Question: You’re now in a unique situation — I haven’t looked at the whole history, but I assume it’s pretty unique — in that you have a chance to return a championship team intact. Do you want to keep it together? There’s a school of thought that would say some change is good…

LOMBARDI: “When we were doing this, we said that one of the benefits of maybe going slow, so to speak, was just that, that we wanted to be in a position not only to win but to keep it together. So, generally, if you go along those lines, with the draft and not over-doing the free agency, you’re able to do that. Given our age, of this team, even though we had to pay those big contracts, that’s what I was always saying with Doughty. We don’t want to go through this and just have a one-year run and blow it up. So we’re in that position now. Secondly, what you’re asking, I’ve got to do some research. This is a new experience for me. Darryl has been through it three times, although this is the first time he has won it. I find some of the dialogue I’m having to be interesting. I’m talking to a number of people in different sports, and that is one of the issues. One guy told me that one of the hard parts was, he made a mistake in terms of training camp. Because (the previous season) was so long, guys were banged up. They weren’t hard on them in camp, like they usually were, and the team didn’t come back until December. So there’s a small thing to be conscious of.

“Then, as you said, there is a school of thought that says you’ve got to make changes and not get stale. I’m not sure about that. On one hand I could say maybe, but we’re a young team. It’s not like there’s old guys that need to go, who had a last hurrah. Secondly, it’s a very tight group. You can say, `Well, chemistry changes when you’ve had success,’ and that’s true. I don’t think these are things we could sit down and analyze and come up with a definitive answer. You’re right. These are things that have to be discussed. I don’t have those answers now, but I’ve already done some surveying and I intend to do a lot more. Clearly I’ve been around a little while now, and I’m getting old, but I’m learning things I never thought of before.”