Caldwell (left) has come out of the shadows of Dungy.

When Bill Belichick looks across the way on Sunday night at Lucas Oil Stadium, he will see a new coach but the same successful Colts team that has won its first eight games of the season for the second time in four seasons.

And a further look inside the decision to promote Jim Caldwell shows that the Colts took pains this summer, following the retirement of Tony Dungy, to make sure that the transition at the highest level on the field didn’t disrupt their amazing run of success.

The Colts decided that after seven years as an understudy to Dungy, eight years as head coach at Wake Forest and seven years before that as quarterbacks coach at Penn State, Caldwell’s time had finally come.

With eight wins in eight tries, it would certainly appear the decision to hire the 54-year-old Caldwell was the right one.

“All I know is what I see,” Belichick said. “Obviously, he did a great job in college and he was part of Tony’s system there with the Colts and moved up when Tony retired last year. I think their team has some differences. They are obviously playing well and he’s got them hitting on all cylinders and playing with a lot of confidence, playing good football. I respect the job that he’s done as a head coach, as an assistant coach and the job he’s doing now with the Colts.”

Caldwell is as understated as he is successful in his first eight games as an NFL head coach, which is to say completely.

“I would probably just say I’m a guy who enjoys what he’s doing,” Caldwell said. “We think we work hard and we’re fortunate to be part of a great organization.”

Asked if there have been any surprises in his first eight games, Caldwell was as polite as he was to the point.

“No, ma’am. It one of those situations where I had some experience previously, about eight years when I was at Wake Forest University, so I’m fairly familiar with the rigors of it,” he said. “I would probably say the only thing that’s different is the magnitude of the press coverage.

When Dungy announced he wasn’t coming back following the team’s playoff loss last January in San Diego, he met with owner James Irsay and team President/General Manager Bill Polian to come up with a successor. They all felt confident immediately with the choice of Caldwell.

“I think all of us there — Jim Irsay, Bill Polian, myself — we all felt that was going to be the case,” Dungy said. “Jim had the knowledge of the offense, very, very sharp guy, very communicative. Had been a head coach before, had run a program and he was going to add his own tweak to things but keep the general path the same and I think that’s what everyone in Indianapolis wanted was to not to make wholesale changes, make it a little bit better, but keep going in the same general direction and [they] felt like that he would be the best man to do that.

“Jim is like me in a lot of ways,” Dungy added. “I think he is going to be measured before he speaks. He’s going to think through things. He’s going to respond in an encouraging way to most situations. In that case, he’s like me.”

But Dungy knows his successor’s differences, too.

“I think he’s a little more emotional, a little more fiery and I think he was probably the right tonic for the team,” Dungy said. “It was important. You have a winning situation and you want to keep that going if you can. It was important to the team to transition well and not take a step backwards and that’s why everyone in the organization felt that Jim would be the best man for the job.

“I think if there was one thing that I left on him it was the fact that pro football is a long year and you don’t overreact to little situations, that you look at the long term, the long haul and 16 games more than anything.”

Say this much, the man can coach quarterbacks. He has helped tutor Peyton Manning for the last seven seasons, he developed Kerry Collins at Penn State and he coached Rusty LaRue at Wake Forest when LaRue set new NCAA passing records.

“Denny Green and Chuck Noll helped me an awful lot,” Dungy said. “I learned a lot from them and I used a lot of that in my head coaching career. I think Jim Caldwell, in the eight years we were together, he saw some things from me but I also think he saw a lot of things from Joe Paterno and Bill McCartney and Ray Dempsey and other people he had worked with. I think that’s Jim’s strength.”

What’s interesting is that when assistants become head coaches sometimes the learning curve starts all over again.

“Well, people think I know Coach Caldwell so well – I mean, he’s been my position coach – but I think I’m kind of getting to know him like the rest of our team is as a head coach,” Manning said. “I think it takes time when you kind of learn something about the guy, just like he’s probably learning about our different players. He was just focused on the quarterbacks for so many years.”

Manning is having arguably his best season ever, in terms of efficiency, and a big part of that comes from the leadership at the top.

“I think the team is responding to his coaching right now,” Manning added. “As we progress through the season – here we are in the middle of the season – I think we’ll continue to learn more about him and he’ll learn more about us. But [he’s] a very hard-working coach, very disciplined, very detail oriented, and obviously he’s had his influences in his coaching career. A lot of it comes from Coach Dungy, but a lot of it comes from other coaches that Caldwell has been with in the college ranks or wherever it may be. Like I said, I think it’s still early in his coaching career and I think we’re all still trying to get a feel for each other.”

Dungy is hardly surprised at the Colts’ success under their new coach, especially given Caldwell’s make-up that he has seen first-hand.

“He’s a very, very smart guy, very communicative,” Dungy noted. “Articulate, sharp, and he’ll challenge his players mentally but as a person, just as good as they get. He’s a guy that I think all their players have confidence in that what he says, what he tells them is going to be the absolute truth and I think his guys are always going to go to battle for him because of that.”

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