The greatest Tom Coughlin article you will ever read.. read it in the link because it's easier to read, it is long but it's WELL worth it if you're a TRUE Giants fan.READ THIS, I promise you if you're a Giants fan or even an avid football follower you'll appreciate it.
http://joeposnanski.si.com/2012/02/02/coughlin/ INDIANAPOLIS — An odd question struck me while watching Giants coach Tom Coughlin address the media here at Super Bowl Week. Odd questions strike all the time during Super Bowl Week, questions like, “Why are there 50 reporters around Tyler Sash?*” and “How many people will surround the restaurant if Tim Tebow is spotted inside?**” and “Who will be the player featured in this year’s ‘Got Milk’ ad***?”
*No idea.
**A lot of people.
***Question will be answered at press conference, Thursday, 1:15 p.m. Eastern.
But the question that struck me was a little bit different. People kept peppering Coughlin with all the theme questions of the week. You know these by heart:
Tom, how do you feel like you’ve changed?
Coach, what would a second Super Bowl mean to you?
Tom, you’ve been on the hot seat numerous times in your career. Why do you think your teams have played at their best at those times?
Coach, talk a bit about how you’ve mellowed over the years.
And so on. And so on. Infinity.
That’s OK. It’s Super Bowl week, and as NBA star Karl Malone once explained to a foreign journalist when asked why baskets are worth two points instead of one: “That’s just the way we do it here, my man.” Super Bowl Week is about excess, about overkill, about the same themes getting battered relentlessly. It’s about New England tight end Rob Gronkowski, discussing his injured ankle, saying that he is “moving forward every day” two dozen times in a single interview session. It’s about Chris Snee explaining 200 times what it feels like to be both a player for Coughlin and also his son-in-law. It’s about media folk like myself splitting our time between complaining that there is so much media here and also interviewing other media people because there just isn’t enough to go around.
We all know this already. So of course people were asking Coughlin the usual questions, and of course Coughlin was giving the usual answers. That’s just the way we do it here, my man. But as I was sitting there, I suddenly I had this question. But it wasn’t one that I thought I could ask. The question is this:
Tom, how in the heck did you become such a good football coach?
I mean this with no disrespect — but look at him. I mean, you see a guy like Bill Belichick and it’s pretty easy to understand why he’s a great football coach. He’s smarter than you. He’s hungrier than you. He’s meaner than you. The best coaches rarely leave you wondering. Bill Walsh had obvious strategic talents. Jimmy Johnson inspired. Vince Lombardi commanded fear and respect and the best that a player could offer. Paul Brown innovated. Tom Landry was a master of organization. Bill Cowher seemed like a fun guy to play for.
But Coughlin? He must have a bit of these things, but so little of it emerges in public. He just seems like this … GUY, not especially different from a hundred people you know. He has the ability to be pretty charming, when he wants. He seems like he’s pretty sturdy, a family man, the kind of person who, if he borrowed your car, would fill it up with gas. He seems to keep his ego in check and pass along all the credit. And of course, we’ve all heard the stories about his exacting persona, about how they called him Colonel Coughlin, and how he would go berserk if a player was only two minutes early for a meeting, and how he’s a taskmaster, and how he will work crazy hours.
But are any of these things unique, or even out of the ordinary? Every NFL coach I’ve ever met has worked hard. Many of them were taskmasters who demanded punctuality and precision. Many others seemed like good guys who would have the ability to galvanize players.
But Coughlin’s career has been amazing. He coached the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars to the AFC title game in their second year of existence. The Jaguars won at least 11 games in each of the next three seasons. He has led the Giants to their second Super Bowl in four years, both times under the most intense circumstances. In 2007, his team went in as a wild card, won three straight road games, then beat the undefeated New England Patriots. This year, his team was 7-7 and had lost five of six games, and the New York howls surrounded him yet again. But the Giants reached the playoffs anyway, crushed Atlanta, won in Green Bay, survived in San Francisco, and are again in position against the Patriots to win it all.
It’s an astonishing career. But how? Is Coughlin a strategic master? He doesn’t act the part. Is he a motivational force of nature? If so, he keeps it hidden. Does he have a connection to players that other coaches don’t? Does he have a supreme ability to recognize talent?
I thought the best way to find out was to simply scan the millions of words that everyone is saying this week and see if we might be able to find out just what it is that makes Coughlin so good. Here’s my best guess:
1. He’s probably better at strategic maneuvers than you would expect.
Owner John Mara: “We wanted a guy that was devoted to the X’s and O’s and coaching, and that’s what we got.”
Coughlin: “[Coaching] is showing you something … and it really isn’t what you think it is.”
Safety Antrel Rolle: “We believe in the game plan. That’s a big thing. We believe that if we follow the game plan, we’re going to win.”
Offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride: “If Tom had the perfect world, we would run it 30 times, throw it 30, and we would win 14-2.”
Coughlin: “There’s always some kind of wrinkle that you have to adjust to and figure out.”
Linebacker Michael Boley: “We’ll just have to adjust. That’s one of the things that Coach Coughlin always talks about: adjust and mystery.”
Patriots coach Bill Belichick: “[Tom] is really good at making adjustments.”
2. Coughlin stays the same. This sounds like an easy thing, but I suspect that it isn’t at all. I suspect that most coaches in the white-hot pressure world that is the NFL TRY to stay the same week after week, but cannot do it. Injuries … bad breaks … off-the-field incidents … insurrection … lack of intensity and focus … these things tend to send coaches careening off-message and off-point. This can be especially true in New York, where Coughlin has found himself the target of more than his share of New York Post back pages. But Coughlin seems to have an astonishing ability to stay precisely the same, no matter what. And this might explain why his Giants seem to be at their best when everything seems at its worst.
Defensive end Justin Tuck: “I think this team responds to Coach Coughlin because you know what to expect from him.”
Safety Kenny Phillips: “The main thing is you got to be consistent. He doesn’t change.”
Kicker Lawrence Tynes: “He is hard. He is black and white. He is pass/fail.”
Tackle David Diehl: “He is a constant guy whose preparation and his life is all around this game.”
Quarterback Eli Manning: “He is still very disciplined. He wants his players disciplined. Everything is still five minutes early.”
Rolle: “I understand everything behind his discipline and his structure, it comes with a reason. Things are tough in New York, and he has to be that way.”
3. There has been a lot of talk about how Coughlin has changed over the years, become less rigid, opened up more for players. I suspect that this has been overplayed, but perhaps it’s a small part of the story.
Coughlin: “I think I’ve become more patient.”
Guard Chris Snee: ““Warmer? Fuzzier? I don’t know if I’d use those adjectives.”
Gilbride: “Even when there was a big to-do made about the creation of the players’ committee and people saying that he’s taken on this softer approach … I don’t see it.”
Running back Ahmad Bradshaw: “He is still tough.”
Tuck: “At the end of the day I commend him for being faithful and as strong-minded as he has been, because he hasn’t changed his demeanor. He has probably loosened the reins a little as far as giving us a little more freedom, as far as some say-so in the locker room.”
Coughlin: “I think that, first and foremost, what you want to try and accomplish is that if a player has something he wants to say about the way business is being done, then come in, sit down, and talk to me.”
Mara: “Too many people make too big a deal out of, ‘He brings discipline and everything.’ We just felt like he was a winner and he would work so hard and be so devoted to putting a winning team on the field, and that’s what we were looking for: a guy who was that dedicated and that hard-working and didn’t care about his image and doing TV commercials or whatever.”
Belichick: “Tom is a good guy, and he has a good sense of humor. He is a good guy to be around.”
Phillips: “Even on the plane, he doesn’t sit in the front. He is back there with the players, and nobody minds.”
Gilbride: “When you get him away from the football field, he’s family-oriented, he’s a fun-loving guy and he’s a great person. I think what happens is if you get the right guys, they appreciate those things. They don’t see the tough guy, the hard-nosed disciplinarian, the taskmaster. They see the other side, and they realize that what he’s demanding of them is to make us a better team.”
4. Whether or not he has changed — or the players around him have changed — it does seem clear that the players now see Tom Coughlin as a guy who is on their side, someone they can win with. This might be an underrated part of being a successful coach. It can be a fine — even imperceptible — line between being a boss and being a leader.
Diehl: ” He does things the right way, and his main goal is to win football games, just like us.”
Bradshaw: “He wants to win as much as we want to.”
Manning: “He has shown more of his passion for football and the players. Guys respect that and play hard for him.”
Tuck: “I think we kind of got fed up with losing. We got fed up with people saying that our coach’s job was on the line every channel we turned to.”
Tynes: “He has produced in a tough market and everyone that puts that NY logo on, on Sundays, is on the hot seat, every week, no matter what we do. We know that.”
5. The players believe that if they follow his lead, they will win. This, admittedly, is a vague concept. But it’s apparent in every word they say this week. Maybe this happened because of changes he has made to his own personality. Maybe it’s because, behind the scenes, they see him as a strategic maestro. Maybe it’s because he allows his assistant coaches freedom to teach. Or maybe it’s simply that the Giants won a Super Bowl with him as coach four years ago, so they think they can win again. Whatever the reason, the players clearly believe that he knows how to win … and he can teach them.
Defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul (on what he learned from Coughlin): “Keep on fighting.”
Cornerback Prince Amukamara: Learning from Coach Coughlin, you look to keep going.”
Special teams coach Larry Izzo (on the Giants way): “Do your job.”
Manning: “You’re out there on that practice field, giving 100 percent, being totally focused on what you have to do to get prepared for Sunday. When he sees a team that does that, when he sees a team that has players that expect that from each other, he can relax a little bit.”
Mara: “We know that he is a winning head coach. We know that we can win a Super Bowl with him. We know that there’s nothing more important to him than getting his team prepared to win and going out and trying to win a championship.”
Rolle: “My first season, I questioned a lot of things that Coach Coughlin was doing … I felt like he was always trying to turn us into men. Does he not know that we are men before we ever step on the football field here as a Giant? I used to ask myself questions like that. Once I matured enough and I took a step back, he is not trying to turn us into men. He is trying to help us become better men.”
This post was edited by xnozx. on Feb 3 2012 02:54pm