From the day Ken Whisenhunt was inserted at "quarterback" in a game-field promotion and told to go beat Notre Dame in a move that still defies all odds and logic, the Atlanta native has known what it means to be thrust into difficult positions on a football field. Good thing. What can be tougher in this part of the football world than to be given the job of resurrecting the Steelers' offense? Click photo for larger image.

The same year the U.S. hockey team struck gold, another miracle was about to take place in another athletic arena in this country. No movie will come from what happened that day on Grant Field on the campus of Georgia Tech, but it doesn't make it less wondrous.

Legendary Notre Dame, unbeaten, untied and ranked No. 1 in the AP and UPI college football polls, played Georgia Tech, a rambling wreck of a team that entered that Nov. 8, 1980 game with a 1-8 record.

"I don't know how many Division I-A teams there were in the country," said ESPN commentator Bill Curry, then the Georgia Tech coach. "But if there were 110, we were No. 110."

Early on, the Yellow Jackets lost their starting quarterback, Mike Kelley, and his backup, Ted Peeples, to injuries. Another quarterback did not suit up because of a previous injury. Georgia Tech, on the third series of a scoreless game, had the ball on its 8. With little choice, Curry turned to a walk-on true freshman receiver/defensive back who had never played in a college game, and told him to go play quarterback.

"I was scared to death," Ken Whisenhunt said.

Said Curry, "If you tried to create the most difficult scenario for a college football player, there's a good chance you'd pick a true freshman walk-on player who was a hybrid, had not practiced much at quarterback and put him in there with the ball on our [8] playing the No. 1-ranked team in America."

It should have been easy pickings for the mighty Irish. Instead, the anti-Rudy, Whisenhunt, a former high school quarterback, and the Georgia Tech defense turned Notre Dame's '80 national championship locomotive into the big train that couldn't.

"He takes his first snap of college football at any position," Curry said, "and in terms of taking the snap, handing off, running with abandon, hanging onto the football and doing all the courageous things you'd pray he would, he did them all!"

Whisenhunt ran for 3 yards on that play and his stats from that game were pedestrian: He completed 3 of 5 passes for 29 yards and ran six times for 3 yards, playing through an undiscovered stress fracture in his leg. Nearly all of the passing yards came on one big play, a 23-yard pass to Jeff Keisler to the 37 that set up a field goal that gave Georgia Tech an implausible 3-3 tie against Notre Dame.

That tie so rocked the Irish that they lost two of their final three games and, at 9-2-1, finished ninth and 10th in the polls. Georgia Tech eventually won a national championship in 1990 under Bobby Ross after Curry left to coach Alabama.

Whisenhunt did play a little quarterback the following season when pressed into action again, but Georgia Tech's own Slash settled in as a tight end and went on to play nine years at the position with three NFL teams.

"He was a good player, a smart player," said fellow Steelers assistant Russ Grimm, a former Redskins teammate. "Whizzie was like an H-back. We ran a lot of one-back so he was like a tight end/fullback/receiver-type. He's smart, quiet and didn't make mistakes."

	Georgia Tech Photo They still talk with some reverence about Ken Whisenhunt's performance against Notre Dame that afternoon of Nov. 8, 1980. Click photo for larger image.

And now he steps into a position not unlike the one in which he found himself nearly 24 years ago: Running an offense for the first time, only now as the Steelers' coordinator. Whisenhunt's play against Notre Dame and throughout his Georgia Tech career leaves little doubt in Curry's mind that there will be no panic if the time comes when he must make a crucial call to put the Steelers in a Super Bowl.

"This may be his first time as a coordinator in the NFL," Curry said, "but he has this calm presence about him that he will function as if he did it all his life. He never panics and he's absolutely brilliant.

"He'll make the call that makes the most sense, that requires calm and presence. He won't be plucking things out of the air or choking on a hot dog. Coaches do all kinds of crazy stuff; there is a legion of ways they can panic in those situations. This guy is cold-blooded in the clutch."

Whisenhunt won't try to remake the Steelers' offense, but he wants to return it to the days when defenses feared the ground game enough that they could not relax into a comfy zone to stop quarterback Tommy Maddox and the passing attack. The Steelers ranked 31st running the ball last season, the lowest in their history. The running game becomes his obvious priority as the team's new commander.

"You want to strive for balance, but the running game especially establishes a mental toughness, a physical toughness with your team," Whisenhunt said. "We were forced to maybe run it a certain way too many times and people could get a bead on it. In the past, when it's gotten tough, we just kind of powered through it, and we couldn't do that this year, for whatever reason.

"I think you have to reestablish the fact that no matter what the situation is, you can run the ball and try to be successful doing that. It establishes the toughness with these guys."

The Steelers might ask Jerome Bettis to take a pay cut and return for another season, but they have left little doubt that they will bring in at least one more back and maybe two, and could use their first-round draft pick on one. They will try to trade Amos Zereoue or release him.

The other order of business for Whisenhunt is to whip the line into shape. That might take care of itself, for the most part, if tackle Marvel Smith and guard Kendall Simmons get healthy in the offseason. The only hole they must fill is right tackle.

"It's never as simple as replacing one guy with another," Whisenhunt said. "It's getting the right person and getting everybody on the same page. We have enough weapons on this offense. If we can address a couple of the issues we talked about -- we can protect Tommy a little better, run the ball a little better -- it's going to make everybody better."

Whisenhunt, who will be 42 Saturday, came to coaching after spending six months pursuing his other love.

When his playing days ended in 1993, he took his civil engineering degree from Georgia Tech straight to the golf course for six months. He's a four handicap, but he got bored with it.

About the time he decided to look into coaching, it found him in the form of Vanderbilt coach Rod Dowhower. His former coordinator in Atlanta, Dowhower needed a special teams and tight ends coach and thought of Whisenhunt.

"I just watched the way he prepared, the way he played, the way he communicated, his demeanor," said Dowhower, now retired in Arizona.

"I was just impressed with the way he went about his business. He's very smart. When he coached our special teams, that was about the best thing on our team other than our defense."

Two virtues come to Dowhower when he talks about Whisenhunt: His smarts and his toughness. He still recalls his former tight end continuously throwing a favorite block.

"When I went to the Falcons I watched him on film wham those noses on the lead nose play over and over again. They did it over and over and over. I'm surprised he has normal shoulders. He's one of the toughest guys I've seen play."

Dan Henning, who coached him in Washington and Atlanta and helped get him hired by the Jets, uses similar words to describe Whisenhunt.

"He leans on approaching players on an intelligent basis, but this is a tough guy," said Henning, offensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers. "He has a mental toughness about him that makes him excel.

"He learned every position. He was on our depth chart in 1986 as a backup quarterback as well as starting at tight end. He's very bright and has a creative mind. I think he'll do very well. He leans toward things to take advantage of the intelligence of the players he's coaching."

Henning convinced Jets coach Al Groh to hire Whisenhunt to coach the tight ends in New York in 2000 after he had spent the previous three seasons on the staffs of the Ravens and Browns. Henning then gave Whisenhunt more responsibility, scripting practices and organizing other areas of the offense with the idea that he would one day succeed him as the Jets' coordinator.

But Groh left after a year to become head coach at the University of Virginia and Bill Cowher hired Whisenhunt to replace Mike Mularkey, who was promoted from tight ends coach to offensive coordinator in 2001.

Mularkey, who became head coach of the Buffalo Bills last month, wanted to hire Whisenhunt as his offensive coordinator in Buffalo this year. But Bills president Tom Donahoe pressed him to hire Tom Clements instead and Bill Cowher promoted Whisenhunt after a cursory look at other candidates.

"He's got a chance to do some things there," Mularkey said. "I think it's a great opportunity."

But is he ready?

"I don't ever think you know that until you do it," Whisenhunt said. "Do I think I'm prepared? Absolutely. I've been preparing for this for a long time."