By Ira Miller

Senior NFL Writer

The Sports Xchange/For FoxSports.com

If Mike Singletary could somehow transplant his passion for the game into all the players on the woeful San Francisco 49ers roster he just inherited, then he might have a chance to buck the odds and succeed.

But that's a tall order.

Singletary has a limited coaching background, but he had a great playing resume that put him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. History tells us, however, that great players rarely make great coaches; Mike Ditka, the only Hall of Fame player who became a Super Bowl-winning coach, said that's because they don't have the patience to avoid frustration with players who don't do what they used to do.

Then again, few players, even Hall of Fame players, ever had Singletary's passion, and that's what has given him his head coaching opportunity just five seasons after he became a coach.

Ditka, who was Singletary's coach with the Chicago Bears, long has predicted coaching success for Singletary. So has Brian Billick, who hired Singletary for his first gig, as linebackers coach at Baltimore in 2003.

"Mike analyzes everything," Billick said in a 2005 interview, after Singletary left the Ravens to become an assistant on the deposed Mike Nolan's staff in San Francisco. "He works at his trade. He came into it new, and spent countless hours learning the craft, talking with people around the league to find out what it is he needs to do, and given that opportunity, how he would approach being a head coach. He's very detailed in his preparation. Mike's a very deep thinker and very passionate about the game, and those are two pretty good qualities to become a head coach."

In fact, Singletary went about his coaching opportunity the same way he made himself into a great player.

When he came into the league, critics said Singletary was too small, too short, to succeed. He lacked the great physical gifts of other players. But he was able to out-work them and out-think them. Ditka called him a "coach on the field," saying, "He was probably as well prepared to play as anybody on our team."

That preparation resulted in 10 consecutive Pro Bowl appearances and first-ballot selection to the Hall of Fame.

"A lot of guys that played this game ... they had a lot of discipline, they had a gift," Singletary said shortly after he came to San Francisco. "For me, I had to develop the ability. I knew I wanted to play linebacker, and that was the best position for me. I was 'too short' and I was 'too slow,' and all this other stuff, so I really had to train to get better and carve out what I wanted to be."

Singletary, whose entire NFL career has been spent in just three cities -- Chicago as a player, Baltimore and San Francisco as a coach -- has managed to avoid the long, disruptive journey that many coaching lifers travel. Of course, he's not a coaching lifter, taking a decade off to spend with his family when he finished as player.

He has said, "the last thing I wanted to do was coach" after his playing career but eventually he came to realize it was a natural transition for him.

In his previous role with the 49ers, Singletary held the dual titles of linebackers coach and assistant head coach. Linebackers he coached speak in reverent tones about the lessons they learned from him because they understood they were getting them from someone who actually did what he wanted them to do. As the assistant head coach, Nolan frequently had Singletary talk to the entire team, an experience that will come in handy in Singletary's new position.

Historically, about a third of the head-coaching jobs in the NFL are filled by former NFL players and, by coincidence, that happens to be exactly the percentage of Super Bowl winners -- of the 24 coaches who have won the Super Bowl, eight played in the league.

But the odds are much grimmer for Hall of Fame players. Ditka, Art Shell, Raymond Berry and Joe Schmidt are the only Hall of Fame players who had a winning record as a head coach. Among those who did not were Forrest Gregg, Otto Graham, Sammy Baugh, Jack Christiansen, Bart Starr, Norm Van Brocklin, Mike McCormack, Tom Fears and Jim Ringo.

Add to the mix that Singletary comes in at mid-season on a team that has endured five consecutive losing seasons, doesn't have a legitimate NFL No. 1 quarterback on its roster and has had all kinds of problems with pass protection, turnovers and defense, and you begin to sense the difficult situation in which he's being asked to prove himself as a coach.

Yet there's also something very practical about Singletary, including his analysis that his great Bears teams failed to win more than one Super Bowl in the '80s because they got so carried away with themselves, they didn't have "enough sense to say, 'Look, we have something special, we have to keep building, we have to stay together.'"

You get the feeling Singletary will know how to keep his team together. The problem, however, appears to be the team, not the keeping together part.

Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than three decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.