Andy Reid was going to become a doctor. He was going to follow his mother into medicine and fix people, not football teams.

He was a good student at BYU. He majored in English and wrote articles for the local paper. He liked to fish and goof off with his pal Randy Tidwell. He liked to make furniture, like his father. He played guard on the school's football team. He didn't really consider a career in coaching until LaVell Edwards, the legendary BYU football coach, asked him one day, "Have you thought about being a coach? You'd be a good one."

Two decades later, we know Edwards was right. Reid will coach the Philadelphia Eagles in Sunday's Super Bowl.

All those years of studying at the knees of the masters, keeping detailed notes in three-ring notebooks, paid off. The year before Reid took over the head coaching job, the Eagles were 3-13. Since then, they have gone 5-11, 11-5, 11-5, 12-4 and 13-3, played in four consecutive conference championship games, and, as of this weekend, one Super Bowl.

Reid has transformed the most cynical and frustrated of sports cities and teams from a perennial loser into a perennial contender. Last September, with Reid only halfway through a six-year contract, the Eagles gave him a four-year contract extension worth nearly $5 million per year.

Everyone laughs about this now, but Reid wasn't a popular choice for the job. There were bigger names who were available to fill the position. One fan playfully booed Reid in a restaurant one day — "Get used to it, Coach," he said. Reid had coached only seven years in the NFL, all as an assistant under Mike Holmgren in Green Bay. No one took this 300-pound man seriously. But insiders knew better. A year earlier, tight end Chad Lewis, a former BYU tight end who had known Reid for years, met with Reid and said, "You're going to be a head coach pretty soon." Reid didn't deny it.

"He was way down on the list of candidates," says Edwards, one of Reid's mentors who receives calls from Reid almost weekly. "But when he went there for the interview, he had put together a written plan, step by step, on what needed to be done to get to the Super Bowl. You've got to give it to the owner for making a gutsy call."

The Eagles were smitten after their first interview with Reid.

"We all looked at each other and said, 'Wow,' " recalls owner Jeffrey Lurie. "This guy really comes right out at you. . . . I remember how the 49ers picked Bill Walsh and the Redskins picked Joe Gibbs — out of the box."

Football men

The hiring was called a risk. Reid was the first position coach in 10 years to go straight to a head coaching job. He had scant credentials. Few realized that Reid had been preparing for that interview for nearly 16 years. He made the most of working under some of football's most successful football men — especially Edwards, Holmgren and Packer general manager Ron Wolf — while also working alongside the likes of Jon Gruden, Steve Mariucci and Marty Mornhinweg, among others. Reid picked their brains, studied their programs and made detailed notes, which he kept in a three-ring binder.