Having zipped through all of Washington's preseason games, Parcells then studies the Redskins' first regular-season game, against Minnesota, when their offense looked like it belonged to a different team. As the video reaches the end of the first quarter, Parcells points to the screen and says, "They've shifted more than they did the entire preseason." The Redskins' offense suddenly looks less like the handiwork of their head coach, Joe Gibbs -- whom Parcells has faced 20 times over the years -- than of Al Saunders, the associate head coach for offense the Redskins poached from the Kansas City Chiefs in the off-season. Parcells moves on to examine the 2005 Chiefs. "If you can just understand what they're about, a lot of other things follow," he says. "It's like finding a common denominator in mathematics." What the Chiefs have long been about -- and what the Redskins are newly about -- is exploiting the width of the field. Their running game tends to avoid the inside, or the middle of the field; it's built instead on sweeps and reverses. Their passing game has a lot of quick screens to the outside. And before every snap there's a lot of running around. "One of the worst things you can do on defense is be a reactive defense," Parcells says. "You can't worry about what they're doing. All that shifting, all that movement before the snap, is designed to get you worried about what they're doing. They don't want you to get a good fix. They don't want you to stare down for 10 seconds. They want to create indecision."

Over the next couple of days, Parcells and his coaching staff can drill his team to be ready for pretty much everything that the Redskins can do. He can design a game plan to exploit slow tackles and weak cornerbacks; he even sees an advantage for the Cowboys in the Redskins' new fast-strike style. Referring to Al Saunders, Parcells says: "This other guy, I think, he's a lot more indiscriminate. I think he's not going to be as concerned about the effect on his defense." In other words, the Redskins' defense will pay the price -- in time spent on the field, in fatigue -- for Saunders's disinterest in controlling the ball and the clock.

The game plan doesn't take long to create. Parcells has a dozen assistant coaches studying the same video. There will be no secrets. Information about the surface of the game is not the problem; if anything, there's too much of it. I ask Parcells if there is anything he would like to know that he doesn't know: that is, if he had a spy inside the Redskins who could provide him with answers to any of his questions, what would he ask? He thinks a bit before he finally answers. "I'd like to know their mechanism on audible," he says. "I'd like to know how they were changing the plays."

What has him troubled -- what has him waking up choking on his bile -- isn't what you might expect. It's not concern that the Redskins' coaching staff could spring something on the Cowboys for which they are entirely unprepared. And it's not his team's raw ability. It's a thing that's harder to put into words, and impervious to strategy. Even as he is trying to study his next opponent, he can't shake what happened on Sunday. How his team, the moment the Jaguars pushed back, collapsed. How, the moment the players felt the pressure, they began to commit penalties and the sort of small but critical mental errors that only a coach watching video can perceive. In their performance he smells the sort of failure he defines himself against.

At the back of Parcells's personal binder there are a few loose, well-thumbed sheets that defy categorization: a copy of a speech by Douglas MacArthur; a passage from a book about coaches, which argues that a coach excels by purifying his particular vision rather than emulating a type. Among the papers is an anecdote Parcells brings up often in conversation, about a boxing match that took place nearly 30 years ago between the middleweights Vito Antuofermo and Cyclone Hart. Parcells loves boxing; his idea of a perfect day in the off-season is to spend it inside some ratty boxing gym in North Jersey. "It's a laboratory," he says. "You get a real feel for human behavior under the strongest duress -- under the threat of physical harm." In this laboratory he has identified a phenomenon he calls the game quitter. Game quitters, he says, seem "as if they are trying to win, but really they've given up. They've just chosen a way out that's not apparent to the naked eye. They are more concerned with public opinion than the end result."

Parcells didn't see the Hart-Antuofermo fight in person but was told about it, years ago, by a friend and boxing trainer, Teddy Atlas. It stuck in his mind and now strikes him as relevant. Seated, at first, he begins to read aloud from the pages: how in this fight 29 years ago Hart was a well-known big puncher heavily favored against the unknown Vito Antuofermo, how Hart knocked Antuofermo all over the ring, how Antuofermo had no apparent physical gifts except "he bled well." "But," Parcells reads, "he had other attributes you couldn't see." Antuofermo absorbed the punishment dealt out by his natural superior, and he did it so well that Hart became discouraged. In the fifth round, Hart began to tire, not physically but mentally. Seizing on the moment, Antuofermo attacked and delivered a series of quick blows that knocked Hart down, ending the fight.

The Redskins video is still frozen on the screen behind Parcells. He is no longer sitting but is now on his feet. "This is the interesting part," he says, then reads:

"When the fighters went back to their makeshift locker rooms, only a thin curtain was between them. Hart's room was quiet, but on the other side he could hear Antuofermo's cornermen talking about who would take the fighter to the hospital. Finally he heard Antuofermo say, 'Every time he hit me with that left hook to the body, I was sure I was going to quit. After the second round, I thought if he hit me there again, I'd quit. I thought the same thing after the fourth round. Then he didn't hit me no more.'