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WINSTON-SALEM — Jim Caldwell went to Wake Forest talking about winning national championships. And he left eight years later with the respect of most every person with whom he came into contact.

What happened in between is what makes that such an interesting story.

Caldwell left Wake and went pro. And now, a decade later, he's in the Super Bowl as the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. It is — and there's no other way to put this — an amazing development.

He was probably an ill fit at Wake, which doesn't put him in any special category. You could probably say that about most every coach who has tried coaching football at Wake Forest. He lost a lot of games, and that doesn't put Caldwell in any special category, either.

But in eight seasons as the coach of the Demon Deacons, he lost more games than any coach in Wake's long and losing history. And Sunday, he'll coach the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. Is this a great country or what?

I was the Wake Forest beat writer for the News & Record when Caldwell was hired off Joe Paterno's staff at Penn State in 1993. I met Caldwell at his office a day or two after he was named the 31st football coach in Wake history, give or take. The truth is, the school doesn't know who all of its football coaches were throughout its past, and some of them left after remarkably bad tenures.

Caldwell would lose more games than any of them, yet that day he looked me in the eye and said his goal was to win national championships at Wake Forest.

"Why not?" he asked.

I had no good answer to that. I think I mumbled something to the effect of "because this is Wake Forest?"

He laughed, and the moment passed. Caldwell would go on to lose 63 football games in eight seasons, winning 12 conference games for an ACC winning percentage of .188. Only one coach in ACC history, Virginia's Dick Bestwick, stayed at an ACC school for more than five seasons and had a worse winning percentage.

All this is not to cast aspersions on the man. As one longtime Wake booster said during the Caldwell years, "He's a good man. He only embarrasses us on Saturdays."

And again, that was nothing new at Wake.

All these years later, that sentiment still comes up from those who know him best. I ran into Bill Polian in the press box of a college game this year, and we talked for a long time about Caldwell. Polian was the general manager of the Carolina Panthers before taking a similar job with the Colts. He oversaw the exchange of the head coaching position from the retiring Tony Dungy to Caldwell, who had been Dungy's quarterbacks coach since 2001.

"He never wavers," I said to Polian, making a straight-line gesture with my hands. Polian smiled and pointed at my hand.

"That's how he runs the team," he said. "He's a good man and a good leader. But we knew that already."

Caldwell hasn't changed through the years. He seems to be a little more comfortable with the media than he was at Wake, where the media corps consisted of about three of us.

He liked to look you in the eye and give evasive answers about things he didn't want to tell you. And he liked to suggest he knew more about football than you did, which was true.

"I'm no spring chicken," he would say, apparently meaning I was.

He sat through countless interviews this week leading up to Super Bowl XLIV, but I was struck by one exchange back in training camp when someone asked him about being comfortable in his role.

"I am comfortable," Caldwell said. "I've been around a little bit. I'm not a spring chicken."

Then he smiled.

"C'mon," he said. "Who wouldn't be excited about this opportunity?"

We used to sit in the press box at Wake on those long football Saturdays and ponder the question: Does he know what he's doing?

It seemed debatable at times. He wasn't a great college football coach, let's put it that way. But he eventually led the Deacons to a bowl game, the 1999 Aloha Bowl, and for that they should probably erect a statue of him.

It would be his only winning season. A year later, he won one ACC game and was fired. And now he's in the Super Bowl. What happened in between is why sports sometimes makes no sense. And it's also why we watch the games. Because absolutely anything is possible.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com