IT’S HIS STAGE

CHICAGO — Every television set Ray Anderson passed Tuesday inside the NFL’s league offices in New York was tuned to the same channel -- and it wasn’t the NFL Network hyping the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII.

It was all inauguration, all the time. Obama-vision indeed.

What does the swearing-in of the 44th president have to do with the 43rd Super Bowl?

“It’s natural to link the inauguration with [Steelers Coach] Mike Tomlin becoming the third African American head coach in the Super Bowl because you see the spirit of change is real, change is here,” Anderson, the NFL’s vice president of football operations, said by phone. “Positive change excites all of us.”

Tomlin follows Chicago Coach Lovie Smith and the recently retired Tony Dungy as the only other African American coaches to reach the big game. Dungy’s Indianapolis Colts beat Smith’s Bears in Super Bowl XLI.

In Pittsburgh, Tomlin tempered any parallels of his commanding the biggest stage of American sport to the inauguration of America’s first black commander in chief.

“What we are doing here today pales in comparison to what’s going on in our nation’s capital with President Obama’s inauguration,” Tomlin said at a news conference he delayed an hour to avoid conflicting with the inauguration. “As a citizen, as a parent, the hope that he sells and we buy in, that he potentially is going to bring to the table, is exciting. The hope for the future for our children is exciting. I am as excited about that as I am about anything going on right now.”

It was an excited Tomlin who offered his support to Obama -- Steelers owner Dan Rooney also endorsed the Democrat -- during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh in early August. It was during that meeting that Obama confessed that he rooted for the Steelers growing up in Hawaii because his home state didn’t have a pro football team and would be a Steelers fan today “if I didn’t live in Chicago.”

The Obama-Tomlin link has inspired T-shirts with Tomlin’s face over Obama’s slogan, “Yes We Can!”

Yes, Tomlin and Obama have, and you didn’t have to live in the Steel City to see the connection.

At the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., former Super Bowl MVP Doug Williams invoked Obama when praising Tomlin’s achievement coming two years after Dungy and Smith.

“I think it speak volumes to the fact that with Obama going in as the president and his slogan being, ‘Yes we can,’ given the opportunity, yes, we can [too],” said Williams, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers executive who is the first -- and only -- black quarterback to win a Super Bowl (with the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XXII in 1988).

“I played in the Super Bowl 21 years ago and [no black quarterback] has won it since,” Williams said. “So Mike has an opportunity, within a three-year period, to have two black coaches win the Super Bowl, which I think is significant.”

The typically stoic Smith, also scouting at the Senior Bowl, agrees with Williams, saying he is “pumped” over Tomlin repeating Smith and Dungy’s feat.

“I definitely think it’s positive and after you’ve crossed that barrier, that’s how you want to see it,” Smith said. “We have our first black president. The next time it happens, it won’t be as big a deal. But it’s a big deal in general for Mike, as a second-year coach, to have his team in the Super Bowl.”

Tomlin started his coaching career a little more than a decade ago with stops at outposts such as Virginia Military Institute, Memphis and Arkansas State. It was at Arkansas State that Tomlin, age 26, told his mother he planned to be an NFL head coach at the age of 35.

He was 34 when the Steelers hired him in 2007 from Minnesota, where he was the defensive coordinator. Now, at 36, he’s the youngest coach to reach the Super Bowl.

Sports and politics typically are kept in separate rooms. But Obama’s presidency inevitably intersects them when considering the historically exclusionary nature of the NFL coaching profession.

When Tampa Bay introduced Raheem Morris last week as the NFL’s youngest coach, he fielded the almost inevitable question about the Obama effect.

“I don’t want to put President Obama and my name in the same sentence right now,” Morris said. “Yeah, we can take things from [Obama]. I’m young; he’s young. We’re black. No secret there. We’ve got a lot of things in common. He’s the leader of the nation and we’ll take everything we can from him.”

Directly or not, the “coincidence of the timing,” as the NFL’s Anderson describes it, between Tomlin and Obama brings awareness to a problem the NFL has committed at least the last two decades to attempt to solve.

The Rooney Rule -- named after the Steelers’ owner in 2003 -- requires every NFL team interview at least one minority candidate for a head-coaching vacancy. Anderson also credits the NFL Minority Fellowship Program, established in 1987, for creating networking opportunities by placing aspiring African American coaches such as Tomlin on pro staffs during training camp.

Yet as much racial progress as Tomlin’s success might suggest, his last boss at the college level remembers a brilliant young coach bound to succeed if he were black, white or yellow.

Rick Minter was the head coach at Cincinnati when Tomlin interviewed in 1999 for an opening on the Bearcats’ staff.

“In 10 years I might have interviewed 500 coaches for assistant coaching jobs so I can tell in one to five minutes whether a guy has it or not,” recalled Minter, now the defensive coordinator at Marshall. “Mike had it the minute he walked in the door. He’d work the dog out of the kids and they still loved him.”

When Minter’s mentor, former Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, called looking for a defensive backs coach in 2000, he asked about “that rising star” on the staff. Minter knew his loss would be the NFL’s gain.

“Mike was such a bright, promising young coach that I never really thought about race being a factor with him,” Minter said.

“I never looked at it in that light. I thought he could accomplish anything he wanted because he just had it.”

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Chicago Tribune reporter Vaughn McClure contributed from Mobile, Ala.

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SUPER BOWL XLIII

PITTSBURGH VS. ARIZONA

Feb. 1 at Raymond James Stadium, Tampa, Fla.

3 p.m. PST, Channel 4