YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Football's new Cradle of Coaches begins here, inside this wood-paneled basement office, in the rear of the Cardinal Mooney High locker room named after the godfather who occupies this inner sanctum.

Don Bucci spent 34 years as head coach here, spends his days currently as athletic director of the south-side school. Over his shoulder, in a corner of modern college football fame, hang side-by-side photographs. One snapshot is of the championship-winning coach who will lead Oklahoma against West Virginia in the Jan. 2 Fiesta Bowl, Bob Stoops, above his kneeling brother, Arizona coach Mike Stoops. Next to it is a freeze frame of new Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, who will coordinate LSU's defense one final time in the Jan. 7 Bowl Championship Series national-title game.

"We got a few coaches, don't we?" Bucci said with a smile. And that's just one corner.

The Cradle continues up Market Street a couple of miles, at Stambaugh Stadium on the Youngstown State University campus. Sure, Cardinal Mooney's tradition-steeped program plays there. But so does Youngstown State, whose former coaches dot the BCS landscape. Ex-assistant Mark Dantonio will coach Michigan State in the Champs Sports Bowl Friday. Ex-assistant Mark Mangino, from New Castle across the Pennsylvania line one deep pass to the east, will coach Kansas in the Jan. 3 Orange Bowl. And ex-head coach Jim Tressel will, for the third time in six years, lead Ohio State into the national-championship game, this one Jan. 7 in the Superdome.

"And we're all kind of connected," said Dee Stoops, the matriarch.

It was in her home, the three-bedroom Cape Cod on Detroit Avenue just east of Cardinal Mooney, where kids regularly gathered: Four Stoops boys along with the occasional Pelini -- Bo or brother Carl, now an assistant at Ohio University -- plus an array of neighbors such as Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, later a world-champion boxer. They used to sit around the kitchen table after dinner watching 16mm game films and the master coach/projectionist at work, Cardinal Mooney defensive coordinator Ron Stoops Sr. The elder Stoops and Bucci went to Youngstown's East High together. They formed a partnership together when Bucci took over the Cardinals' program in 1966: I'll take the offense, Ron, and you take the defense. It worked well enough for four Ohio state championships and one runner-up in three classifications over 3¹/₂ decades.

The next generation migrates back to the warmth of that Cradle every summer. They return to Youngstown and Cardinal Mooney for a Camp of Champs for 400-plus schoolchildren and a charity Bocce Social.

"Of course, only in Youngstown and Pittsburgh could you have a big bocce tournament at $125 a person," joked Ron Stoops Jr., the oldest brother and a lifer high school coach.

Yet every July, the offspring come home: Tressel, Mangino, Dantonio, Bo Pelini and all the Brothers Stoops, including Mark, the youngest boy who is Mike's defensive coordinator at Arizona. Funny thing. These coaches, all grown from the same northeast Ohio clay if not genetic code, go at this event like it's Bowl Championship Series bocce.

"Holy cow," Ron Jr. marveled, "you would think the national championship game was on the line."

Maybe that helps to explain why, in seven of the past eight years, that infamous computer spat out college football title games that included these Youngstown guys on the sidelines:

• The 2000 BCS championship was won by Oklahoma and coach Bob Stoops alongside assistant head coach Mike Stoops.

• 2001 was won by Miami and secondary coach Mark Stoops.

• 2002 was won by Ohio State and coach Jim Tressel over Miami and Mark Stoops.

• 2003 was lost by Oklahoma and coach Bob Stoops alongside associate head coach Mike Stoops.

• 2004 was lost by Oklahoma and coach Bob Stoops alongside defensive coordinator Bo Pelini, whom Stoops hired to replace his next-youngest brother.

• 2006 was lost by Ohio State and Tressel.

• 2007 pits Ohio State and Tressel against LSU and defensive coordinator Bo Pelini. Oh, and there's another Stoops involved, but we'll get to that later.

Proclaimed Ron Stoops Jr., like a proud father: "It's a great story."

"October 7, 1988," Dee Stoops recited from memory.

Father was coaching against son for just the second time.

Ron Jr. was the secondary coach at Boardman, a south suburban high school. Ron Sr., as always, was the defensive coordinator for mighty Cardinal Mooney.

At the time, Bob was starting in coaching at Kent State. Mike was a graduate assistant at Iowa. Mark was also at Iowa playing defensive back and planning a career in coaching, like Bobby and Mike.

This night, something was amiss.

"I knew Ron [Sr.] kind of felt funny," Bucci said. "I told him, 'Ron, go lay down on the bench there.' We scored, but missed the extra point, to go into overtime. That's when he got sick."

Tony Congemi knew something was wrong at halftime.

Ron Sr. always wrote up the defensive changes, the coverage alterations, in the locker room for the second half. Not this one against Boardman.

"It was the only game where he said, 'You go put it on the board,' " said Congemi, the secondary coach and uncle to former Pitt quarterback John. "That never happened before."

Late in the second half, a call came up to the visiting coaches box, to the Boardman secondary coach. Ron Jr. was summoned to the field, to the opponent's sideline, to the side of his ailing father.

"I can still see him crossing the field," Congemi said.

"I knew that was a bad sign," Ron Jr. added of that call. "I went over there, and he was still conscious ..."

Cardinal Mooney scored that last-ditch touchdown, missed that extra point, sent that game into overtime. Then, it went into a second overtime. Then a third, where the Cardinals won.

"The outcome was insignificant," Ron Jr. continued. "They put him in the ambulance, and he died on the way to the hospital.

"That was his last game."

There were six Stoops kids. There were eight Pelinis. Cardinal Mooney's wide hallways teemed with them. So did the Detroit Avenue home, where the two Stoops sisters slept in one room, the parents in another and four boys in the last. The father had climbed miles up and down those steps to the upstairs bedroom to quiet each night's brotherly bedtime riot. To say nothing of the wild times when such friends as the neighbor kid from Cambridge Avenue stopped by.

"True story," Bucci began. Teen-aged "Boom Boom" Mancini came into his office one day prepared to quit the Cardinals. "I said to him, 'You're giving up football for boxing? What kind of future is there in boxing?' "

Cardinal Mooney students like Mancini gravitated to Stoops the elder. He played basketball with them in his physical education classes. He taught history with one-liners. He was the scorekeeper at school basketball games. He refereed intramurals. He coached baseball and, into his 50s, this no-smoking, no-drinking, daily-Mass-attending example at 6 feet, 185 pounds still played the game at summer-ball and fast-pitch softball levels.

"The Mooney football family is close," Ron Jr. said, "and my dad was an integral part of it."

The Pelinis had football in their family, too, but the family was probably too much for football. The five girls were, anyway. Business oozed through their veins the way football coursed through the Stoops'.

"We have an attorney, a doctor, a restaurant owner, a pharmacist. ... I'm a business owner," said eldest brother Vince Pelini, who, of course, played football at Mooney, with Bob Stoops. "The first six of us went into more traditional fields." The baby brothers, Carl and Bo, heard the same calling as the Brother Stoops.

"They really share a resemblance, except Bo probably had more confidence in himself than anybody who ever played for me," Bucci said of his ex- quarterback.

So, when Nebraska and then-athletic director Steve Pederson of Pitt chose Bill Callahan over then-defensive coordinator Bo Pelini in late 2003, Bo vowed to Bucci: I'm going to be a head coach here.

He joined Bob Stoops the next season as a co-defensive coordinator at Oklahoma. Look at them now: Big 12 archrivals Oklahoma and Nebraska are coached by a couple of Cardinal Mooney guys and former Detroit Avenue loafers. "Let's face it, those are two great traditions," Vince Pelini said. "And to have the Stoopses and Pelinis involved is just amazing."

"Any one of them that you talk to," said Joe Kelty, a Cardinal who went to Notre Dame on scholarship and later into medical-device sales, "and they'll tell you about the same thing: The influence Mr. Bucci and Mr. Stoops had on them. Mr. Stoops, in my lifetime, he had a huge impact on the type of person I've become."

"The DNA starts a heck of a lot earlier than the Stoopses."

Joe Malmisur is fairly barking about this point. He is invoking old-school Youngstown football, when its city league consisted of eight sturdy scholastic programs of which half remain. He is harking to a time when Youngstown produced an Ohio State coach long forgotten: Wes Fesler, 1947-50. This one-time Pitt coach is famous in the Buckeye State for winning the 1949 Rose Bowl and national championship, but best known for having the good grace to leave and open the door for one Wayne Woodrow "Woody" Hayes.

Fast-forward a half-century, and Youngstown -- with Malmisur's help -- produced another Ohio State coach: Jim Tressel.

Malmisur was the Youngstown State athletic director who had the immense fortune to hire Earle Bruce, a Buckeyes assistant, as Penguins head coach in 1986. Tressel turned Youngstown State into a Division I-AA playoff team the next season, their first of 10 over 15 years. It won the national championship in 1991, the first of four. It became an assembly line.

Mark Snyder, the current Marshall head coach, came through Youngstown State. Dantonio came through. Mangino, a former Ellwood City High head coach plus New Castle High and Geneva assistant, came through as well.

Mangino worked midnight to 7 a.m. on the Ohio Turnpike, then slept until noon on a Youngstown State office cot.

"Mark was just intense. I don't think he ever smiled," Malmisur recalled. "He paid a price to be a football coach."

By the way, Youngstown State had Stoops ties, too. Ron Sr. and Jr. graduated from there. Uncle Bob also was an assistant there.

Malmisur added of Youngstown in general, "It was a great cauldron."

So what caused it to boil and bubble and produce seven successful major-college head coaches plus eight assistants and a couple of NFL guys? After steel faded here as in Western Pennsylvania, this city of 82,000 in the Mahoning Valley found a new industry: Stamping out football coaches.

"Pretty damn impressive," Malmisur said. "Football's a quasi-religion here."

"You go to games, it's packed," said Bob Stoops.

"Like Pittsburgh, we've lost a lot of jobs. You bounce back. You fight," added friend and Cardinal Mooney teammate Jack Leow, the trainer for Kelly Pavlik, Youngstown's fifth world-champion boxer.

"They realized only hard work and persistence would get them out of Youngstown," Bucci concluded. "That's what you saw in these guys."

The No. 41 worn by all three Stoops boys at Iowa was laid over Ron Sr. in his coffin.

But his legacy was never laid to rest.

Bob went from Iowa to Kent State to Kansas State to Florida to three national-championship games and one title at Oklahoma, which he steered to 11-2 and a No. 3 rating this fall despite an NCAA probation.

Mike went from Iowa to Kansas State to Oklahoma to a fourth season trying to resurrect Arizona.

Mark went his own way, from Iowa to coach/athletic director at Nordonia Hills (Ohio) High to South Florida to Wyoming to Houston to Miami (where, among others, he coached and recruited Baltimore's Ed Reed and the late Sean Taylor) to, at long last, a brother's shadow in Arizona as defensive coordinator.

"I'm sure he enjoys being with them, his spirit," Dee Stoops said.

All the Brothers Stoops and Brothers Pelini staked their collegiate claim as defensive coaches. All deploy an aggressive, emotional brand of defense.

Coaching to national-championship games is difficult, but Ron Jr. just might have the toughest job of them all. He went from eldest son to father figure. He went from Youngstown State grad to teaching to coaching to coordinating the Cardinal Mooney defense, thus far winning half as many as Ron Sr.'s four Ohio state titles. Or, in his words: "As fate would have it, I ended up coaching at the same school and coaching the defense, like he did."

He is his dad. He operates the summertime painting business, the one where his brothers and Congemi used to paint Youngstown mansions for the father and now where his sons and fellow Boardman High teachers toil for him. He teaches history. He drives a van.

And, Kelty offered, "He's right where he's supposed to be."

It's an ongoing story nowadays.

There is another Stoops, another coach, by the same name.

Ron Jr.'s eldest is a Ron, and he's a student assistant for Tressel at Ohio State. On Jan. 7, he'll become the fourth Stoops man involved in a national-championship game.

He already has an internship offer from KPMG, a global tax firm. He already has a place in the family business. Which course to follow?

"He's trying to figure it out," Ron Stoops Jr. said. "Another generation."