Herm Edwards has the presence of a preacher on the pulpit, the words flowing fast and furious, a brimstone sermon suddenly rushing into the room. He has a gift of transforming the most mundane coaching clichés into passages of pure inspiration. It's easy to see him in his kitchen, insisting as he does to his son, Marcus, that the job of sweeping the floor isn't complete until the kid has cleaned the corners.

	When the Jets went from Al Groh to Herman Edwards, they made the best upgrade of the NFL offseason.

Who can't imagine the Jets coach dropping to his knees, peering under the cabinets and ceremoniously thrusting his fists into the air upon discovering the dust and dirt had disappeared? Just as he has demanded this detail of himself and his son, it was, too, the wish of Edwards for NFL owners and general managers to conduct coaching searches with a shared tenacity.

Clean the corners, and yes, maybe find a gem like him.

"There's sometimes an easy road to take," Edwards says speaking of his selection as the third black coach in the NFL, and amazingly, the first in New York football history. "They call this guy, and he'll have the same candidate names as the other guy. A lot do that. They don't go down and get their hands dirty.

"They don't clean the corners."

At 46, Edwards' wait was over. These are changing times in the sport. As the walls crumbled for black quarterbacks, they're starting to decay for coaches. In a sport where 75 percent of the athletes are black, where 41 of 42 past head coaching hires were not, there came a ripple of progress with Edwards. Before this season is over, it's possible he could be the first black head coach to reach the Super Bowl.

For now, Edwards has justified the faith of owner Woody Johnson and GM Terry Bradway. The Jets are 7-3, winners of four straight, and perhaps the hottest team in the AFC as they move into Sunday's game against New England. The Jets are famous for folding in the final weeks of the season, but Edwards is determined to change that fate this season. The Jets begged former coach Al Groh to ease back on his rigid practice regimens late in the season and insist they were exhausted for December, when they lost three straight games to end the season and miss the playoffs.

Edwards has let the Jets form player committees -- including Vinny Testaverde, Curtis Martin and Kevin Mawae -- to bring issues to him, and in some cases, change policy. After they beat Miami 24-0 on Nov. 18, Edwards let the players script the practice schedule for the Thanksgiving bye week.

"They've got their program, I've got my program," Edwards said. "But I played the game. The committee comes, and I take my head coach's hat off and put my player's hat on. Options, huh? OK, you've got Option 1 and Option 2. I don't want to talk about Option 1, but Option 1 if you win is really, really good.

"Is that a big thing? In the grand scheme of it, no," Edwards says. "But it's something the players wanted and you have to let them earn it."

Groh's unbending dictatorship wore out the Jets a season ago, and Edwards' hiring has the makings of a cool breeze blowing into town on a sultry, summer day.

"He's kind of the modern coach, as opposed to the '60s and '70s when they treated players all the same," Tampa Bay GM Rich McKay says.

As a Philadelphia Eagles cornerback 23 years ago, Edwards understood that the meeting of good preparation and good timing can make magic. The testimonials of his old teammates and coaches sure sound like he was destined for this day.

He paid his dues. Edwards was a 10-year NFL starter willing to begin as a defensive backs coach at San Jose State. When he moved to Kansas City to take a job in the scouting department, it wasn't uncommon for Edwards to not complete his final scouting reports until 1 a.m. Not every former star is willing to serve those inglorious apprenticeships, but Edwards embraced them. When it was time to interview for head coaching jobs, he wanted to believe his ascent was pure and proper.

"(I worked) my way up the ranks like any good soldier," Edwards said. "I did it without stepping on people, without talking about people, without bellyaching it wasn't my turn."

The best coaching job Edwards did in his time with Tampa under his mentor, Tony Dungy, wasn't turning two third-round draft picks into All-Pro caliber defensive backs, but inspiring his wife Lia to overcome the despair of a diagnosis for diabetes.

"I just thought I was dead," Lia says. "I thought all of a sudden that I had lost years of my life. Herm was the one who got me through it. He was like my angel."

She was frightened to test her blood-sugar level, so in the beginning he did it for her. "But first, he pricked his own finger," Lia says. Just to show her, hey, it wasn't so hard.

For so long, this sounded like the NFL owners and executives, afraid of hiring a black football coach. Jets leadership pricked their fingers, cleaned the corners and found themselves a football coach. After all these years, it wasn't so hard, was it?

Adrian Wojnarowski is a sports columnist for The Record (Northern N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.