Pete Carroll has taken the Pats to the playoffs twice since Bill Parcells left.

That's how it was supposed to shake out, anyway. As late as January of this year, with his team staggering away from a terrible AFC playoff loss to Jacksonville, Carroll was the designated bag man. The weight of New England's unhappiness would be brought to bear upon the shoulders of Carroll, and it'd be time for the Pats to resume their search to replace the Tuna that got away.

Carroll, that is, was not Bill Parcells, was not Super Bowl coaching timbre and, depending upon which talk show you dialed up, was not worth the effort it'd require to walk across the street to cuss out. It's a tough crowd around Boston, a knowledgeable crowd, a hungry crowd.

It is a crowd that only the Tuna -- intense, explosive, driven -- seemed to satisfy, and then only for a while.

Easygoing Pete Carroll? Not a chance in the bloomin' world.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the future: A quite pleasantly surprising present. And if this year's Patriots haven't yet won over a significant legion of doubters, they are indisputably positioned to find their way to the playoffs for the third consecutive season under Carroll.

All of which brings into sharper focus tonight's meeting between the Patriots and Parcells' visiting New York Jets, and for at least one solid reason: Beyond the old war stories and the glory days revisited, this marks Carroll's best opportunity yet to put some distance between himself and the ghost of the man who preceded him.

To date, their seasons have gone in opposite storylines -- literally from the first weekend forward. Back in Week 1, with Carroll's Patriots on the field in the Meadowlands, Parcells watched from the sideline as his starting quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, went down with a ruptured Achilles. The Jets lost to the Pats 30-28. Carroll walked out of his locker room with the sense that his team could amount to something "dangerous," and you see what has happened since.

While the Jets have whimpered along at 2-6, with Parcells paying a steep price for having dealt away backup QB Glenn Foley (and his salary) to Seattle, the Patriots have knocked heads to a 6-2 result. If they haven't come close to silencing the doubters, they have made a fair case both for themselves and the man coaching them.

This isn't a blowout team, so widespread fan confidence might prove hard to come by. Outside of comfortable victories over diminished Arizona and expansion Cleveland, the Patriots haven't played more than a three-point game this season. Their victories feel blade-close, but so do their two defeats, by a point to Miami and by two points in Kansas City after a missed field goal.

The schedule still looms, with its AFC East challenges and its geography; after tonight, New England plays four of the next five on the road. With a raft of relatively unimpressive wins, the Patriots are an easy target as a team set up to struggle over the second half.

But all of this sells New England, and Carroll, short. The truth is that, since Parcells parted ways with Pats owner Robert Kraft and made for New York, the collapse that some have been predicting for the Patriots under Carroll and Kraft has not materialized.

That's not to say it has been a gold-paved road. The Pats were 10-6 in the first season under Carroll and just 9-7 last season, when the warts became a little more pronounced. After the Jets took apart the Pats on the regular season's final weekend in '98, New England linebacker Chris Slade volunteered that the Patriots had been outplayed and outcoached. When they were drubbed by Jacksonville 25-10 in the playoffs, the calls for Carroll's head intensified.

Instead, Carroll went back to work -- and so, too, did his team.

Exhibit A: Drew Bledsoe.

Far from disintegrating in the absence of Parcells, who drafted him, Bledsoe appears to be approaching his professional peak under Carroll, a former defensive coordinator in San Francisco. Bledsoe entered the NFL's 10th week with the most passing yardage of any QB in the league and a touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio of 13-to-4, and Parcells did not hesitate in listing his former pupil at the head of the class of currently working signal-callers leaguewide.

Naturally, the residual credit there still flows in the direction of the Tuna. Nothing wrong with that; Parcells found Bledsoe and chose him ahead of Rick Mirer in a draft in which many people had the two QBs rated equally.

Still, you can't argue with time. Parcells left Bledsoe nearly three seasons ago. Today, Bledsoe might well be a more rounded pro than the one Parcells first developed.

Meanwhile, Parcells benches Mirer in New York in favor of Ray Lucas, a former special-teams player with New England, as the Jets try to dig out from the rubble of their life without Testaverde. Carroll, sure of what he has and smart enough to value it, contentedly rides Bledsoe.

And as the 27-year-old quarterback's fortunes continue to ascend, so do the odds that the Patriots don't really need to keep looking for someone to coach them. Of course, if they somehow find a way to lose to the Jets tonight, you could make some hay betting that the search will go on.

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.