IN one short season, he has gone from Terrible Tom to – dare we say? – Tom Terrific. Tom Coughlin is The Comeback Coach.
With his back against the wall, he has shown New York he is a fighter, and he has given us a team that will fight to the finish. For once, there are no signs another monumental collapse is imminent.
“I think this team is a reflection of the coach and his attitude and his will to win,” John Mara told The Post yesterday. “I think he’s done a great job keeping his locker room together and emphasizing that they play as a team. I think he gets the most out of this particular group of players.”
The Giants certainly aren’t New York’s Finest or Bravest.
Just New York’s Grittiest.
The Giants certainly are not the Hit-The-Open-Man ’69 Knicks.
Just a team that plays for one another and, finally, for its coach.
They have become true believers who don’t panic, who don’t crack, especially when it is Giants against the world. A far cry from what we endured a year ago: Giants against Giants.
“Guys believe they can win,” Coughlin said yesterday. “We play one play at a time. We fight for every yard. We deal with any and all situations.”
“They play hard for 60 minutes,” Mara said. “They’re physical, and they’ve shown a propensity to win close games on the road.”
When Coughlin first arrived here five minutes early four years ago, Wellington Mara was a lot more confident than Giant fans that he would be able to go toe-to-toe with the NFC East heavyweights: Bill Parcells, Andy Reid, Joe Gibbs. Parcells is in the ESPN studios and Reid and Gibbs will be on the outside of January looking in, and here stands Coughlin, on the brink of the playoffs, on the brink of becoming the first Giants coach to take his team to the playoffs three consecutive seasons since Parcells did it from 1984-86.
But shhhhhhh.
“We’re in a position here where our next game is the most important of the year for us, and it’s the Redskins,” Coughlin said. If you clinch a playoff berth might you play the last two games differently? “We don’t have anything secured,” Coughlin said.
No one calls Coughlin Dead Coach Walking anymore. A little before midnight Sunday, the same fans who were angrily chanting “Fire Coughlin” during a sorry 30-7 loss to the Saints last Christmas Eve could very well be soaking up a scene straight out of the glorious past, when Michael Strahan and Antonio Pierce, probably, will be dousing Coughlin with the Gatorade shower that Parcells got all the time from Harry Carson. No Hail to the Redskins. Hail to the Coach.
Coughlin has remade himself, without sacrificing his principles, and remade his team, simply by making it a team.
He must love being the coach of the Giants because, with his team a fractured soap opera, with a disgusted constituency trotting out the guillotine, with ownership concerned that perhaps he was an anachronism in an age when even Vince Lombardi’s methods would be challenged, he looked in the mirror and discovered perhaps there were a few warts that needed clearing up.
It is still his-way-or-the-highway, but there is room for passengers now in the Big Blue bus. Because Coughlin-Against-The-World in some ways included Coughlin-Against-His-Players. Bear Bryant could sit atop his ivory tower way back when, but not in the year 2007. Coughlin’s Leadership Council shows the players that he will listen, and that he cares. He hired quarterbacks coach Chris Palmer to help Eli Manning. He gambled on defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, and won.
From the day he was hired, he talked about the restoration of Giant pride. The team that shows up 60 minutes from the playoffs Sunday night plays with pride, and does New York proud. There are two leagues right now: the UFL (Ugly Football League), and the PFL (Patriots Football League, or, if you prefer, Perfect Football League). The Giants play in the UFL.
To use a boxing analogy, if the Patriots are Sugar Ray Robinson, the Giants are Jake LaMotta. One year after all the Coughlin Giants gave us was raging bull, they are raging bulls.