The son of the legendary John McKay, the witty but win-challenged coach of the expansion Buccaneers, he was around for the ignominious beginnings and the 0-14 inaugural season of 1976. Two and a half decades later, McKay is nominally the top-ranking football man in the front office of the Super Bowl finalists, and largely responsible for transforming the Bucs from comic laughingstock to one of the league's most efficiently operated organizations.

This week, though, he is mostly a fan of the NFC championship team that he helped to fashion.

How they were built

SAN DIEGO -- The Tampa Bay Bucs have gone out of their way this week to offer "props" to former coach Tony Dungy and the team he assembled. But while Dungy is indeed responsible for much of the composition of the NFC champions, the roster has Jon Gruden's fingerprints on it as well. Of the 53 players active this week, 24 are in their first season with the Bucs. And Tampa Bay has six new players, including five on offense, who will be in the starting lineup for Super Bowl XXXVII. "The core group here is essentially Tony's team," said strong safety John Lynch, "but Jon has also tweaked things a bit. We've got some news guys who played big parts in all this and some good role players, too." For a franchise that prides itself on building through the draft, Tampa Bay has just 20 original draft picks on the roster. There are only three first-round choices but the Bucs have drawn solid dividends in the middle rounds, with 14 players from the second, third and fourth stanzas combined. In six of the seven drafts 1993-99, the Bucs selected at least one player who went on to subsequently earn a Pro Bowl spot. But on offense, in particular, the Bucs have taken the non-draft route to try to develop a unit that has historically lagged. The only home-grown "skill position" starter is fullback Mike Alstott. The starting quarterback, two wide receivers, tight end and tailback all arrived via free agency or trade. There are nearly as many veteran free agents -- 11 so-called "street" free agents, who were signed after being released by other clubs, and another eight unrestricted players -- as draft choices on the roster. The roster also includes two players claimed on waivers, 10 college free agents and two players acquired via trade. "Our philosophy has been to primarily use the draft," said general manager Rich McKay. "But we don't want to be too narrow-minded and ignore all of the other avenues of player acquisition in the league. You have to just keep evolving. For instance, we've never been big in free agency, at least not in the past. But now, having given up some draft choices to get Jon (Gruden) here, we may have to be a bigger player in that arena." --Len Pasquarelli

"This is where we always wanted to be," said McKay, glancing around to take in the spectacle of "Media Day" on Tuesday morning. "This was always the goal of the franchise. It just took a little while longer than we anticipated, that's all. But now that we're here … how can you help but be proud? It has been a long climb, but this makes it worth all the stuff we experienced."

In between his humble beginning as a ball boy and his current status as NFL big shot, McKay has become one of the league's most influential people, a guy with entrée at every level, up to and including the commissioner's office. In addition to his team responsibilities, he is co-chairman of the influential competition committee, a guy on everyone's must-call list when a critical issue needs sounding-board treatment.

But the Princeton-educated McKay, who earned his law degree at Stetson University, is hardly a one-man band. And he is quick to note the overall strength of the Tampa Bay front office.

It is not, truth be told, a management assemblage that garners attention from the national media. Part of that might be that ownership, Malcolm Glazer and his family, largely dodge the spotlight like a vampire avoids daybreak. Conversely, the lengthy shadow cast by coach Jon Gruden, who has quickly grown into the (rubber) face of the franchise, supersedes all else.

But in assistant general manager John Idzik, in essence an invisible man when it comes to the national media, Tampa Bay possesses one of the best salary cap managers in the league. The Bucs, compared to most 2002 playoff teams, are in relatively good shape heading into the future.

The scouting staff -- director of personnel Tim Ruskell, college director Rusty Webster and pro director Mark Dominik -- is excellent if low-profile. Basically, it is a support staff that knows its role, and shares vicariously in the success of this season.

And like McKay, it is a support staff that wasn't quite sure if a Super Bowl spot that some players considered a birthright, would ever become reality. And frankly, given the direction of the Bucs (or, more appropriately, the lack thereof) just a decade or so again, no one could argue the pessimism.

"Sometimes the harder we worked," Ruskell said earlier this season, "the more behind we seemed to get."

During his "Media Day" chat, in fact, McKay recalled a time when he and former personnel director Jerry Angelo felt exactly that way. McKay said the two were sitting in an office at the team complex, commiserating "over another bad draft pick," and trying to design a blueprint that might pull the franchise out of its perennial morass.

"And then Jerry said, 'You know, Rich, we've got to stop digging' and start climbing out of the hole," recalled McKay. "It was like the harder we dug to get out, the deeper the hole got, and we needed to get smarter. Which, you like to think, is exactly what we did."

Now the Chicago Bears general manager, Angelo -- who termed McKay "the smartest guy in the league" -- recalled the conversation, and the results that emanated from it.

Said Angelo, who has remained one of McKay's closest confidants despite leaving the franchise two years ago: "Just look at what has happened. We started holding people, including ourselves, accountable for the failures. We brought in a great coach and he did a great job of identifying exactly the kind of players he wanted. And we went out and found them."

Tampa Bay hired Tony Dungy, of course as its head coach. It dramatically altered scouting models, drafted to fit the Dungy style, assigned more weight to production instead of potential. The combination clicked and, despite underachieving for years in terms of fulfilling a Super Bowl destiny, Tampa Bay has now posted six straight non-losing seasons.

	McKay and owner Malcolm Glazer hoist the NFC championship trophy following Sunday's win over the Eagles.

By comparison, the franchise had just three non-losing campaigns in its first 21 years of existence.

Given his football background, management acumen and his organizational skills, McKay might have become a true player in the league even without the success of the Bucs on the field. But in addition to curing most evils, victories also focus on the people who dictate winning as a must, and that has helped catapult McKay into his position of prominence.

There have been suggestions that McKay has the right stuff to perhaps be a candidate for commissioner when Paul Tagliabue eventually steps aside, but that is just idol talk, and the Bucs general manager certainly isn't fueling it. Last spring, with Tampa Bay seemingly in chaos after Bill Parcells left the franchise jilted at the altar for a second time, McKay flirted with the Atlanta Falcons general manager position.

He is reluctant to discuss how close he came to departing a city he has come to love, and the matter became moot when Bucs ownership would not allow him to move anyway, but it was a rough period. Most people remember that McKay had essentially brokered a deal with Marvin Lewis to replace Dungy, but that the Bucs owners vetoed it and suddenly adopted a proactive role in the coaching search.

What people forget is that McKay, in the wake of the Parcells fiasco, raised Gruden as the next best possibility. Of course, McKay couldn't consummate a Gruden deal, because at the time the Bucs weren't prepared to part with the compensatory windfall Al Davis subsequently squeezed out of Tampa Bay.

Just as he is reluctant to discuss that chapter of his Bucs tenure, McKay is reticent about the rumors he has lost some clout to Gruden, who clearly has assumed more sway in personnel decisions. Sources in the Tampa Bay front office insist the McKay-Gruden relationship was far more testy early on than it is now.

Certainly in the past month, there is no evidence the Bucs aren't all pulling in the same direction, given what they have accomplished.

It is a franchise that now is a model for many others, a team envied by all but one other, a front office run efficiently and productively. No matter who gets the credit for what occurs on the field, most staffers will offer McKay as the reason everything comes together so well off it.

McKay suggested earlier this week that a coach operates as the CEO of the franchise and, as such, is a team's most critical hire. That may be true but a general manager of McKay's ilk is almost as priceless.

Asked on Tuesday to define the role of the general manager in the evolving front office structures around the league now, McKay noted that the job was a function of managing the salary cap, organizing the scouting staff, keeping the machine well-oiled, allowing a coach the time to be a coach.

It sounded a lot, truth be told, like he was reading his own job description.

Len Pasquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com.