GEORGETOWN, Ken. -- You think it's race, the fact that Marvin Lewis is just the sixth black man in the modern history of the NFL to be named a full-time head coach, that separates the Cincinnati Bengals first-year field boss from most of his peers?

Well, sure, that's part of it. But here is another subset, an even more elite brotherhood, to which Lewis has recently been initiated: He is now the second coach in Bengals history to have his mug on the cover of the franchise's media guide.

	Marvin Lewis was the defensive coordinator for the Redskins last season.

The first coaching cover boy came in 1968. Guy by the name of Paul Brown. Uh, yes, that Paul Brown, the legend who essentially founded two franchises and actually attached his surname to one of them. One of the game's most innovative minds. Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1967. A daring pioneer, not unlike the man who has now assumed control of the team Brown himself originally coached at its '68 outset, a guy who believed in retooling the fundamentals.

OK, so maybe Marvin Lewis, finally a head coach after too many years of being a bridesmaid, isn't Paul Brown reincarnate.

Then again, given that some of his players have referred to him as "the black Jesus" behind his back -- "no (sacrilege) intended, but he is resurrecting this franchise," said cornerback Artrell Hawkins -- perhaps Lewis does have an inside track to some higher authority. Certainly it will take the equivalent of a modern-day miracle to enact the kind of turnaround Bengals ownership has asked Lewis to promulgate.

The Bible details the manner in which Jesus, in his first public miracle, transformed water into wine. Lewis' charge? Turn a team that previously had been comprised of whiners into winners.

No small feat there, of course, but Lewis is off to a pretty good start.

"But there is," cautioned Lewis, between training camp practices on Thursday, "a long way to go. The good thing is, for the most part, the players have responded to what we're asking of them. It's a change for a lot of them who have been here and, I'm sure, even for the guys who are new. But we've got a plan in place here. So, yes, that's a good start."

Actually, the real start to Lewis' stewardship of the Bengals was a bit shakier than publicly believed. On the day Cincinnati officials decided to offer him the thankless job, they could not reach him on his cell phone, because he had dropped it into the toilet. That was, it seems, the last time Lewis has been short-circuited in his quest to somehow bring respectability to a team that has long been a laughingstock.

While he did not completely trash a roster that included more talent than most outsiders realized, Lewis did make key changes as he began to overhaul a club that has not been to the playoffs since 1990, and hasn't posted a non-losing record since 1996. When he made the decision not to match the offer sheet that standout linebacker Takeo Spikes had signed with Buffalo as a "transition" free agent, a message he'd been subtly delivering for weeks was bluntly hammered home.

Lewis wants good football players, but only those who want to be good in Cincinnati, and who were willing to place the team above their own individual goals.

There were some, but not enough, players of that ilk already on the roster. And then, in an upset of epic proportions, Lewis went and got more of them in free agency. Indeed, one of the most compelling stories of the offseason was the manner in which Lewis and his staff (in particular defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier) were able to lure some quality veteran free agents to a franchise many of them had long regarded as the NFL's equivalent of a Siberian gulag.

"My friends around the league would call me and say, 'You're going where?!' after I signed here (as a free agent)," said eight-year veteran Kevin Hardy, one of the Bengals' key free agent acquisitions. "I mean, I had no history with Marvin, never played for him in the past or anything. A lot of (free agents) who change teams, there's some connection at least to an assistant coach, right? But this guy looks you straight in the eye, and he tells you exactly how it's going to be, and he makes you a believer."

Lewis, 44, does not possess the evangelical bent of some of his NFL head coaching peers. His fanaticism for the game, his passion for doing things the right way and for possessing a mental paradigm in which shortcuts are forbidden, certainly is not worn on his sleeve. He did not, in recruiting veterans to this forlorn franchise, rain down fire and brimstone and false promises of sudden glory.

But there is an admirably calculating nature to Lewis, one nurtured during those seasons in which he served as an assistant under some of the league's most notable head coaches, that cannot be ignored. He has had time (some would suggest too much time) to develop a blueprint of how he believes a team should be operated. The Brown family, beginning with the patriarchal team president Mike Brown, essentially has gotten out of his way and given him the opportunity to put his plan into place.

For years, Mike Brown, well-intentioned but perhaps too mired in the methodologies of his famous father's era, served as the voice of the Bengals, but no more. Locals cannot recall the last time Brown's name appeared in print within any kind of proximity to a set of quotation marks. On Thursday morning, Brown chatted amiably with a trio of national reporters visiting camp, but the discussion was generic, more focused on league matters, and with a simple ground rule that he could not be quoted.

There is, for sure, a singular Bengals voice and it belongs to Marvin Lewis. Read some item about the team, an assessment of players, and there is no gray area, no question of from whence it emanated. Lewis is hardly loud, but he deplores the ambiguity that marks some franchises -- the often fractured nature that results from loose lips and from an excess of tongue-wagging.

Veteran beat writer Geoff Hobson, who now is the editor of the Bengals' award-winning Web site (Bengals.com) and who has been around long enough to be seen as, at least, a semi-historian, has coined a phrase. Marvinvision, he calls it, given that Lewis walked into this job with eyes open, but also with a 20/20 perspective on how the fortunes of a team that has won just 19 games in five seasons might be reversed.

It was that attention to detail, a sense of how you might fix things on and off the field, that most impressed Bengals officials. Over all those offseasons in which the pundits had predicted Lewis would land his first head coaching gig, with every time he finished as the runner-up, he had plenty of time to revise his plan. And now he has the opportunity, with one of the NFL's most futile franchises, to prove his philosophies are sound ones.

"More than anything," said Lewis, "I thought what they needed here was a really concrete direction. And I think we've got that now."

Indeed, there is a sense of stability and organization now that was direly absent for much of the past two decades. Certainly the rookie coach has been ceded more control, over the occurrences on and off the field, than anyone since, well, probably Paul Brown himself. That might have been the only way Lewis, who wanted considerable input in personnel and salary cap management, accepted the position.

	“	More than anything, I thought what they needed here was a really concrete direction. And I think we've got that now. ”
		— Marvin Lewis, Bengals head coach

Only weeks before the Bengals hired Lewis, he rejected a job offer from Michigan State, preferring instead to continue his quest to be an NFL head coach. There was no sense of desperation and, truth be told, Lewis almost certainly would have waited for another post to come along if the Bengals hadn't acceded to his notions about how a club had to be run under his stewardship.

One longtime Cincinnati veteran noted that, when a man is able to wrest power from the tight clutches of the Brown Family, it is an immediate imprimatur, and quickly grants him some legitimacy with the players. Now that Lewis has established himself as The Man in Cincinnati and proven more than capable of implementing a new mindset, he faces the even more daunting challenge of winning football games.

How quickly that occurs is just speculation at this point.

Years of collecting high draft selections has given the Bengals some base of talent. There are young veterans here, like defensive end Justin Smith or wide receiver Chad Johnson, who could play for most teams in the league. There are some graybeards like right offensive tackle Willie Anderson, whose excellent performances in the past have gone unnoticed because they were relegated to playing for a team no one cared much about.

Lewis has a keen sense for the big picture, understands that in a way, he is still on a prolonged honeymoon. He wants to build something that will last for the long haul. He is not, he acknowledged, into quick fixes and that is most obvious in the plans for potential franchise savior Carson Palmer, the Heisman Trophy quarterback who figures to take a redshirt season in his debut campaign.

That isn't to say Lewis wouldn't like to fool the experts in 2003 with a victory total that could serve as a catalyst for even bigger things. Merely finishing at 8-8, of course, would be instant validation for doing things The Lewis Way. But he isn't into predictions or, at least publicly, setting time frames. Lewis possesses a quiet confidence that is palpable, but isn't necessarily on display, so it is up to others to enunciate it. Which they often do.

Beaten down by years of losing, frustrated by the slights to him individually and to the team with which he has played his entire career, even Anderson sees some light at the end of what has been a very long tunnel.

"He makes you believe it can happen," said Anderson, now playing for his third different head coach in eight years. "And that, in itself, is an accomplishment, man."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com.