Is there a pattern to any of this? A formula? A key? A clue? There must be historical guideposts that indicate or at least suggest why teams reached a Super Bowl. How they did it. Right?

I sifted across 46 years of Super Bowls and the 92 teams that made it to find out, figuring that’s a legitimate sample size both in duration and number. The focus of the study: Generally the two most prominent men on a team — the head coach and the starting quarterback.

Sunday’s two Super Bowl sideline bosses happen both to be gruff and grizzled veterans, the Patriots’ Bill Belichick in his 17th season as an NFL head coach and the Giants’ Tom Coughlin in his 16th year. (Their combined 33 years are the most ever by any SB coaching tandem, topping the previous mark of 29 combined seasons’ experience by Tom Landry and Chuck Noll in the 1978 game). But let’s see if there is any pattern here. Let’s see if Veteran Coach is any sort of Super reliable barometer.

Sunday’s two field bosses, the starting quarterbacks, are a first-round draft pick in New York’s Eli Manning but famously only a sixth-round pick in New England’s Tom Brady. No clues there, right? So let’s see if Quarterback Pedigree historically means much in terms of getting to the ultimate game.

I’m guessing the Dolphins and Dolfans should have ears perked for this topic more than in most other NFL enclaves, for two reasons.

First, the Super Bowl has proved a maddeningly stubborn Holy Grail for Miami.

The franchise reached three SBs in a row in only its sixth, seventh and eighth seasons — winning back to back of course in 1972-73 — but has returned only twice since, losing in 1982 and ’84. Dolfans who cheered the Perfect Season as teenagers are eligible now to carry an AARP card. Wrap your noggin around that one.

Second is Miami’s current uncertainty in the coaching and quarterbacking departments.

The Dolphins are trying to get here, to be Super again at last, with the dice roll of a rookie NFL head coach in Joe Philbin, and with what presently is an Unknown Quarterback. Will it be Matt Flynn who opens the 2012 season? Peyton Manning? Matt Moore? [Your Name Here]? To be determined.

Now on to our findings in the two categories:

• The veteran coach factor:

The average Super Bowl coach brings to this game 7.57 seasons of NFL head-coaching experience, which figures to be around mid-career (theoretically the prime) for most successful coaches. Sunday’s will be the 26th SB (of 46) in which at least one head coach had at least 10 years experience. Thirty-one of 92 Super Bowl coaches in all (33.7 percent) have been 10-year veterans of more at the time of the game.

So there is a legitimate reason why many Dolphins fans, for example, saw a comfort level in been-there-done-that coaches such as Bill Cowher and Jeff Fisher. Experience does seem to matter in getting to this game. (Don Shula was the longest-tenured of any Super Bowl head coach before or since, in his 22nd head-coaching season, when Miami last made it in ’84).

However.

There is reason to not weight too heavily the head-coaching inexperience embodied in the Dolphins’ Philbin.

Five men have reached a Super Bowl in their rookie year as a head coach: Don McCafferty of the Baltimore Colts in 1970, Red Miller of the Broncos in 1977, George Seifert of the 49ers in 1989, Bill Callahan of the Raiders in 2002 and Jim Caldwell of Colts in 2009.

And more Super Bowl coaches have been second-year men (10) than any other one year of experience.

In all, 21 of 92 SB coaches (22.8 percent) have been in only their first, second or third years.

So what gets a coach to a Super Bowl isn’t always experience at his job. Sometimes it is having the right player at his most important position. Which brings us to our second category of study:

• The quarterback pedigree factor:

There are exceptions, of course, and they are best and most currently personified by the Pats’ Brady, the greatest sixth-round draft pick ever, seeking his fourth Super Bowl ring Sunday and championing every NFL personnel guy’s belief that there are diamonds to be mined in a draft’s lower rounds.

Heck, four Super Bowl starting quarterbacks have been undrafted free agents: Kurt Warner, three times, and Carolina’s Jake Delhomme in 2003. Eight other SB QBs were drafted in the 10th round or later (back before the draft was reduced).

So there are exceptions, yes. Enough of them that Dolfan might still have faith in Matts — in Flynn, drafted in the seventh round, or in Moore, not drafted at all.

Make no mistake, though:

The rule is that first-round quarterbacks get you to a Super Bowl.

I hadn’t realized how hard and fast that rule is until my research told me.

An overwhelming 82.6 percent of all Super Bowls (38 of 46) have included at least one first-round starting quarterback. That includes the past nine in a row, indicative of the position only growing in importance and as a factor in reaching this game.

In nearly one in four SBs (11 of 46, or 23.9 percent), both QBs were 1R-pedigreed.

First-round draftees in fact account for more than half of all Super Bowl starting quarterbacks — 49 of 92, or 53.3 percent.

So Dolfans who are hoping for Peyton Manning are not just pining nostalgically. Perhaps they are putting trust in the historical map that suggests a first-round quarterback is your path to a Super Bowl.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Miami’s last first-round QB, some guy named Dan Marino, happened to lead this franchise to its last Super Bowl in ‘84. Maybe it isn’t dumb at all to think the club should finally draft another first-round QB this April, knowing the risk might be offset by a rather big reward.

The conclusion of our two-pronged study is nothing they’d allow as evidence in court, but I think it bears relevantly on the Dolphins’ situation as the club tries to solve the mystery of getting back to this game:

Rookie head coach Joe Philbin will have a much better chance to look wise beyond his experience if he can somehow get a first-round quarterback into his huddle.