Head coaching in the NFL is widely considered the toughest job in all of sports. It chews up grown men and spits them out, often in less than three years. Sometimes it nearly kills them. Bill Parcells, Dan Reeves and Mike Ditka, three of coaching’s most respected names, have seven Super Bowl trips between them–and three heart attacks. Unlike baseball’s lazy, 162-game march, an NFL season is jammed into 16 Sundays. So the pressure to win each game is crushing. “The bottom line is, you get hired in this business to win. If you win, you stay. If you don’t, you leave,” says Jets general manager Terry Bradway, who hired Edwards and was rewarded with a 10-6 season. “Sometimes even when you win, if you don’t win enough, it’s a problem.” Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy, one of Edwards’s best friends and the NFL’s only other black coach, turned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from a joke into a playoff team four of the last five years. In January he was fired. Why? He never reached the Super Bowl.

Edwards doesn’t seem like a strong candidate for heart trouble. By 7 a.m. he’s finished a two-hour workout and his calf muscles are taut as piano wires. He looks as fit today as he did 25 years ago, when he was playing defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles. Right now, Edwards is in his office breaking down game film of the Jets’ next preseason foe, the local rival Giants. On screen, Giants halfback Ron Dayne is primed for a run play against the Atlanta Falcons. Edwards clicks his laser pointer on the Falcons’ outside linebacker, who takes a half step back at the snap, anticipating a pass. “You see that?” he asks. The LB recovers in a blink, but it’s all the Giants’ line needs to set up its blocks and clear the way for Dayne. One flinch the wrong way, Edwards explains, and a two-yard gain becomes a six-yard gain. “Generally, every play in football–every play–someone messes up,” he says. “Most of the time it’s not physical. It’s mental. So your habits have to be right. And habits only come through repetition.”

At 8:30 a.m. Edwards grabs his whistle and heads outside for the Jets’ two-hour morning practice. This is his favorite part of coaching–getting “in the dirt” and teaching football–and his biggest frustration is that he gets to do so little of it. Edwards is adored by his players, in part because he was once one of them, but also because he’s a warm and candid leader. Even in the dewy morning hours, he hums with energy. “I just wake up rollin’, coach,” he says. (Edwards calls everyone “coach.”) But distractions abound. Star linebacker Marvin Jones took an elbow to the throat last week and has developed a hematoma; Edwards has to figure out what a hematoma is before a reporter asks him about it. (It’s a mass of coagulated blood. At his daily press conference, Edwards describes it as “some kind of blood deal.”) Later the coach will learn that owner Woody Johnson wants veteran QB Vinny Testeverde to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. It’ll force Testeverde to miss a full afternoon, and with opening day looming, every second of camp is precious. Edwards says it’s fine, but he’s clearly miffed. “I knew all that stuff was part of the job, but you never think about it until you have to do it,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me, I’ve gotta deal with all this nonsense? When do I coach?’ "

Before the team’s midday practice, Edwards has one more thankless task. Next week the Jets must trim their roster from 85 men to 65, and most of the cuts will be young guys. The coach gathers all his rookies and second-years in an auditori-um to prepare them for what’s to come–and to cheer them up. “Don’t try to crunch the numbers, say, ‘There’s no way they’re keepin’ me.’ Don’t do that. Just play,” he tells a grim room. The pep talk lasts just 10 minutes, but it’s dear to Edwards: he arrived at the Eagles camp in 1977 as an undrafted free agent and retired 10 years later as the team’s all-time interception leader.

After vacuuming up a quick dinner–a dressing-drenched salad, Edwards’s only meal of the day–the coach joins his assistants in a dim, windowless classroom to look at practice film. Each play on the film is labeled in yellow: opie-saw-red-1-dog, under-zone-x-match. Defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell talks up one kid, a Tennessee graduate, and Edwards springs to life. “I played with this guy who went to Tennessee. I said to him once, ‘Hey, what you major in?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I was gonna do engineering, but I switched ‘cuz there wasn’t no trains in it.’ Trains! Boy thought he was gonna be a choo-choo man!” The room explodes in laughter.

By 10 p.m. the coach is yawning. His day is winding down, but he still needs to check in with the team trainer to see how injuries are healing. It’s also one of Edwards’s tricks for gauging player morale. “The trainers and the equipment guys–they know more about the team than half the coaches,” he explains. “The players see them as men, not as coaches. So they hear how the team’s doing. Are they tired? Are they happy?” The answers, for now, are “no” and “yes.” In about six hours, Edwards will be back to make sure it stays that way.