Mike Holmgren is quick to tell his players when they're not doing things correctly.

"I don't think Mike wants any more of me," Favre laughingly replied when asked about his coach leaving the Packers for Seattle 10 months ago. "I think he's had enough."

Nope, no bestest-buddy ties here. That's just not Holmgren. He was never the players' mother confessor, seldom their kindly uncle. He is equal parts disciplinarian and egalitarian, yielding ground when he knows it's the fair thing to do. As he returns to Wisconsin tonight to take his Seahawks into Lambeau Field to face his former team, Holmgren seems to inspire equal parts nostalgia and relief from the Packers who once played for him.

Nostalgia, of course, for the good old days. And relief that they are officially the good old days.

But heading any further down that street is pointless; the enduring truth about the good old days is that they were, for the Packers, very, very good.

And that, in the end, is what Mike Holmgren brings to the table.

Since taking over the Packers in 1992, Holmgren developed any number of part-time reputations: Quarterback guru, offensive schemer, control-monger, Harley freestyler. The only one that lasts is the one about his teams finding a way to win.

So it is, again, thus far in 1999. Operating a Seattle team as both its coach and chief front-office presence, working with a promising quarterback (Jon Kitna) who is yet no Brett Favre, and without the team's top receiver, Holmgren and the Seahawks come to this game with a 4-2 record and fully competitive standing in the wide-open AFC West.

	“	He (Holmgren) would talk to me, and it was in one ear and out the next. But over time, I kind of started believing in what he was saying and knowing that he was right. I did start becoming more of the quarterback he wanted me to. ”
		— Brett Favre

Duly noted, of course, is the fact that the Packers haven't fallen apart in Holmgren's absence; Green Bay hits this game at 4-2 as well, and showed some serious mettle in wiping out San Diego on the road a week after suffering a terrible loss in Denver. The Packers have a good coach in Ray Rhodes and a top executive in Ron Wolf, and Favre is the QB. They'll be all right.

But this is about Holmgren, the man who left Green Bay for his $32 million assignment in Seattle -- and, in so doing, left the relative comfort of a place where a street is literally named for him in favor of a place where he is being asked to revive a flagging enterprise.

All of Holmgren's strengths, that is, are being tested. Lucky for him that he has so many.

Holmgren communicates with his players, a thing that sounds a heck of lot simpler than it is. As his former Packers receiver Don Beebe noted, "He's a fair guy. You know he's a fair guy. You know at practice that he's going to be all over you, but then on the other hand, he'll listen to you."

Favre could attest. His first few years under Holmgren were an absolute battle of wills between the two, but Holmgren never wavered on making Favre his starter. Eventually, that investment of faith paid Lombardi Trophy dividends.

"My first couple of years, now that I look back, I don't know how I made it," Favre said last week. "I never stopped to think of what was going on. He (Holmgren) would talk to me, and it was in one ear and out the next. But over time, I kind of started believing in what he was saying and knowing that he was right. I did start becoming more of the quarterback he wanted me to."

Holmgren has a tremendous sense of organization, particularly in the aspect of coordinating practices and preparing for opponents. Sherm Lewis, Holmgren's offensive coordinator in Green Bay, says that organizational attention to detail is something both men first witnessed while working in San Francisco.

"Successful organizations do things right," Lewis once said. "I don't think there's that big of a difference in players, I really don't. And I don't think there's that big a difference in coaches. I think it's the way things are run and organized. You watch: Some teams are up every year, and some teams are down every year."

In recent years, Seattle has been a franchise on the down side, with an occasional foray into the land of upward mobility. To change that, Holmgren has to do more than spend owner Paul Allen's money; he has had to implement basic structural changes in the Seahawks' daily operations.

He has had to deal with his players, too, a process that has proven both fruitful and frustrating. On the one hand, Holmgren was able to get defensive end Michael Sinclair locked down for five more years; he traded for backup quarterback Glenn Foley, who won a game for the Seahawks in relief of the injured Kitna; and he brought in receiver Sean Dawkins, currently second on the team in catches.

On the other hand, there is the Joey Galloway holdout, a complete mess. Locked in a deep stalemate with Galloway over the receiver's worth, Holmgren the executive has essentially asked Holmgren the coach to run an offense absent the one player who could be a game-breaker.

Result: A middling offense that doesn't scare people -- but, remarkably, no fatal damage. The Seahawks, after all, have found a way to win four out of six, and even if Holmgren isn't victorious in his return to Lambeau tonight, it's a fair suggestion that Seattle viewed the game as winnable.

That's the essence of Holmgren the coach -- the sense that, if it isn't happening just this minute, it'll happen at some point in the not-too-distant future. In today's NFL, that sense is worth just about whatever someone is willing to pay.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/. During the 1999 NFL season, he will write a weekly column for ESPN.com, focusing on the Monday Night Football matchup.