"He had a wife, four children and no job. He flew to New Orleans to interview at Tulane. This wasn't the Joe Philbin the Dolphins hired after managing the Green Bay Packers' offense to record numbers and a Super Bowl win.

This was a young Joe Philbin who went to Ohio University, was fired with the rest of the staff after one season and was scrambling to find another job before the offseason music stopped.

"How'd it go?" his wife, Diane, said after picking him up the airport in Columbus, Ohio, as they drove the 75 miles back to Athens and Ohio U.

"Pretty good,'' he said.

"Did you get the job?" she asked.

"No,'' he said.

She held up the pregnancy test. Their fifth child was on the way.

And now the older Joe Philbin, the one the Dolphins hired, stands in a hallway nearly a couple of decades later and delivers the kicker.

"So when people ask if I've known pressure …'' he says.

Does that help you? Does it offer a hint of who the Dolphins hired as their new coach?

A football lifer, sure. A man who's worked his way from the bottom, too. But more than that the Dolphins seem to have a coach with a healthy sense of self-effacing humor for the first time in, well, a long time.

Nick Saban didn't have one. Cam Cameron didn't show one. Bill Parcells? Tony Sparano? They didn't exactly disarm a room with charm."