It was a dyed-in-the-wool baseball guy, the late Branch Rickey to be exact, who philosophized that luck is the residue of design. But it is NFL coaches, many of whom have likely never even heard of the visionary Rickey, who have lent longevity to his legendary words.

To be both lucky and good in the NFL anymore, a team needs design, almost as much as it requires superior personnel. As the talent advantage throughout the NFL has continued to narrow in the past decade, an indisputable function of free agency and the salary cap, the significance of design has increased to the point where a solid blueprint is as essential as a seal-off block.

The game may be the thing but, at this juncture in NFL history, the game plan is everything.

	Does Reid have enough effective game plans to put the Eagles over the top this season?

"It's essential now to have a good game plan," said Hall of Fame head coach Bill Walsh. "A lot of games are won on those long Tuesdays, when the coaches are putting (the game plan) together, trying to figure out the best matchups. It's a big part of success. It's woven into the fabric of the game."

And into the consciousness of America as a whole.

Don't believe it? Think about this: How often, sitting in a business meeting now, do you hear your CEO refer to having a game plan? How many times in the past month has the evening news detailed the alleged game plan for attacking Iraq? Haven't you sat with your kids, maybe on the eve of the beginning of school, and challenged them to have a game plan for the year? Isn't the planning for your summer vacation a game plan of sorts?

The term has become ingrained in our neural synapses, the buzz-phrase for promulgating efficiency, an over-accepted and over-utilized entry into jargon. Nowhere, however, is the term more critical than to a football team.

"It's where everything starts," said Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid. "Nobody goes to war without a plan. You don't build a house without a blueprint. Things would be complete chaos. You spend hour after hour constructing a game plan, then you fine tune it, because it's so critical in this league anymore that you're as prepared as you can be."

Sure, there are game plans, of a sort, in baseball. Before every series the pitching coach will go over with his staff the tendencies of opposition hitters in recent weeks, a scheme for dealing with the batters devised, and a defense set accordingly. In basketball, a coach will run set plays against a certain team, or seek a matchup that pits his best scorer against a poor defender. In hockey, scorers know whether or not a goalie will flop or spread-eagle on a breakaway. Even in your weekend tennis league, there are opponents whose backhand you know you can attack.

None of those has as much to do with victory, though, as does a brilliantly devised game plan brought to life in an NFL contest.

In a league where nearly half the games are decided by a touchdown, and a quarter of all contests by a field goal, parity has begat planning and coaches have become micro-managers. A computer printout is about as important as a square-out. And coaches spend more than double the time in a video room, seeking out their own team's strengths and the other outfit's shortcomings, than they do on the practice field.

The human factor is still paramount for every team, but plotting the game has become as crucial as playing it, especially in the past 10 years.

Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman, a brilliant strategist long before scheming became an art form, recently referred to the NFL as being like the cover of the original Godfather novel. The hand at the top of those marionette strings, he suggested, belonged to the head coach. Seems an apt analogy anymore.

About 15 years ago, then-Indianapolis Colts general manager Jim Irsay strolled the Anderson College training camp site with a young writer, and talked about how significant good game-planning coaches would become in the NFL. His rationale was that, when a salary cap arrived, every franchise would be able to afford only about 10-15 premier playmakers. And those playmakers, in most games, would negate each other. What would determine the outcomes of games then, Irsay felt, was the design of the game plan. A decade and a half later, his vision has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The best coaches in this era are the ones with Boy Scout backgrounds. They are prepared to the Nth degree.

"Nothing against the New England players, because they did a fantastic job in carrying through with the game plan, but do you think the Patriots would have beaten the Rams (in Super Bowl XXXVI without the game plan their staff put together?" asked one AFC general manager rhetorically last week.

	“	It's essential now to have a good game plan. A lot of games are won on those long Tuesdays, when the coaches are putting (the game plan) together, trying to figure out the best matchups. It's a big part of success. It's woven into the fabric of the game. ”
		— Hall of Fame head coach Bill Walsh, winner of three Super Bowls

A more timely allegory might be that of the Washington Redskins and their preseason performance under first-year coach Steve Spurrier. The "ol' ball coach" has leaped in recent days to the defense of his players, because he feels they are being denigrated, and his system is getting too much credit. But there is a reason that Danny Wuerffel has thrived in a new environment after failing three other places. There is an explanation for why wideout Derrius Thompson, with three receptions in three previous NFL seasons, is torching opposition secondaries.

Both players are now in a system, working with game plans, more conducive to their success.

Walsh is still a true believer in the axiom that players win games. But for years, the San Francisco 49ers stayed on top of the league with continuity, by retaining their offensive and defensive designs even of the coaching staff changed. Not surprisingly, current San Francisco coach Steve Mariucci still pre-plans the opening 15-20 offensive snaps. In fact, so do most of the army of Walsh protégés sprinkled around the league.

That isn't to claim the blueprint is inflexible -- Joe Gibbs used to say that the coaching bromide he most detested is, "The hay is in the barn," because he was still making alterations to his game plan most Saturday nights -- because circumstances dictate malleability. But for most teams, what you see on the field on Sunday afternoons is a tangible result of what transpired in meeting rooms late Tuesday night.

Even with the advent of computerized game-planning, the sessions are long and arduous. Coaches can now search through opponents' game tapes and ask a computer to find every play for a given situation -- the microchip will pull out every snap the offense ran on second-and-five or less when inside its own 25-yard line -- but interpreting the data is still a daunting task. And then formulating a design to counter is still even tougher.

Mysterious in lure, virtually unreadable to the observer who doesn't have a basic knowledge of a team's jargon, game plans resemble hieroglyphics to some fans. And perhaps even to some players. But the basic game plans are centered around three elements: relative field position, down and distance and formation. The package handed to players on Wednesday mornings is 30-50 pages, typically, usually longer on defense. One of the New England defenders claimed the game plan for Super Bowl XXXVI was one of the biggest he had ever encountered.

"But it covered everything and it worked," he said. "That's the kind of daily double you're looking for, right?"

The game plan, on both sides of the ball, is a brainchild born of long hours and bleary eyes. Coaching staffs cobble together a game plan on Tuesday, the traditional off-day for players, present it to their team on Wednesday, then spend the rest of the week adjusting to what they see on the field. If the strongside linebacker absolutely can't cover the opposition tight end, for example, the game plan might have to be altered to provide him "bracket" help from a safety.

"Think of a (sitcom)," said Green Bay safety Darren Sharper, "where this one joke gets zero laughs in rehearsals. Hey, it's not going to work. So it's out and you tinker with a bunch of other stuff to see what fits best."

Of course, one reason that coaches have risen to such a lofty status now in the NFL, as delineated in an earlier ESPN.com story this week, is because they are being paid to plot winning game plans. If it has become the league of the coach, it then follows that the NFL is an entity where the masterstroke game plan is key, where systems and systems analysts are critical.

And where the results of Sunday are often the result of a bunch of meticulosly choreographed X-and-O doodling during the week.

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.