Zak Keefer | IndyStar

Stephen Holder/IndyStar

Gregory Bull, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Five days after he buried his mother, in January 2002, Tony Dungy lost a playoff game and lost his job. He’d rescued a fledgling franchise from football oblivion, lifted the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to four postseason berths in five years – more than their previous 20 seasons combined – then was coldly and promptly rewarded with a pink slip. Distraught, he mulled retirement. He weighed a life away from football.

Then Jim Irsay called. He sold Dungy on a defense and a team and a city that needed him. It worked out for Tony Dungy in Indianapolis.

On Valentine’s Day 1996, Art Modell, owner of the yet-to-be-named NFL franchise in Baltimore, called his head coach and fired him. Bill Belichick, architect of the Giants’ bruising, championship-winning defense of the late 1980s, had flopped in his first head-coaching gig. He’d warred with star players in Cleveland, with management, with the media. He’d led the Browns to all of one winning season in five years. He was out.

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“Bill Belichick’s five-year reign of error is over,” a local columnist wrote at the time.

Four years later Bob Kraft’s mind was made up: The owner of the New England Patriots was resolute to give Belichick a second chance. There was no other name on his list. Eighteen years later Kraft’s validation sparkles inside his office in Foxborough. That’s where he keeps his five Lombardi Trophies.

It took Pete Carroll nine years in sunny Southern California – and a few national championships – to salvage his reputation in the early 2000s and persuade an NFL team he deserved another shot. Fired by the Jets in 1996. Fired by the Patriots in 1999. Redemption, and a world championship, with the Seahawks in 2014.

Dungy, Belichick, Carroll are three of the most prominent retread success stories in recent NFL memory. Middling results at their first stop, spectacular triumph at their second, or in Carroll’s case, his third. For Dungy, it was about finding the right fit. For Belichick, about swallowing some humility. For Carroll, about learning to adapt. Combined they’ve won seven of the last 15 Super Bowls.

It remains a bold gamble in today’s NFL: Hiring a coach who flunked the first time around. The payoff can be substantial. Dungy, Belichick and Carroll’s stories are a testament to that. Yet it routinely backfires – Eric Mangini, Chip Kelly, Romeo Crennel and Ken Whisenhunt are just a few of the names in recent years – and when it does, the blame falls on the front-office that wasn’t shrewd enough to foresee history repeating itself. In those instances, it typically doesn’t just cost the coach his job. The GM goes with him.

Greg M. Cooper, Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports

The Indianapolis Colts are primed to become the latest franchise willing to bet big on a head coach who previously flopped. His name is Josh McDaniels, and his stormy two-year tenure in Denver is something the Colts’ brass cannot gloss over. They’re betting on the belief those two seasons made McDaniels a better coach and a better man. They’re betting he learned a heck of a lot from it.

If they’re wrong, chances are they won’t get to hire his successor.

McDaniels, to be fair, deserves a clean slate when he lands in Indianapolis. Coaches make mistakes. Coaches learn. Coaches grow. Even Belichick, the greatest of his era, perhaps the greatest ever, was humbled by his failures in Cleveland. “I really screwed that thing up,” Belichick told former Browns GM Ernie Accorsi in 2000, according to Accorsi’s book, “The GM.” That’s not something you often hear from Bill Belichick.

When Carroll looks back on his three-year stay in New England, one that ended seven games above .500, he sees a coach who couldn’t see his own flaws. “When I went to New England,” Carroll said in 2016, “I was really committed to being able to bring the philosophy and do it exactly the way you wanted to do it, and be in control of it. It didn’t really work out that way, the way I hoped. I wasn’t on my game enough to pull that off. It was a great lesson learned.”

Maybe McDaniels is next in line to write his redemption story.

Or maybe his time in Denver will prove a premonition the Colts should’ve seen miles away. Time will tell.

As for the coach-to-be, McDaniels seems to have swallowed the heavy dose of humility that came with his Denver exit. According to an illuminating 2016 Bleacher Report profile, he has kept a spreadsheet on his computer titled “lessonslearned.xls,” updating it throughout his second stint as Patriots’ offensive coordinator. The man seems intent on growing from all that went wrong.

Good. Because plenty did.

“He was emotionally volatile,” longtime Broncos beat reporter Mike Klis said of McDaniels on Indy’s Kent Sterling Show on 1430-AM on Tuesday. “It was a fast-sinking ship ... he had a way of alienating the locker room.”

By numerous accounts McDaniels sought to be Belichick Jr., a fiery, my-way-or-the-highway dictator resolved to impose his beliefs upon the entire building. Problem was he was only 33, and the Broncos handed him personnel control, and it blew up in everyone’s faces. McDaniels wasn’t Belichick. He wasn’t even close. He lost the locker room, lost the team and lost plenty of games. He didn’t make it to a third season.

Joe Mahoney, ASSOCIATED PRESS

McDaniels’ goals if he were ever to land another head-coaching gig, according to the Bleacher Report article: listen more, be more considerate of his players’ and coaches’ time, don’t burn himself out. More subtly put: Don’t try to be something you’re not. Don’t try to be Bill Belichick.

McDaniels won’t be getting personnel control in Indianapolis; that duty falls upon the man hiring him. Chris Ballard laid out the expectations of his new coach back on New Year’s Day, before he ever sat down with his first candidate.

“They’ve got to be able to lead the room,” the Colts’ general manager said. “We’re going to be about teaching and developing players. And you’ve got to live through some bumps when you do that. But that’s very important, so you want a staff full of teachers who can develop not only players, but develop men.”

Ballard believes McDaniels can do this. He wouldn’t be hiring him otherwise.

Furthermore, a coach’s triumphs and failures can’t be viewed in a vacuum. All rosters aren’t created equal – Belichick never had Tom Brady in Cleveland. McDaniels never had Andrew Luck back in Denver. He has had eight years to revisit and reflect on those rocky 18 months. He was 34 when he lost his job. He’s 41 now.

And one of the coaches he’s sought the counsel of, according to the Bleacher Report article: Dungy. A fired coach who found his redemption in his second stop.

“I could relate to where he was at the time, having been fired myself,” Dungy was quoted as saying in the story. “He's a very smart guy, and we just talked about finding the next spot—the one that would be best for him.”

McDaniels will get his shot, here in Indianapolis, handed the keys to a team that slogged to a 4-12 record this fall but offers promise of a brighter future. Luck is expected to return. The team owns the third overall pick in April’s draft. Ballard has about $84 million in salary cap room to spend.

Eight years after flaming out in his first head-coaching stop, Josh McDaniels gets to show everyone what he learned.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.