Peyton Manning vs. Bill Belichick? If you aren't a Patriots fan, root for Manning.

It's important that Peyton Manning continues to shred these so-called defensive masterminds. Last week in his divisional playoff contest against the Kansas City Chiefs, Manning outfitted defensive guru Greg Robinson for a clown suit so hilarious that Robinson promptly resigned out of embarrassment. It was fun to watch.

	No doubt the coordinators of the world look up to Belichick, a former "guru" now a "genius" coach.

Well, now Manning gets to try and climb Mt. Saint Belichick, the Bill Russell of football, on one of the NFL's largest stages, the AFC Championship Game. In the monkey-see-monkey-do world of professional football, Manning out-foxing Belichick might inspire a few more NFL coaches to turn control of their offenses over to their franchise's highest-paid employee.

Manning isn't the only NFL quarterback capable of calling a game at the line of scrimmage. But he's the only NFL quarterback blessed with an offensive coordinator -- Tom Moore -- mature enough and intelligent enough to swallow his ego and liberate his most important player.

That's what it's all about, really: ego. Damn near every NFL coordinator wants to be labeled as a genius by John Madden or Phil Simms or Joe Theismann or Cris Collinsworth. Every time one of TV's talking heads starts squawking about the "genius" of a coordinator, that coordinator starts to fantasize about becoming the next Mike Martz -- the overrated assistant who overshadows his head coach.

You want to know why the responsibility for calling plays was taken away from quarterbacks 25 years ago?

Television.

It's the root of all evil.

These NFL coaches have bigger egos than the players do. They ham for the cameras. They want credit and adulation and celebrity and, most importantly, money. Assistant coaches leak more confidential information -- especially when it puts them in a positive light -- than players ever think about spilling. If the offense isn't working quite right, a coordinator is quick with an "anonymous" leak to his favorite national or local reporter about just which incompetent player -- the one the coordinator didn't want to draft, anyway -- is destroying what would otherwise be a record-breaking unit.

NFL assistants, just like the players, are in it for the money. Hey, I don't blame them. The players sacrifice their bodies. The coaches sacrifice their home lives and families. They work 19-hour days during the season and 14-hour days during the offseason. They put more into the game than anybody. So they all dream of landing the kind of golden parachute that Gregg Williams just received in Washington. Canned as the head coach in Buffalo, Williams picked up a contract worth $1 million-plus a year to direct the Redskins' defense.

To get one of those contracts, you have to have been called a "guru" on the air by a network analyst.

And no one is hailing Moore as a genius because he trained Manning to control an offense. Manning gets all the hype; Moore is an afterthought. Well, I've always believed a good coach gets 99 percent of his work done before kickoff. Game day should be a piece of cake. On game day, a good coach should sit back and watch the players he's prepared go out and make plays.

In Kansas City, Dick Vermeil loves to rant and rave about how the NFL is about the players.

"The fans come out to see the players! It's about the players!" Vermeil loves to say.

It's the coaches who forget that. It's the coaches who put headphones in the quarterback's helmet so they can make him more robotic.

You wonder why some of these quarterbacks can't think? Why they make boneheaded plays? It's because coaches don't train players to think. The coaches train their players to run the 20 plays the offensive coordinator "scripted" on Thursday. And, of course, details of that script are provided to the network broadcast team during its Saturday production meeting with the assistant coaches.

	Mike Martz has proven that the gifted coordinator can't always make the leap.

Obviously, not every QB has the discipline and work ethic to do what Manning does. But there are a half-dozen other quarterbacks around the league who should be liberated and given a little autonomy. Kansas City's Trent Green excels in the two-minute offense. He reminds me of Jim Kelly when Kelly ran the K-Gun in Buffalo. Green is a student of the game, has the respect of his teammates, is mature enough to handle the responsibility, knows what Vermeil wants and gets the ball to the right people.

And maybe now that Chiefs' offensive coordinatorr Al Saunders is about to be showered with one of those phat, new, seven-figure, assistant-coaching contracts, Green will get some control. As productive as K.C.'s offense has been the last two years, it could produce even more if properly tweaked. The tweaking begins with enhanced responsibility for Green.

A quarterback, especially a non-scrambler who doesn't run of breath and routinely get his brain scrambled by a vicious hit, has a better feel for the rhythm of the game than the guy who sits in a booth wondering if the cameras are on him and what the analyst just said about his double-reverse on third-and-2.

Jets' fans, you think Chad Pennington could call a better game than Paul Hackett?

I do.

Jason Whitlock is a columnist for the Kansas City Star (kcstar.com) and a regular contributor on ESPN The Magazine's Sunday morning edition of "The Sports Reporters." He also hosts an afternoon radio show, "The Doghouse," on Kansas City's 61 Sports KCSP. He can be reached at ballstate68@aol.com.