this year, the league was fending off inquiries about the dangers posed to players by concussions, and fans thought that a labor dispute might cancel the season. But the players and owners reached an agreement, and the disturbing research into head injuries hasn’t yet eroded football’s reputation, however mystifying, for providing wholesome and patriotic entertainment. Instead, it’s the National Basketball Association that had to cancel part of the season. And the sixth game of this year’s World Series, hailed as an all-time classic, drew about as many viewers as a regular-season football game a few nights later.

Midway through the season, the Chiefs seemed promising: they were led by Matt Cassel, the quarterback whom Gruden had called an “outstanding young man.” Then they lost two seemingly easy games, and Cassel injured his hand; the new Chiefs quarterback was Tyler Palko, an unheralded twenty-eight-year-old whose résumé includes engagements in the United Football League and the Canadian Football League. By contrast, Brady, the Patriots’ quarterback, could be the most accurate and effective passer of his generation; Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ crafty coach, is probably the most feared man in football.

By the time Gruden and the others arrived in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on a Saturday morning in November, Patriots-Chiefs no longer seemed like a battle of equals. At the first on-site production meeting, at a hotel on the stadium grounds, Gruden addressed the group, explaining how his various observations might fit into story lines. He talked about how the Patriots like to start plays before their opponents can get set, and how their constantly fluctuating formations can confuse opposing teams. Then he switched to the language of television. “I want to show confusion, chaos—I want to show stress,” he said. “And I want to show the Patriots creating that stress.”

Gruden, Jaworski, and the rest of the crew filed into a cinder-block room in the bowels of the stadium, where they interviewed various Patriots. The team’s two best receivers arrived together: Wes Welker, a small, intense veteran wide receiver, and Rob Gronkowski, an ingenuous six-foot-six tight end, who looks like a teen-ager still learning to handle an epic growth spurt. The producers thought it might be fun to frame Welker and Gronkowski as the Patriots’ “Odd Couple,” and someone was dispatched to see about licensing the theme song. It was an inane idea, but it would give the producers an excuse to broadcast a package of clips of the two receivers, helping viewers to understand their divergent styles: Welker puts himself exactly where the ball will find him, while Gronkowski can reach over, around, or through defenders to make a catch.

On Sunday, ESPN technicians set up eight television screens in a hotel conference room, so that Gruden and the rest of the team could watch all the day’s games at the same time. Gruden sat in front of the one showing the Baltimore Ravens versus the Cincinnati Bengals—he was rooting for the Bengals, who employ his younger brother, Jay, as offensive coördinator. That night, Gruden and the crew travelled half an hour south, to Providence, Rhode Island, where the Chiefs were staying. They were searching for hope. Tyler Palko, nattily attired in a jacket, a checked shirt, and a tie with a tie pin, seemed mellow and unflustered; he referred to his coach, Todd Haley, as Todd instead of Coach. Romeo Crennel, the Chiefs’ defensive coördinator, was jolly but not necessarily reassuring.