Herm Edwards can do some things. He’s competed in a Super Bowl, led a pro team to the playoffs and completed a game-winning play for the ages. There are some things, however, that player-then-coach-then-analyst Edwards just can’t do. Like sit still.

It’s approaching midnight at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., on the opening Sunday of the 2010 NFL season. Edwards has been up since 5am. The night before, he flew in late from Tennessee, where he was completing his latest gig doing commentary for the country’s largest college football conference. From his energy, you wouldn’t know it.

One of the Sportscenter’s co-anchors asks the other, “You want to wind him up?” but Edwards is already amped. A penalty had just erased what appeared to be the last-second Dallas Cowboy win – the kind of game that lands coaches in the loony bin – and almost brings Edwards completely out of his chair (an exceedingly rare event for all analysts). His arms slash the air in front of him. He shakes his head like a lion. “That’s why I’m here and not there!” he says.

There are other reasons he’s here. Among them: an evangelical faith in football.

“The game is bigger than any one,” he told the Weekly. “I’ve been doing this 30 years. Not three – 30! If you had told me that back in the day, I’d say you’re crazy. It’s like a whole life on recess. Go play.”

He understood early he had to coach: “I knew when I started playing I wanted to give something back to the game, to turn that wisdom over to the group that follows.” Now he carries a similar commitment to analysis.

“The red light comes on, I’m giving information where the viewer can say they learned something,” he says. “I have an obligation to the fans to give the what, why and how.”

Though he’s now in pressed suits and ties laid out ahead of time by his wife, Lia, he’s approaching the gig with the same urgency he applied when he wore number 46: “You rent the jersey. It doesn’t belong to you. The number doesn’t belong to you. What you do in that jersey – that’s my legacy. That will follow you the rest of your life.”

But his presence on ESPN is anything but ephemeral. It’s expanding. Though he stars on flagship franchises NFL Live and Sportscenter, he also appears on a rush of other programming, including the morning show First Take; radio programs Mike and Mike, The Herd and Scott Van Pelt; the newsier sports magazine Outside the Lines; and even Baseball Tonight, where he evaluated who are the better athlete, baseball or football players.

“I’ve done about everything you can,” he says.

Now he’s crisscrossing the South, providing calls for ESPN’s Southeastern Conference coverage, which corrals a massive 75 million viewers. And starting this week, Edwards will helm an ambitious new show called The Audible at ESPN’s Los Angeles studio in which former players Keyshawn Johnson, Trent Dilfer and Steve Young will field questions completely generated by viewers. “I’ll be policeman,” Edwards says.

In each role, in each engagement, the energy is unrelenting. “You can’t have Herm on the show and expect to have a bad day,” veteran Sportscenter anchor Trey Wingo says. “It’s contagious. He’s going to bring wattage.”

It seems a nice fit for someone who always has a lot to say.

“I always remind him: He loved to talk,” says his Monterey High School head coach, former Monterey Mayor Dan Albert. “Name something, and he’d talk about it.”

And it seems a dream gig: “I like doing what I do now,” Edwards says. “I have a bunch of platforms to state my case.”

But it’s also a compunction, about as optional as sitting still.

“When you’ve been involved in football all your life, you’re an ambassador for football,” he says. “That’s my job. If I can make football better, I’m gonna do it.”

But it goes beyond football. The former New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs head coach gives around 10 motivational speeches a year and welcomes hundreds of local kids to his annual Herm Edwards Football Camp (now in its 16th year). As Albert points out, he connects everything with playing ball. Longtime NFL referee and local resident Jim Tunney has seen it too: “Herm asks, ‘How can I help people get better?’”

For Edwards, it’s a matter of sharing what comes organically. “Wisdom, that’s free – that don’t cost you anything. To not give someone that… ” his voice trails off. “For me, that’s how you give back.”

And Edwards feels a duty to the Monterey Peninsula that parallels his feelings for football.

“When I was growing up, your neighbors raised you too,” he says. “A lot of people helped you along the way. I have an obligation to that community.”

Though Edwards can claim the most famous fumble return in NFL lore, his words foreshadow a different kind of return, one that will be much more memorable and meaningful for Monterey County.

• • •

For a man who travels as many as five days a week, coming home is something powerful.

“It rejuvenizes me,” he says, coining a new “Hermism” (see side bar, opposite page). “When I was playing in Philadelphia I got my energy coming home. I got ready to go again.”

Back then, he would lead younger players through workouts: trail runs through the pines behind Monterey Peninsula College, footwork on the field, 100-yard uphills, 12 at a time, along the baseball field.

“He made the dream more of a plan,” says Ron Johnson, part of a surge of local kids who followed Edwards to the NFL. “It was kinda like a road map set down from Monterey.”

“I was running hills way before Jerry Rice,” Edwards says. “Trust me.”

It was then that Edwards’ visits to the then rag-tag Boys and Girls Club came naturally. “He’d show up, shoot pool, talk to ’em,” says Johnson, who now helps steer the local club. “He’d help with homework and stuff, like a big brother.”

It was then that Edwards also understood he would have to come back. “I always knew I was gonna live in Monterey – had that planned a long time ago – because there’s no other place like it. It’s not a small town, but it’s a family town. They know who you are.”

He still comes home semi-monthly to visit his mother at her home in Seaside, and between his weekly local radio bits with Hunter Finnel and local newspaper commentaries with John Devine, he’s already awfully present for a man who spends most of his time in his wife’s hometown of Modesto and in hotels in Bristol and across the Southeast.

But this move is for the duration. He wants a place for his family. Today he’s building on a Tehama lot.

“We wanted privacy, to be a little sheltered from fog,” he says, “and wanted access to everything.”

As he settles into his permanent home here, a larger, logical play comes together. He will attend more games and track the players he knows from his annual camp more closely. He’ll sync with local programs and coaches. His quickly expanding college football familiarity means he will be able to speak to local kids about what opportunities he sees at the college level and what it takes to get there. His ability to assess college-to-pro possibilities will grow as he tracks the SEC and the draft.

“For our college games,” he says, “I go to practice, I interview the coaches, players come up to me.”

Linked in at every level, he provides connective tissue the areas has never enjoyed. “If I’m on a campus, I can tell that coach, ‘There’s an athlete at Monterey or P.G. you can look at,’” he adds. “If I tell a coach that, guess what: He’s gonna listen.”

And Edwards will do some telling.

“He knows the game and has strong opinions,” Wingo says. “He’ll tell you exactly how he feels.”

• • •

For a man so full of life, Herm Edwards talks a lot about death.

“When I leave here I’ve got nothing,” he told a crowd assembled for a talk at Monterey Peninsula College this summer. “Hopefully six friends to carry [me]. What you do here is what matters.”

“You don’t control when the guy taps you on the shoulder,” is something he’s said more than once.

“When your Visa card expires, you’re gone,” he said. “You’re coaching another team in heaven. I’d want them to say I was a man of integrity, honor, lived by his word. That’s all you’ve got.”

Therein lies something else Edwards can’t do: Cheat death. So he lives like every day, every moment is sacred. Like a ball might squirt free and he better be ready to scoop it up and run. Like sitting still is a supreme waste of an opportunity.

“One thing I do know about life,” he says, “no matter what you say, everyone gets 24 hours a day. How you choose to divide your life is up to you.”

In other words, go play.