Charley Casserly never thought Dom Capers got a fair shake with the Houston Texans.

It was Capers' second head coaching job -- both with expansion franchises, which force a coach to make castoff veterans and untested rookies buy into a program despite long odds of winning many games immediately.

And just as had happened to the Carolina Panthers in 1998, the Texans' seeming ascent crashed in 2005 as they battled injuries, couldn't escape a losing spiral and crumbled to a last-place finish in Capers' fourth season.

A day after the Texans finished 2-14, owner Bob McNair went over the head of Casserly, who resigned as Texans general manager less than five months later, and fired Capers.

"You can't let somebody go after four years," Casserly said in a phone interview this past week.

"For an expansion team, two things can happen. Carolina had a lot more (to work with) than we had in Houston because of free agency, the advantages they had that we didn't. But then you'd go through a transition and then you have a second bump -- you go down a little bit and you come back. Well, (Capers) never got the opportunity to come back, which was unfair to him.

"I think the guy's a good football coach."

Make no mistake: there is a part of Capers, and not a small one, that would like another opportunity. His precise answer is "never say never," but it's clear he believes his record as an NFL head coach -- 48-80, one playoff trip in eight seasons -- would be far better had he entered situations more conducive to immediate success.

Months away from his 60th birthday, Capers has no interest in spearheading another building (or major rebuilding) operation. Yet rebuilding is precisely what he's become known for doing -- taking bad defenses, like the Green Bay Packers unit that finished 20th in total defense last season, and turning them into exceptional ones.

So, when Capers says he'd be "fine" with not getting a third chance to run his own show, it is not so much a statement of true feeling as an acknowledgment the right opportunity might not come soon enough.

"You just realize," Capers said, "it doesn't make any difference whether you're going in and you're starting with a team that's been doing it for 40, 50 years or starting with an expansion team -- it's going to be probably four years if you don't get it done.

"I wouldn't take a job just to take a job. It would have to be a job where I felt you had an opportunity to go in and win."

Details, details

Ask anyone who's worked with or played under Capers about him, and one of the first things mentioned is attention to detail.

Extreme, almost compulsive attention to detail.

"Oh my God, let me tell you," longtime NFL coach Jim Mora said. "You ask him someday what he did on February 10th, 1986, and he'll pull out his calendar from 1986 and he'll look in the little square there for February 10th and he'll tell you what he did, because he'll write it down. He is so organized in that regard. It's unbelievable."

That started in 1982, when Capers took his fifth and final job coaching college defensive backs at Ohio State. He'd spent the previous two years at the University of Tennessee and felt his spring recruiting schedule there had worked out well, but he had to call the school to remember the details.

"I felt like I was getting closer to being a head coach, and I said, 'You better monitor all these things and chart them,'" Capers said. "It just so happens for Christmas that year my dad got me a very nice calendar book."

He's gotten a new calendar every year since and still has all of them -- as well as binders with the schemes he's run at each of his six previous stops as an NFL coach and coordinator -- in his Lambeau Field office. He's also known for systematically highlighting his notes and game plans, using different colors to differentiate between topics.

Part of Capers' presentation when he interviewed for the job with Packers coach Mike McCarthy in January was pulling out game plans from his first coordinator job with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1992 to illustrate the origins of his fire-zone 3-4 scheme.

"He's not the guy that is going to sit on the computer and punch out a bunch of printouts for you," McCarthy said. "He still writes everything out by hand. He has a method that he has done for so long and can jump up and pull the book off the shelf from 1995, and I appreciate that."

Steady presence

Capers' personality mirrors that calculated approach -- businesslike, levelheaded, rarely raises his voice -- but he's also a man of conviction.

Packers safeties coach Darren Perry, a Steelers rookie in 1992, vividly recalls Capers fighting to keep a package first-year Pittsburgh coach Bill Cowher wanted to chuck after it allowed a couple of long gains in training camp. Cowher relented, the Steelers intercepted future Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon five times in the opener and "2-Buster" became a staple of Capers' system.

Mora -- who brought him into pro football as defensive backs coach with the USFL's Philadelphia/Baltimore Stars (1984 and '85) and then the New Orleans Saints (1986 to '91) -- remembers a player getting reinjured in practice one day while Capers was running the drill.

"I remember screaming and yelling that he shouldn't have done what he did with the guy," Mora said. "It was bad -- it was bad on my part, I'll admit it. But Dom, he just kind of took it and didn't say much, and he's that way. A very even-keeled guy -- but intense."

That's one of the common adjectives used in the Packers locker room to describe Capers, who roundly is complimented for hearing out players' thoughts or complaints and making adjustments as he sees fit.

"He's a laid-back guy, knows how to explain things to you," cornerback Tramon Williams said. "You may have some coaches come in who just, 'All right, you this and that, this and that.' Dom, he'll just bring it to you smooth: 'OK, you'll do this on this play, this one here.' Easy to understand. Just a fun guy to be around."

Said end Cullen Jenkins, "When he turns the business mode on, he's in it. He's consistent."

Turnaround artist

When Capers addressed his Packers defense at the outset of training camp, his message was clear.

"He said, 'Hey, we're going to be the No. 1 defense in the NFL, and it's going to start because we're going to stop the run,'" nose tackle Ryan Pickett said. "He said, 'We're going to be the best running team in the NFL.' That's the first speech, the first thing he ever said to us.

"We was like, 'OK, this sounds like the speech you get every year.' But he was serious."

Capers no doubt believed himself, too. He'd coordinated one No. 4-ranked defense in Jacksonville in 1999, a year after the Jaguars finished 25th, and another in Miami in 2006, a year after the Dolphins were No. 18.

Along the way, his scheme evolved and expanded. The original system in Pittsburgh was heavy on Cover-3 before teams began working the sidelines and throwing underneath. In Miami, Capers didn't have the personnel to play a pure 3-4, so he went to a hybrid. In New England, where he was a special assistant/secondary last season, he worked in a modified Bullough/Fairbanks 3-4 that is significantly different in look and philosophy.

All of which has given Capers a multitude of experiences to draw from, even though it was cut-ups of the relatively pure 3-4 in Pittsburgh -- the Packers' opponent in Sunday's game at Heinz Field, about 110 miles from where he grew up in Buffalo, Ohio -- Capers showed players as they began the transition in March.

"We've got our identity together," Perry said, "and hopefully, we'll be the model in the next coming year."

In addition to his base 3-4 and standard nickel and dime defenses, Capers has matched personnel to opponents and injury situations with a variety of subpackages, most recently the five-linebacker "psycho" package he unveiled in last week's win over Chicago.

After taking its lumps the first half of the season, the Packers defense is No. 2 in total defense (272 yards per game) and against the run (85), No. 3 against the pass (187) and tied for eighth in scoring (18.7) -- rankings Pickett admits he was skeptical about achieving at the start of camp.

"I was like, 'Man, OK, I hear him ...'" Pickett said, rolling his eyes. "But he was truthful. He's serious, and the more we listen to him, the more you just trust him. He says stuff, it comes true."

Going forward

That ability to engender belief is one more reason those who know Capers well think he could be highly successful if he does get another shot as a head coach.

"He's proven his coaching ability," Mora said. "He was in some tough situations at Carolina and Houston. I don't think that the fact that he was fired at both of those spots is any reflection at all on his ability as a head coach.

"Dom could be a quality head coach, there's no question in my mind. You've just got to be in the right place at the right time to be successful. You've got to have the players, that's what it boils down to."

Capers speaks with pride about taking the Panthers to the best two-year start for any expansion team -- seven wins in 1995, then a 12-4 record and a trip to the NFC championship game in '96 -- and says he "would match our first three years at Houston with anyplace else with an expansion team."

The Texans did move from four wins in 2002 to five in '03 and seven in '04 -- a climb Casserly attributes in part to Capers' vision and flexibility when it came to personnel moves.

"He's a high-character person," Casserly said. "Straight shooter. What you see is what you get, which is a compliment. Man of his word. He's totally honest with people."

That's far from a guarantee Capers will get one more chance, but it doesn't hurt his chances when his defenses keep playing as the Packers have the past five weeks.

Capers interviewed for several jobs before going to Houston and has expressed at least passing regret about not ending up in one of those spots. He also interviewed for the head coaching job in Buffalo in 2006 before heading to Miami, becoming the NFL's highest-paid assistant coach in 2007 and getting fired along with the rest of Cam Cameron's staff after the season.

Given the Packers' success this season, McCarthy probably would keep Capers as long as he's willing to stay -- and that probably would be fine with players as well.

"You have no choice but to respect him," Pickett said. "All the players respect him. When he says something, everybody listens. He is like a general, man. He demands respect."

**

History at the helm

Both of Dom Capers' NFL head-coaching stops were with expansion franchises. In both Carolina and Houston, a downturn in Year 4 spelled the end of Capers' tenure.

Year Team W-L Place
1995 CAR 7-9 4th, NFC West
1996 CAR 12-4 1st, NFC West*
1997 CAR 7-9 2nd, NFC West
1998 CAR 4-12 4th, NFC West
2002 HOU 4-12 4th, AFC South
2003 HOU 5-11 4th, AFC South
2004 HOU 7-9 3rd, AFC South
2005 HOU 2-14 4th, AFC South
*Advanced to NFC championship game