Bill Cowher was surprised the first time he ever talked to Dan Rooney that football and philosophy was never mentioned in the conversation.
It was in 1992 and Cowher, a third-year defensive coordinator with the Kansas City Chiefs, was one of the finalists to replace Chuck Noll as Steelers head coach.
“He was asking me about my wife, my kids, what I like to do,” Cowher said. “I’d be on the phone with him the first five or six times I talked to him and you’d hang up and go, ‘OK, I just talked to him for 20 minutes and I don’t think we talked about football once.