That might not be the whole truth, but there's enough of it there to stick. The Jaguars broke two fourth-quarter ties in their Monday Night Football tilt against Denver to win 27-24. The victory improved Jacksonville's already-golden chance to sprint to the finish with home-field advantage throughout the playoffs -- and when the story of this season is written, it will be the name of Coughlin's former nemesis that looms so large in the print.

Coughlin and Capers began this expansion run as men on the opposing sides of contemporary history, Coughlin launching the Jaguars in 1995, Capers guiding the Charlotte Panthers into being that same season. Less than five years later, you'd need a shoehorn to get between their intertwined fates.

	After a difficult final season in Carolina, Dom Capers has thrived as the defensive coordinator for Jacksonville.

And that, as it develops, is one hell of a thing.

Can you imagine this Jacksonville team going 12-1 this season without the remarkable work that Capers' defensive unit has turned in? It's like thinking about M&M's without the hard candy shell. As a man in an ad once said, what a mess.

Instead, Jacksonville, which had the league's 25th-ranked defense last season, rates statistically as the stingiest in the NFL going into Monday night's contest -- just 250 yards and 11 points allowed per game. That is no coincidence, and whether or not it's ironic we'll leave to someone with more time on his hands.

But what it does represent is the revitalization of Capers as a defensive mind -- and, in all likelihood, the sharp upward valuation of his stock as a once-and-perhaps-again head coach.

Capers' flameout with the Panthers was such a public thing that this year -- working practically undercover in Coughlin's assistants-should-be-seen-but-not-heard system -- it feels like he has disappeared altogether. Quite the contrary; Capers has gone about the business of reshaping the Jacksonville defense from the capable but underwhelming unit that Dick Jauron left behind to the monster group that unquestionably has, at times, carried the Jags.

While Coughlin and Mark Brunell danced their two-step of offensive confusion in the early going this season, Capers' crew held the center. In one remarkable stretch, the Jaguars played six consecutive games in which the defense allowed 10 points or fewer.

And now that the offense is operating more or less efficiently, it's hard to imagine an AFC Championship Game that doesn't have the Jaguars in it.

The early comparisons between Coughlin and Capers were natural, born of the coincidence of their expansion-team coaching jobs and their shared reputations as discipline-minded taskmasters whose personal springs had been wound just a tad too tight. Indeed, Capers spent so many weeknights hunkered down in his football office in Charlotte, a small room with a pull-out cot, that some of the writers covering the team nicknamed the place "The Cell."

Creepy, but initially effective. But as Coughlin and the Jaguars continued a steady growth born of their initial decision to draft for long-term stability, things fell apart for Capers with the Panthers. That playoff season of 1996 was followed by 7-9 and 4-12 campaigns, the latter pockmarked by the dissolution of Kerry Collins as a vital quarterback and by Kevin Greene's decision to go WWF on an assistant coach during a game.

Coughlin, though, had followed his peer's career path closely enough -- especially the man's role in developing the great Pittsburgh defenses of the early '90s -- to know that Capers' defensive mind hadn't dulled a bit through the Panthers' downfall. And his decision to hire Capers stands up as perhaps the best one Coughlin has made all year.

Capers made a fine move himself, eschewing his option to simply sit out the year and collect his $1.1 million due from Carolina. Instead, he threw himself back into coaching, got out from under the kleig-light pressure that accompanies the head-coaching job, and rebuilt himself as one of the league's bright minds.

Coughlin's assistant-coach system is something of a fast track; in the last four years, he has lost three top assistants -- Kevin Gilbride, Chris Palmer and Jauron -- to top jobs elsewhere in the league. It isn't difficult to imagine the same thing happening to Capers, particularly in light of what he has done with Jacksonville's defense this year.

That would be Jacksonville's loss -- and the premature suspension of what is developing as a fine case of coaching synergy. At one time, Tom Coughlin and Dom Capers would have struck anyone as a genuine odd couple. Today, they rate as one of the best one-two coaching punches in the game.

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.