"The mania began again last Monday, at least officially. The whispers had already been circling.

By the time Todd Haley was fired last week as the Chiefs' coach, social-networking sites already had been buzzing with the team's next set of dream candidates. Fans posted to their Twitter pages that former Pittsburgh coach Bill Cowher or former Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden should be the only logical choices to lead the Chiefs. Hours after Haley's firing was announced, a Facebook page went live in hopes of luring Cowher to Kansas City.

"Everybody thinks that Gruden and Cowher have got all the answers," said Kevin Harlan, a Kansas City-based sports broadcaster who calls NFL games for CBS. "They're spotless right now; nobody can say anything bad about them."

Cowher has, since leaving the Steelers in January 2007, been a studio analyst for CBS. Gruden, fired by the Buccaneers after the 2008 season, has since been a football analyst for ESPN. Both former coaches, each of whom led their teams to Super Bowl championships, are believed to earn around $1 million per year.

Still, each year, when there are NFL coaching vacancies, fans rush to stake claims on the top names in coaching free-agency, deciding on reasons it makes perfect sense for this to be the job to lure them back to coaching.

Cowher, you know, was a young defensive coordinator under Marty Schottenheimer in the early 1990s; why wouldn't he want to return to Kansas City and come full circle? Gruden, of course, would love the opportunity to work with a team with such talents as running back Jamaal Charles and safety Eric Berry. And what if the Chiefs trade up to select one of the top quarterbacks in the 2012 draft? Didn't you hear Gruden say on "Monday Night Football" that he'd go anywhere to coach Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III?"