For Tom Coughlin, Sunday in Kansas City becomes a referendum on his coaching and his leadership. For his players, it becomes referendum on whether they are true Giants.
Or fatcats who have become afflicted with the insidious disease of complacency.
In the meantime, if you thought you might see the football remake of “Night of the Living Dead” when you entered the assembly room and listened to Coughlin or the locker room and listened to his players, you were mistaken.
You got Blue Storm Rising instead.
“I’m pretty sure we’ll come out with a win this week,” Jason Pierre-Paul said, in no small part because he is pretty sure he’s going to get to Alex Smith.
Except that after 0-38 in Carolina, the kind of debacle that calls into question whether the franchise is being weighed down by too many fatcats not as hungry for a third ring as they were a second ring, or not as hungry for a second ring as they were for a first ring, it is time for the Giants to show us, not just tell us.
“We have been throwing must-win around for what, three weeks now?” Pierre-Paul said. “We haven’t won a game yet. I wouldn’t say must-win, just got to go out there and do it. Stop talking must-win and stop saying it, and go out and do it as a team.”
Coughlin has a long history of offering the right motivational quotation at the right time, and so at Wednesday’s team meeting, he shined a light on Michael Jordan, essentially asking each and every Giant to Be Like Mike:
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” Jordan says in a commercial. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
It only feels as if the Giants have lost almost 300 games. So when an uplifting Coughlin stood before his players, players he has grown fond of, he told them was looking forward to witnessing the character and pride he knows is inside them pouring out with a vengeance.
“He’s eager to see, now that our backs are against the wall, odds are against us, nobody’s really picking us to do anything this season, he’s eager to see what team emerges from these ashes,” one Giant told The Post.
One player paraphrased Coughlin’s message thusly: “Who’s going to fight with me? Who’s going to continue to come here every week and prepare like it’s the first game of the season?”
Another player on Coughlin: “Talking is not going to do it, we just got to stick together and just play. We got to turn this around.”
There was plenty of fire and fight during the 9-on-7 drill at practice Wednesday.
“We just went out there and tried to break our intensity up and play fast, and you get a couple guys who get hit different ways than they normally got hit in practice, that’s pretty much it,” Justin Tuck said.
Coughlin and the Giants hierarchy are mystified and stung by a Marshmallow Men performance that would have only made Coach Mahatma Gandhi proud.
So when Coughlin was asked what the challenge was for his embattled, wounded offensive line against a physical Chiefs defense, he said, “For us to go ahead again and regain the respect that we’ve always had throughout the league for being a physical football team.”
Giants on the brink.
“We do a good job when our backs are against the wall,” Hakeem Nicks said.
Not last December.
Maybe this September?
“You see a drive in each people’s eyes because we know what’s at stake,” Spencer Paysinger said.
The leaders led. “I just have to have a little energy getting in and out of the huddle,” Eli Manning said. “Kind of getting the pace picked up a little and get guys running around. Little pep talks.”
Tuck and Antrel Rolle were vocal in the defensive meeting. “A lot of people stepped up on the practice field,” Terrell Thomas said. “Just inspiring, and not just a rah-rah, but more like, ‘We got to fix this,’ and I think that’s the attitude of everybody.”
They won’t crack. They won’t divide. “We haven’t been playing with chemistry, or harmony,” Pierre-Paul said. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to do that this week.”
Giants, or fatcats?
“You get complacent when you feel like you don’t have a chance,, “ Tiki Barber said Wednesday on WFAN, “and that falls on coaching at this point — it’s not just Tom Coughlin, it’s the [running backs coach] Jerald Ingram, it’s [offensive line coach] Pat Flaherty — it’s those guys whose job it is right now, to light a fire under their guys’ butt, whether it’s benching them, whether it’s giving reps to someone else, they’ve got to do something to change what is a malaise in Giants Stadium right now.”
Talk is cheap. Play the game.
Like Mike.