NFL

Giants coach recruits Patton for inspiration

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PATTON, George C. Scott, 1970. TM and Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection (
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War is hell, and football is a game, so of course the two should never be compared, except in this regard: The most successful head coaches generally lead like generals, and the most successful quarterbacks generally are field generals, and the most successful teams are the most unified, cohesive and determined armies.

So no one around the Giants was surprised this week when coach Tom Coughlin borrowed a quote from one of his favorite men in history, Gen. George S. Patton.

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He has done this often over the years, picking what he believes is the appropriate quotation for the occasion. If it isn’t Patton, it is Winston Churchill. If it isn’t Churchill, it is Muhammad Ali. It could be John Wooden. It could be T.S. Eliot. It could be Jack Youngblood, the former Rams lineman who played in a Super Bowl with a broken leg.

Coughlin and the Giants are bracing themselves for the sports equivalent of hell on what could be both a muddy and bloody Candlestick Park against an implacable enemy that will take no prisoners. Coughlin is asking his boys to show up as road warriors one more time tomorrow against the rough-and-ready 49ers in the NFC Championship.

It is why one of the quotations he selected during his Power Point presentation Wednesday in the auditorium inside the Timex Performance Center was the perfect one:

“I am a soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.”

If the Giants win where they fight tomorrow, they go to the Super Bowl.

It is a quotation that also hangs from one of the hallways .

“Road Warriors, man,” Dave Tollefson said. “I don’t make the schedule. I just show up where I’m supposed to, and I show up on time.”

“Obviously guys are going to have ones that catch their eye more than others,” Chris Snee said. “But yeah, I think guys all get his message, we all buy in.”

Punter Steve Weatherford smiles and says: “He’s always got Churchill up there, actually. He’s really fond of that guy.”

I tell Weatherford: “I think he [Coughlin] thinks he coached.”

Weatherford smiles and says: ““He coached the troops, you know what I mean?”

Coughlin’s message from the start of the season has been to finish.

“He showed a video — it’s like a TouTube video of this cross-country girl running, and she stumbled just short of the finish line like out of exhaustion,” Weatherford said. “And, if anybody touched her, and helped her across the finish line, then her points wouldn’t count, and her team would lose the state championship. But if she crawls across the line, then they win the state championship.

“So, she fell, and it was like from me to that shoe box over there, and an official came up to her and was whispering in her ear, like ‘Do you need help? But if I help you, you’re disqualified.’ And she crawled across the line, and they won a state championship. … It’s a pretty cool video, and for us, we don’t want or need anybody to help us. We’re self-sufficient within this locker room. And everybody’s hungry and we all have the effort and the want-to finish strong.”

Coughlin developed a friendship with General Ray Odierno, former commander in Iraq, who visited him two days before the wild-card playoff against the Falcons.

Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Gadson became a good luck charm during the Giants’ Super Bowl XLII season and celebrated in Green Bay last week with Big Blue. Gadson, who was a linebacker at Army, had both legs amputated after the armored vehicle he rode in was blown apart by an IED on a road south of Baghdad.

In his book, “A Team To Believe In,” Coughlin writes about an inspirational speech Gadson delivered to the Giants the night before they played the Redskins on the road that year, at a time when they were 0-2. Coughlin also had Gadson address the team the night before Super Bowl XLII.

Gadson, Coughlin tells us in his book, talked about Pride, Poise and Team. Then he said: “The most important thing I am going to tell you is that if I was going to battle, there is not one of you here I would not take with me. I swear to God, I would take every single one of you. I believe that. Belief is that powerful. When I was lying down and those guys were doing all the things, I never believed that I would not live. And that is what belief will do for you if you really believe. You guys know it and you guys understand. That is all I’ve got.”

Time for the New York Football Giants to be soldiers. For them to fight where they are told, and win where they fight.

steve.serby@nypost.com