FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It's great to see black NFL head coaches doing well, the tangible signs of a new era of diversity in professional football coaching.

But it's always been my contention that black football coaches will really have made it when more of them go through the win-lose-fired-hired again cycle. It's a coaching retread pattern we've seen for years.

If Mike Tomlin ever gets run out of Pittsburgh or the Bears get tired of Lovie Smith or the Bengals finally pull the plug on Marv Lewis, will we see those black coaches get the same benefit?

"I don't know if that's something we have to really be concerned about," said John Wooten, the former NFL player and current chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which advocates non-playing opportunities for minorities in football.

"I think it has to do with the individual coach."

It appears that it does, and that's a wonderful thing for black coaches. There have been nine in the NFL's modern era, not including new hires Jim Caldwell (Colts) and Mike Singletary (49ers), and nearly all of them have been successful by objective measure.

When Tony Dungy retired from the Colts this week, he was noted as the first black coach to win a Super Bowl (vs. Smith's Bears). But Dungy wouldn't have gotten that chance if the Colts didn't hire him after the Buccaneers fired him in 2002.

And if Dungy hadn't gotten another shot, then maybe Dennis Green couldn't have hopped from Minnesota to Arizona in 2004. Herm Edwards could be out soon in Kansas City, but the Chiefs hired him in 2006 despite the stigma of his 4-12 record in his final season with the Jets.

Art Shell, the NFL's first black head coach in the modern era, waited 12 years to get a second chance with Oakland in 2006, but at least he got it. Ray Rhodes went from Philadelphia to Green Bay in 1999, flopping in his one season with the Packers but sticking around for a while as a coordinator.

All of those coaches won in their first go-round but then were let go later when they didn't win as much or couldn't break through for a championship.

"I think if a (black) coach has been successful it opens an era where they get another opportunity," Wooten said.

It's a residual benefit of the NFL's Rooney Rule. The regulation, adopted in 2003, requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching vacancies, and Wooten said teams now routinely interview more than one black coach.

Before the Rooney Rule, white retreads got head coaching gigs while promising black assistants couldn't get a sniff. The rule cracked the door, black coaches took advantage, and now they are in the pipeline that leads to second chances.

So now it's easier to take when, say, Jim L. Mora is the handpicked successor to Mike Holmgren in Seattle after Mora flamed out as Atlanta's head coach. Or when Eric Mangini had barely cleaned out his head coach's office with the Jets before the Browns scooped him up.

Not to say those coaches and others don't deserve another chance after perceived failure — losing isn't always on the head coach, after all. It's just sweet to see black NFL coaches get the same benefit of the doubt.

Major college football, by contrast, seems to be a generation behind.

While the Colts replaced one black coach (Dungy) with another (Jim Caldwell), Buffalo's Turner Gill and Florida defensive coordinator Charlie Strong believe they aren't getting more opportunities because they are married to white women.

Wooten said it wasn't so long ago he saw the same attitudes in the NFL. He said an NFL team was intensely interested in a minority candidate he endorsed in 1996 — until Wooten asked if the coach's white wife would be an issue.

The team never called back, confirming the candidate's fears. Wooten chuckled at the memory.

"The fact you can laugh at it a little bit helps, too," Wooten said.

"There are a few people that have those hang-ups. You just let them keep them and you go on right by them."

It's easier to laugh off stuff like that now that black NFL coaches get not only a first chance but sometimes a second one, too.