KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The similarities are eerie. They are both sons of football men. That's obvious enough. But it goes much deeper than that. They are both sons of real football men, hard-nosed football scouts, the kind who loved to study film and break down the game and search for secrets in the rewind. There aren't many of those men around.

They both traveled with their fathers on college scouting trips.

They both grew up around great football players.

They both started breaking down game film when they were young boys.

"Other kids had their hobbies," wrote David Halberstam in his book "The Education of a Coach." "Some collected postage stamps and others had baseball cards. But Bill studied film."

Dick Haley said: "Todd loved looking at film when he was, I don't know, 11 or 12. And he was good at it right away."

They both played other sports more than football. Bill played lacrosse. Todd played golf. They both got into pro football on the bottom floor, in jobs that required getting coffee for the coaches and driving them to work. They both worked nonstop.

They both learned a whole lot about football from Bill Parcells, the two-time Super Bowl champion coach. Bill was Parcells' defensive coordinator, and the two clashed and synchronized and won. Parcells gave Todd his first coaching job, though it came with a warning.

"You're crazy," Parcells told Todd.

The pay was less than half of what Todd was making as a scout. But Todd wanted to coach that much.

They both became coordinators for Super Bowl teams.

So, of course, you know the two men are New England guru Bill Belichick and Todd Haley, hired on Friday to be the new coach of the Chiefs. And that adds one more eerie similarity to the equation. Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli, who made his reputation working with Belichick in New England, is the guy who hired Haley.

"You know, they do have similar backgrounds," Pioli says in a somewhat surprised tone, as if he had never really thought of it.

And it's probable that he never thought it quite that way, never had really gone down the line, point by point, and noticed that the man he hired was, in fact, a perfect eHarmony match for the man he had worked with. Even so, it was no coincidence. Maybe Scott Pioli wasn't looking for another Bill Belichick — he knows, better than anyone, that there is no other Bill Belichick.

Thing is, Pioli was not opposed to finding someone with some Belichick in him.

"It doesn't hurt," Pioli says. "They do have a lot in common in their background. They have a few differences, too."

And that is true also. Haley does not appear to be as determined a football hermit as Belichick (though Haley admitted that he did have to be reminded, several times before his Friday news conference, to smile some). Haley seems as if he's probably a better dresser. Haley thinks offense first, while Belichick thinks defense first. And so on.

But there is no question that Pioli is trying hard to rebuild the Chiefs, as best he can, in the New England Patriots' image. And Haley fits. He's a dedicated film watcher who gets real enjoyment out of breaking down opponents' weaknesses.

He's a former scout who has a good feel for what makes good and great football players (his father Dick Haley was, of course, a legendary scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s). He's a guy who loves just talking about football and philosophies, which should make for some fun and loud late-night conversations with Pioli.

And he's a guy who brings a lot of passion and emotion to the job. Of course, every coach wants to win. But Haley figures to show it a little more than some. He had that rather famous shout-out with Arizona's Anquan Boldin. He had a less famous clash with Terrell Owens (less famous because ... everyone has had a clash with Terrell Owens). He admits that his dreams of being a professional golfer — he was on the Florida golf team with PGA veterans Chris DiMarco and Dudley Hart — were pretty much destroyed because of his football temperament.

"It killed me," he says.

Will the Pioli-Haley combination work? It's all guesswork, of course. The NFL — pro sports in general — is just not that easy to predict. Many promising coaches end up flopping ... heck, Bill Belichick got fired in Cleveland before succeeding in New England. Many brilliant young general managers struggle to put their team together. A lot has to go right for a football team to become a winner. It helps to draft a quarterback like Tom Brady in the sixth round or find a linebacker like James Harrison as a free agent or something like that. There are so many variables.

But there certainly was a winning vibe Friday at Arrowhead. It sure looks good now. You have two very bright, high-energy guys who have had a lot of success and who think about the game in pretty much the same way. Will it work? Why not? It worked already in New England.